The more I read about kitty diets on the internet, the more I’m coming to understand why pet obesity is such a problem. Simply put, fat animals are cute. They’re all puffy and soft and covered in fur. You just want to rub your face in them. I mean, if I had a child that was overweight, it would be clear to me that I wasn’t doing him any favors by feeding him all day and rubbing his belly and throwing treats at him. But a cat? All I want to do is hug her and say, “Who’s a fat kitty? Who is it?”
What we don’t realize is that even though our cats and dogs and things look fat and happy, we’re actually making them uncomfortable and unhealthy. I don’t want my cat to get kitty diabetes or kitty heart failure (man, even kitty diseases sound cuter than human ones). I want my kitty to be fit and healthy.
And so we come to the third week of Ripley’s diet. I still haven’t replaced my scale (which Ripley cunningly sabotaged) so we’re not sure if she’s actually losing any weight or not except by eyeballing her. At this point, when Ripley jogs through the room, I’ll say to Ben, “Don’t you think she looks really streamlined today?” and Ben will say, “Yeah, she’s really cutting through the air better.” But I’m not sure if I’m just trying to placate Ripley and if Ben is trying to placate me. I’m sure it makes us all feel better, though.
The biggest problem we’ve dealt with this week is the Ripley Alarm. The Ripley Alarm goes off at exactly 7 AM each morning, which is about 20 minutes before our Tradition Alarm goes off. The Ripley Alarm consists of Rips jumping onto the bed, placing her two front paws on my chest, and meowing in my face like the world is going to end. You can only turn the alarm off with cat food. There is no snooze button.
After a few sleepy discussions on this topic, last night we decided that Ripley was associating us being in bed in the morning with her feeding time, since feeding her is the first thing I do when I get up in the morning. This morning, we agreed, we would not feed her until after I had left for work.
Well, the kitty alarm went off as usual this morning and I ignored it. The kitty alarm then followed me to the bathroom, still going off, and sat on the rim of the bathtub and on the sink meowing constantly. Then the kitty alarm and went off again in the kitchen as I fixed and ate my breakfast (the meows got desperately louder as I poured cat-food-sounding dry cereal into a bowl) and then as I sat in the living room checking my email. Unlike traditional alarms, the kitty alarm will attempt to trip you, stick it’s noise in your milk, block doorways, and generally make you feel like a bad person.
About ten minutes into our experiment, Ben yelled from his office, “Sounds like it’s working!”
When I left for work this morning, she was still going off.
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October 3, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Ellie
We used to feed the cats at wake up and dinner time. But then, the Cat Alarm got earlier and earlier in the day. Now we feed them at lunchtime and bedtime. The cat alarm starts around 10am, and again at 7pm.
October 4, 2007 at 2:33 am
Martha Garvey
The only thing cuter than a cat alarm is a dog alarm…but keep at it. It’s really worth it.
October 4, 2007 at 3:57 am
Mary Nelson Abbott
My cat (rather, my husband’s cat, whom I feed when I wake up every morning) does the same thing. There is no solution. Closing the bedroom door on Friday night does nothing, because at 5:30 a.m. Saturday, he’s out there scratching at the door and meowing like Little Timmy’s fallen into the well and we have to run! quick! to save him!
Turns out, cats don’t understand weekends so well.
October 4, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Patrick
If I may offer this solution to the kitty alarm. Erin and I usually get up around 5-530 on weekdays and hopefully 7 or 8 on weekends. Or cats Stewie (the OMG-he’s-a-fat-cat tabby) and Bender (the sleek calico), got into the habit of being fed at these times, and much like the cats from other posters kept trying to get us to wake up earlier to feed them. Bender would “squeak” (she’s three but I’ve never heard an actual “meow”) at the foot of the bed before jumping up and head butting either Erin or me until we awoke, and then would continue doing so until we got up. Stewie took the more direct approach of sitting on us, either lying on our stomachs and purring in our faces, or, more often than not, sitting on or about our faces so that in order to breathe we must inhale stewie hair–essentially he’s attempting to kill us if we don’t get up at that moment and feed him. Neither situation was tenable and a solution needed to be found.
In our attempts to stop this we bought the following product from petsmart: http://www.petmate.com/Catalog.plx?ID=1823. It’s an investment that has paid for itself over and over.
We’ve set it for a 1/4 cup twice a day–5 am and 9 pm. You can set it for one feeding to three feedings and various amounts. After two days the cats got used to it…although the wily Bender has figured out that is she lies on her back and sticks her paw up the shoot she can get a couple kibbles here and there. This is actually pretty cool because we don’t have to watch her weight. Stewie on the other hand has not figured this out (not only is he big, but he’s kinda special–i’ve thought about getting a helmet for him) which is good.
Anyway the kitties love their feeder. It keeps them fed and happy. And more importantly, the mewing, scratching at the door, and 4:45 wake up calls have ceased.
Now, we just have to deal with the 4:45 wake up calls for Dexter (our new 7 month mini-dauchshund puppy) to go potty.
October 4, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Patrick
when clicking on the link, remove the period after the number 1832
sorry.
pjm
October 5, 2007 at 2:52 pm
drmiketemp
I don’t think I could have done that. The thought of being heartless would be going through my mind all the while I was ignoring the cat.
Our overweight cat wasn’t that bad though. He allowed us to do the normal morning things because he knew he was going to get fed. He did know that the alarm clock was going to go off at 6:30am though. He’d start paying attention to it around 6:15am and stayed “glued” to it around 6:27am.
October 10, 2007 at 2:28 pm
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