As an obligate carnivore, your cat is a hunter at heart. Research that explores the intersection between their hunting habits and their eating habits is changing the way we feed our kittens – and is having a positive impact on feline health and behavior.
Like most pets, your cat will likely eat from a bowl or platter at set times throughout the day. But if you’ve ever witnessed your cat’s hunting instincts, you’ll know that the way felines feed in the wild is very different from the way we feed them at home. Feline behavior research is changing our understanding of the connection between our cats’ hunting and feeding needs, and how restoring your cat as a hunter can improve their health and well-being.
Cats in the wild
Living alone in the wild, free-roaming cats are solitary hunters who stalk and catch small prey, says Elizabeth Waring, feline behaviorist at International Cat Care in the UK.
In order to meet their daily energy and nutritional needs, these cats must kill and eat an average of ten prey per day. This means they consume small, frequent meals and spend most of their waking hours searching and hunting for food.
Also, since feline prey is most active at dawn and dusk, this is when cats hunt most actively. “So it’s easy to see how a cat’s eating behavior can conflict with an owner’s routine,” says Elizabeth.
Indoor cats cannot hunt
In most human households, pet cats are fed a few times a day (unless dry food is left in a bowl all day) at the convenience of their people. “This means cats no longer follow their natural pattern of eating little and often, day and night,” says Elizabeth.
The majority of cat owners also keep their kittens indoors, leading boring lives where they walk from couch to food bowl and back to couch. That doesn’t even match what they do in the wild.
Boredom leads to health and behavior problems
This disconnect can lead to health and behavioral issues. Boredom can lead to inactivity, which can lead to overeating and obesity, which can then lead to metabolic diseases such as diabetes, and behavioral problems such as urinating or defecating out of the litter box, swallowing food and then vomiting, waking people up at night, and even aggression.
“How you feed your cat is as important as What you feed it,” says veterinarian Dr Elizabeth Bales, creator of the Indoor Hunting Feeder, a set of mouse-shaped feeders that cats “hunt.” People love their cats and give them the best of everything, she notes – but that’s the best of everything from a human, not a cat, perspective.
In the wild, says Dr. Bales, a cat’s purpose is to hunt and find prey. “When you take that goal away and just give him a bowl of food, it changes everything for him.”
She adds that cats, unlike dogs, are not genetically built to express their needs. When their innate needs are not met, they become stressed and manifest this stress by peeing outside the box, becoming obsessed with food, and being destructive or aggressive. Worse still, cats can “emotionally shut down” and just sleep all the time.
Engage Cats in Hunting Behavior
Being able to adopt a hunting behavior to eat, says Dr. Bales, changes all that. Cats are less anxious and more relaxed, so they don’t urinate or defecate outside the litter box or are aggressive with people or other cats. They stop waking people up in the middle of the night to be fed, and the “sling and vomit” behavior disappears.
Research that has been conducted to explore the intersection of cat behavior and nutrition reveals ways to feed cats that are better suited to their natural eating habits (see below).
As research into the dietary needs of felines moves beyond the veterinary research community and becomes more mainstream, Dr. Bale believes feeding cats once or twice a day from the same bowl in the same place will become less of the norm. . More and more people will seek to improve the health and behavior of their cats by giving them ways to “hunt” for their food.
Tips for feeding felines
- Feline behaviorist Elizabeth Waring recommends dividing a cat’s daily food intake into small meals, with a minimum of five servings. You can hide these portions all over the house at different times of the day, so your cat has to “hunt” them. It’s a good idea to change food locations; in the wild, cats would not find their prey in the same place all the time.
- If hiding portions of food isn’t an option, or if you aren’t available to feed your cat at least five small meals a day, timed automatic feeders may be a solution. Although they do not meet the needs of feline hunting, they can be programmed to dispense several smaller meals per day, which is still an approximation of how cats naturally evolved to feed themselves.