Update on our free-range cats
by Amy
Posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 12:30 pm CET
Earlier this month we decided to try changing our two-square-meals-a-day (plus snacks) cats into free-range eaters. Alex had a small setback last week when she gorged herself and then barfed everything up. Other than that incident things are going smoothly and Arby and Alex seem to understand that they can eat whenever they want to.
They are eating less every day, but still they have certainly gained a bit of weight. They are both a lot more relaxed now, without the stress of begging for food all the time. Arby especially is a lot more mellow than before, and is finally sleeping a normal amount, which for a cat is pretty much all the time.
Alex takes a few nibbles every couple of hours and then retreats to the solitude of ‘her’ attic room. She is getting a lot more exercise this way, actually, since she is going up and down the stairs a lot more than she used to. 🙂 She also seems to find Arby’s food tasty enough. Before she seemed to find her food stale after the bag had been open for a while. We would always buy the smallest (and thus most expensive per kg) possible bag of food for her but when the bag was half empty she was a lot less enthusiastic about eating.
Tomorrow we have to make another trip to the vet to get more food for them – with two cats all-you-can-eating from one bag of food, the bag needs replacing a lot faster than before.
Anyway our experiment seems to be a great success so far in reducing the overall stress level in our house, and we will certainly keep it up.
Earlier this month we decided to try changing our two-square-meals-a-day (plus snacks) cats into free-range eaters. Alex had a small setback last week when she gorged herself and then barfed everything up. Other than that incident things are going smoothly and Arby and Alex seem to understand that they can eat whenever they want to.
They are eating less every day, but still they have certainly gained a bit of weight. They are both a lot more relaxed now, without the stress of begging for food all the time. Arby especially is a lot more mellow than before, and is finally sleeping a normal amount, which for a cat is pretty much all the time.
Alex takes a few nibbles every couple of hours and then retreats to the solitude of ‘her’ attic room. She is getting a lot more exercise this way, actually, since she is going up and down the stairs a lot more than she used to. 🙂 She also seems to find Arby’s food tasty enough. Before she seemed to find her food stale after the bag had been open for a while. We would always buy the smallest (and thus most expensive per kg) possible bag of food for her but when the bag was half empty she was a lot less enthusiastic about eating.
Tomorrow we have to make another trip to the vet to get more food for them – with two cats all-you-can-eating from one bag of food, the bag needs replacing a lot faster than before.
Anyway our experiment seems to be a great success so far in reducing the overall stress level in our house, and we will certainly keep it up.