I have noticed that cats seem to have specific behaviors when it comes to getting food. Here are some tongue-in-cheek categories for you. What personality type is your cat?
The Scout – the cat who finds you, leads you to the bowl, and then to the pantry, to show you where the food is, because you are clearly too dumb to find it. (Oliver does this.)
The Whiner - the cat who sits and cries repeatedly by the food bowl in an effort to alert you that it is, indeed, empty. (Salem.)
The Con Artist - the cat who meows pitifully at the first person who is awake, because clearly she has been starving for days and nobody fed her. When the food is provided, the cat devours it and lies in wait. When the next person makes an appearance, the cat greets them and meows pitifully, because clearly she has been starving for days and nobody fed her.
The Hard Worker - the cat who studiously scratches on his scratch post, and then runs to his food dish, because he has earned it. If the food dish is empty, he then caterwauls in outrage.
The Metabolism Enthusiast - Step 1: eat as much as you can. Step 2: use litter box, preferably with throwing litter all over the place and loud scratching. Especially if the feeding is taking place at night. Step 3: repeat Step 1and Step 2 until humans take away the food.
The Machiavelli – a cat who exists in a state of constant vigilance and treats any substance that is not the exact same brand of cat food as an attempt at poisoning. Even if this substance is a tiny piece of raw fish or broiled chicken. Because his owners obviously can’t wait to murder him. (Oliver again.)
The Bartering Expert – the cat who deposits a dead bird on your doorstep, because you are a terrible hunter and if someone doesn’t feed you, you will surely perish, and then meows by her dish to be fed, because birds are simply not sanitary. Quid pro quo. (Salem.)
The Paranoiac – the cat who only eats if nobody is watching. (Batty.)
The Solitary Predator – the cat who will allow no rivals in her feeding territory until she finished her feast.
The Coveter – the cat who always covets whatever the other cat has in his bowl, even though it all comes from the same cat food bag.
I think you forgot THE EXTORTIONIST – the cat will come while you are sleeping and Sit On Your Face, if human wants their air back, she must produce breakfast forthwith, immediately and without delay.
I call mine THE ALARM CLOCK because no matter what time I have set my alarm he will manage to wake me up at least an hour earlier because HE IS STARVING, but when you put the food in the bowl only eats about three bites and walks away.
Same here, but ours goes by the sun rise . . . not too bad in winter, but summer is too early
We give our outdoor cats canned food in the morning…rain or shine, each morning they run upstairs and hang out on the balcony outside our bedroom, crying like they are starved. If we don’t immediately respond, they run down and back up the stairs. (Apparently to check that we got the message to get up.)
It’s amazing how two 12 pound cats can sound like a herd of elephants on those stairs. This occurs at 5:00 am. Every. Day.
You get to sleep in until 5:00???
Mine have decided the 4 am is the proper time for cats to be fed.
Mischief is more of a dry food girl – i try to get them high quality food with meat as the first ingredient – she also likes to steal your pizza, your ice cream, your mint tea and anything else that isn’t cat food and not nailed down. Personality wise she’s brave to the point of being stupid, eager to explore and snoop.
Mayhem used to be a dry food cat without the hoomin food snackage – but he’s decided that he also likes a little can of moist food since Junior gets it. He doesn’t like men – don’t know why – and rather than trying to get out or away if you accidentally roll onto him in the middle of the night, he mewls pitifully until you do the moving.
Junior, my 3-legged cali – was originally fed 9 lives as an outside cat – now that she gets her food indoors she gets the same high grade stuff as the brats – she still wants her canned food like when I used it to get her to take her antibiotics after the amputation – two cans, thank you – once in the morning and once in the evening. She’s just recently started going back outside and spends most of her time there – but she does appear to like the whole ‘indoors is warm and dry’ thing when there’s bad weather. She’s an older cat and doesn’t care to play, so I think she likes the outdoors because there are more places to get away from Mischief and her pestery ways. She’s also a conartist – pretends she can’t get around on her own, hobbling on her three legs and stopping after a couple steps to mewl piteously for you to pick her up and carry her – but if there is somewhere she wants to be that cat is FAST.
One of my babies was a three-legged after a terrible run-in with a car as a kitten. She had a very long and fulfilling life. She was a beast and could hold her own with any cat. She would still box with her two front paws while hopping along on the third if an upstart got mouthy with her or tried to nose in on her food.
Right now I have a Coveter and a mix between the Whiner and a Metabolism Enthusiast. Though if she eats too fast she upchucks it into a nice pile on the floor.
My sister had a cat that was an Elitist. She would only eat if the food bowl was full of fresh food. If the food was more than 30 minutes old, she wouldn’t eat a bite. If the bowl wasn’t full, she wouldn’t eat a bite. Then she’d only eat half of the bowl. So we were left with half a bowl of old food that she wouldn’t touch. And don’t think you could add fresh from the bag on top of the old food. She’d just sniff and walk away. So her left-overs went into her brother’s bowl.
My cat (who looks freakishly like Salem) is a mixture of the The Whiner and The Scout. He’ll walk up to me Yowl at me, take a few steps and check to see if I’m following him (if I’m not, repeat yowling), and keeps doing that until I follow him to the food dish where he expects to be petted while he eats. Although, he also has a bit of a Metabolism Enthusiast in him, too. He delights in tossing cat litter around.
We leave food out at all times for our babies, and if I come home, and they don’t have food (my husband never feeds them for some strange reason), my female cat runs to her bowl, and if I don’t follow, runs back out, stares at me until I follow her, and then runs to her bowl again to show me it’s empty. My male just meows at me until I feed him.
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i’m not sure how i should mine: the buddy, the one who is afraid to eat alone.. really i don’t know if will come near you, eow pitifully or with energy ( depending his mood) …just for you to accompagny him to his bowl ( in teh same room mind you) before he starts eating ( the bowl can be full you have to go along)
Kali, our little avatar of the Hindu Goddess of Creation and Destruction, is a Scout who also likes to deposit birds or mice on the doorstep. I don’t think she’s bartering, it seems to be a critique of the latest bag of dry food.
There is no sticking with one brand, she gets bored and needs a change.
Haha, this is freaking hilarious! I’m trying to decide where the cats in my life fell in, but I was a small child for some of them…. We had a con artist because we tried to keep her at a healthy weight and failed, to the point that we had to make a little board that marked if the cat had been fed or not because it was impossible to tell! We also have the barter, but I can’t tell if he just wants to be nice and thinks we can’t feed ourselves or wants to trade. He certainly never eats the things he catches though
Sometimes he even fails to kill them, haha. The first time he caught a bird, he looked over at us unsure what he was supposed to do next and it got away from him!
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This wouldn’t have something to do with Jim, Dali, or Curran by any chance…would it?
Alexis K recently posted..On Cats and Feeding: What Personality Type is Your Cat?
My parents have the second “the dog food tastes better” cat now.
He’s also an outside cat, so of course he’ll bring leftovers of his meals or whole mice…
Speaking if cats, quirky personalities bless them., I highly recommend checking out Simon’s Cat on YouTube. He is a creation from a cartoonist from England and his cartoons are very accurate for cat behavior. For feeding i think some people would recognize their animal in ‘catmando’ i think it is called.
My kids and I watch them over and over again.
There should be ‘The Recycler’ The cat that can’t get to another cat throwing up quick enough so they can dine on a special hot meal.
Oh! Forgot about ‘The Fisher’ The cat who scoops as much kibble into his/her mouth then drops it all into the water bowl just so they can fish it out one kibble at a time with their paw…. Also a couple who must scratch in front/the rim of the food and water bowls before dining and our cat that likes to curtsey while drinking from the water bowl but gets embarrassed if you catch him in the act. Maine Coons; poly or not RULE THE WORLD!!!!
I have The Starer. Fergie is a small black and white Persian. She can stare holes through you. The problem is that she does this whenever she wants anything, so you are left with 20 questions! She won’t drink water unless she actually sees it being poured into the bowl. Bottled, of course. She is a PERSIAN, after all. She won’t come in off the porch through the pet door if she can see you, but does just fine if she can’t. And she will mug you for a bite of Krispy Kreme donut.
I had a Shade Tree Mechanic. If the cat food dispenser stopped dispensing, she’d lie on her back with her head in the bowl and stick her paw up the chute to try to fix it–which upset the other cat to no end.
I have a combo cat. She does a bit of several of these. Since my work schedule is chaotic and inconsistent and so is my hubby’s we decided to get an automatic food dispenser so at least her dry food is always there on time twice a day. (She sits and prays to it. For hours.) Then we give her 1/4 can of wet food mixed with a little dry to slow her down from guzzling it too fast and puking. She gets this in the late evening with a somewhat fluctuating schedule. She does not starve and she is 13lbs so she is not svelt, but she ties to con the first person who stands up and does the run to the bowl and back to us routine starting at sunset. If her food dispenser runs low on battery or something she will sit on my face crying piteously and she will try and climb me when I get out of bed. (We rescued her after she had been declawed so the climbing thing is kinda sad.)
So she is a combination of The Scout, The Con Artist, a semi-Machiavelli (she will only eat certain dry or wet foods and is very particular of flavor and brand. She is suspicious of human food unless it is butter, eggs, cheese or fish and only certain ones) and the Paranoiac. She also is weird about her water bowl and she insists on shoving it around the floor sloshing water everywhere and will only drink when no one is watching. LOL The are so funny.
My cat is a Scout. We keep a bowl of dry food out for her, and if it is “empty” she will stand right under your feet and meow, then lead you back to the bowl, yowling and weaving under your feet the whole way.
The weird part is, she crunches her food, but sprays the crumbs everywhere, and will absolutely not eat any partial food pieces. So her bowl ends up 1/3 full of crumbs, and she cries like she’s starving.
She also prefers to drink water from my glass. Even if I give her her own at the same time. If I leave an open glass on the bedside table, she will drink from it. If the water is too low, she will paw at it till it tips and splashes all over my pillow.
Mine can be filed under “Delusional”. It thinks its a dog and even steals the dog’s food when it finds its own lacking. She used to be a show cat, and is so docile that if we dont watch, the kids try to carry it round by the tail. She yowls at strangers when they walk past and tried to chase a car. Nevertheless, she is beautiful and I wouldnt change her for the world.
My Maine Coon is a Blackmailer. She will casually get up and start slowly doing something that she knows will get her in big trouble (like scratching on a chair) while watching me. The worst is when she decides to gnaw on a plug (while watching me, of course). Then she will follow me to the food bowl, which must be full and fresh (her cat food pellets are rather large and after she bites them in half, she refuses to eat the remaining half). Obviously, I have somehow trained her to do this, but I will be damned if I can figure out how to make it stop.
Also at night, she must have a little way-station of a mini-bowl in the hallway so she doesn’t have to go all the way to the kitchen.