Why You Should Feed Your Cat 5 Times a Day
Do you have a cat that paws at you in the wicked hour of the morning until you finally give up and get up? Then he starts meowing and whining until you fill his bowl of food? It’s not that your cat is unusually voracious; they may be telling you that this is their natural feeding time.
In the last episode of “Improvement,” animal behavior expert Zazie Todd told us that cats naturally tend to eat five times a day, not two, as most of us tend to our animals. This is because cats are natural hunters, and in the wild, they can hunt and eat during the day.
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As Todd explains:
[C] ats prefer to feed five times a day if possible, rather than just twice a day. [It’s] good for them when they eat outside. Because if you think that a cat usually catches mice during the day, and a cat can catch 10 mice a day, that would be like 10 small meals. So if we can try to get it closer, it’s good for cats.
If you don’t have a cat that is naturally self-regulating (i.e., unable to eat her entire bowl of food in one go), feeding time can be a godsend. If you have a cat that self-regulates, then just making sure their bowl has some food in it works well all the time.
For early morning harassment, Todd recommends the following:
[M] aybe, give her one last snack before bed … But if you can spread her meals a bit and then tire her out before bed, then hopefully she doesn’t wake you up so early. If she does, of course, every time you get up you reward her for waking you up. So you can try to reschedule it a little later in the morning if you can.
And it all makes sense if you admit that cats were not tamed as long as dogs . Come to think of it, they’re still a little wild and, as Todd put it, “if we didn’t exist our cats could continue to exist on their own rather happily.”
For more on how to take better care of your cat, watch the entire episode!