Food during wee, small hours: opinions?

Do you make food available to your cat during the night? If so, wet or dry? Mine gets his last feeding between 10:30 and 11 pm, then it's a long night's haul til 7:30 the next morning. Should I space this a little more evenly over 24 hours? He gets his shots at 7:30 am and pm. He's ravenous by morning.

Thanks... just trying to get this feeding down right.

 

Yes, my diabetic cat (and by extension the others) have access to wet food all night. It usually involves DH or me getting up when summoned (a cold paw on the face) and popping a can a couple times a night.

 

Hope and Mishka get fed twice a day. They eat a good portion of it, then I pick it up or Mishka might decide to finish not only hers but Hope's. Then they let me know when they want to finish the food, maybe an hour or so later. They do not get fed again till evening, same routine. Only Mishka is still on insulin. Vinnie is in remission also and he's a big boy so he gets a.m. p.m. and a late night. His pancreas is working. We have no clue why Hope, after over 4 years, went into remission except we did find out she has Restrictive Cardiomyopathy. Can the heart issue have an effect on insulin needs? No one can give me a definite answer on that one.

 

You might consider a timed feeder.

Little compartments open at pre-set times.

 

I didn't used to leave food out, but I do now. What I do is leave some wet food, mixed with a little water and another bowl with cubes of frozen wet food. That way, there is fresh food all night. I just make sure I don't leave so much that there is any left when it gets close to AM shot time. The bowls are usually empty by the time I get up, and nobody wakes us up for food anymore! Now, if I could just teach Tinkles how to test himself.... :mrgreen:

 

Until Yittle was regulated on the insulin he was literally starving to death. We ended up feeding him 1/4 of a can of Friskies, or 1/2 a can of Fancy Feast every 2 hours, 24 hours a day - so 12 feedings. He'd eat anywhere from 2/3-all of it. He did not get any kibble (on purpose). At night if I wanted to sleep for more then 2 hours to the minute from when I put the food down - and trust me I have food logs that prove he'd wake me every 2 hours to the minute - I would freeze food and put down a frozen puck for him to eat. It thawed in about 2 hours and was good for another 2. If we put food down we could conceiveable leave the house for up to 6 hours before somebody had to come home and feed him. He pretty much went through regulation and then going OTJ in one fell swoop. Right about the time we started getting nice even blue numbers he started hypoing every once in awhile and within a month or two we were off insulin. At that point we got him down to about 6-8 feedings a day, usually 7. For him eating small meals regularly seemed to have the best results on his blood sugar, particularly when he was on Lantus and we were tapering him off.

 

About these frozen hockey pucks of food: if you put out, say, two of these, and they thaw at the same time of course, doesn't the cat gobble both of em down? I worry about that vs. the food going bad it it's out too long and goes UNeaten, and then he eats it and gets sick. Id LOVE to be able to vacate the house between his twice daily shots.

I have read about timed feeders and they don't seem to work too well - like that Littermaid box system. Ugh.

 

My timed feeder has worked extremely well for years and years....

I feed my cats a few meals of canned food throughout the day, and last meal is before bed. They manage just fine till breakfast the next morning

 

My cats are pretty good about grazing -- not gobbling up all the food quickly.

So we put out canned food and leave it for 24 hours. If the bowls look low at bedtime, I add some more food for the night.

 

In the opinion of many members here, timed feeders do work well. Some brands/models work better than others.

The PetSafe 5 compartment feeder is a popular one that works very well. http://www.petsafe.net/Products/Feed-an ... eeder.aspx It's cat-proof, very quiet, and you can digitally set the times you want food to be available. There is a 2 compartment one available, too, but it's not cat-proof (cats are known to pry open the flimsy lids) and very noisy (manual dial to set time and it ticks) and the timer can only be set in 2 hour increments.

Catmate is another popular brand.

 

It is possible to get timed feeders with gelpacks that you freeze to keep the food frozen/cold for periods of time. You could then put one out, have one in the timed feeder being kept cold for later etc.

Having said that, lets remember that in the wild cats will eat the half-rotten corpse of a mouse they caught 2 days ago and they survive. While I wouldn't eat tuna fish that had sat out for 4-6 hours my cats tend to refuse it based on their dislike of the crusty bits, not because it isn't edible. When we mix water in with the food and put it out they'll often eat it for hours longer then normal as long as it stays moist. The feral cat we're socializing right now has NO such issues, for the first week or two we had him inside after he was trapped it would take him at least 4-5 hours after you fed him before he'd creep out of the cat condo and eat the food, crusty bits and all. If you disturbed him during that time it took longer.

 

my diabetic sleeps on my pillow so she gets food on my nightstand. because she tends to scarf and barf, i put about a spoonful out at a time and any time i wake up i put some food down. she eats mostly wet food even tho i'd allow her dry because she has cancer and liver disease and has to eat to keep her liver healthier.

i think putting the food out on the nightstand makes her feel special and hungrier for some reason, which is good for us. the other cats would love to eat there too but so far they honor that space as hers. food on the floor is fair game for everyone, and our greedier cat would probably eat everyone's food.

i think you can buy decent feeders for $35 to $60, and would give you peace of mind, give your cat something to do (wait for the magic feeder to open), and reduce some of your burden of feeding timed meals or meals on demand. i haven't heard of anyone here not liking a feeder but maybe some don't.