Looking for some cat advice
Caveat: I'm following up with my vet for most of this, but she's newer and is having to do a lot of consulting with other vets in the practice.
Info: I have three cats,
- adult female - Nova, 13ish?
- adult male, Pippin 3ish
- male kitten - Fig 5 months (he's very sneaky)
Ok so, my girl Nova has been diagnosed with diabetes. This has entirely upended our feeding schedule and she's not coping well with it. We'd previously used some automatic feeders that dropped food 6 times a day, because she would stress out about not having food and then overeat and would throw up in both scenarios. But now all three cats are on different food (all kibble), and at least Nova would prefer to eat any food but her own, or have seconds, but the others would too if left to it. So they're being fed in different rooms at the same time.
Nova is ravenous, aggressively trying to drag her bowl out of my hands, headbutting the tub of her food (she caught it loose once) across the floor, running to the other bowls in case there's CC. food left once they're separated. She just dove for one as I was trying to just let a cat out of the room instead of pick the bowl up. She's always under my feet in a way that she used to be good about avoiding. I've stepped on her several times, and hurt my ankle and wrist last night catching myself.
Any suggestions for the perpetually (thinks she's) starving cat? I just got her a glucometer and am figuring it out but haven't been taught how to adjust her insulin as of yet.
Part of the difficulty here, and another area I need solutions in, is that she'll (mostly) inadvertently scratch my partner's leg when she wants his attention usually to be fed. I think occasionally it's intentional but he uses a wheelchair and mostly can't feel the leg - a cut can be dangerous for him, but also sometimes the touch/pain sets his leg off in a spasm cycle that is incredibly painful. On a bad day he's feeling guilty for how angry he is at her and is afraid he'll hit her (he probably wouldn't, but he doesn't have the control to say intentionally tumble her like a mama cat to a kitten, and she would probably claw or bite if he tried plus she's been sick and he's already afraid of hurting all the cats with the chair.) he's done the spray bottle thing in the past, she likes water and we know it's not ideal, but it's usually something that happens when he's not looking or can't see or hear her til she gets him.
Finally I need a better storage method for the food. Something she can't headbutt open or into dropping food, but that I can leave out in an open space. Currently I have a bag in a bathroom vanity, a tub of the Rx food in a spare room, and a bag in a closet. They have torn the bags open in the past (working together as a team, I suspect) when they're not secured.
I've thought about the microchip feeders but the youngest isn't chipped yet and frankly they're really expensive.
Summary of Asks:
- Help with a diabetic cat who's perpetually starving
- Help with getting a cat to stop scratching a human's leg who can't see it coming (addressing the first might help)
- Help with ideas for cat food storage/dispensing that would be more accessible than 3 bags in 3 closets in 3 rooms, two of which my partner can't access.
Bit of a vent here too, just everything is expensive right now too so I'm trying the best I can. Pics added.
We’ve got a cat like this, we throw single kibble pellets for her to chase in between meals. Seems to calm her down a bit.
Shes still annoying as hell and will trip you, but with the kibble chasing exercise at least she naps sometimes now instead of just constantly hunting.
The food storage is actually easier than you might think. Our chonker also likes to rip open a bag of food if left undefended. Just get a plastic storage tote, and if need be, there are the ones where the lid has a snapping handle mechanism. We leave our food in its bag, in that big box. Works well.
We have RFID feeders (I bet you can find some used for a bit of a discount), and one of the better features is that if another cat tries to butt-in, their chip registers and the door closes. It isn't perfect, but our cats trained themselves pretty well within a week. The more food determined lady skulks by all the feeders even though she knows she won't get any glory.
Last comment is that I can't say much about the histrionics around starvation - I've read about it but never had to deal with it first hand. I guess just my commiserations. And cat making you take a tumble is infuriating, and then you feel bad for being angry.
I've never used the RFID feeders, but I have friends that have used them with good results as well, so I second @davek804 on that front.
We did have a cat, Verona, that had a terrible stomach, and so she was constantly on various prescription foods. Like Nova, Verona was a bit... excitable about food, and needed ta be fed at least 4 times a day (including the middle of the night) or she would start panicking about starving, and eat herself sick.
I don't know exactly what food Nova needs to be on, so maybe this isn't an option, but we just put both of our cats on Verona's prescription food. It wasn't actually medicated, though (to be honest, I don't understand why so much specialty pet food requires a prescription, and it drives me a little nuts). It was, of course, more expensive, but it meant that we could keep using our auto feeders and keep the cats (relatively) sane.
Re: the scratching/aggression, this is maybe a bit of a long shot, but:
One of the strategies that we tried for getting our cats more comfortable being around our dog was to train them to "touch". Cats, it turns out, are very good at clicker training (as long as the clicker sound isn't frightening to them). You can buy extendable wands with built in clickers, and teach your cat to boop the tip of the wand with their nose, and then reward them with a treat. For Verona (and probably Nova), just using a piece of kibble was often a sufficient treat. Here's one of the "target stick" wands I'm talking about: https://www.amazon.com/CAT-SCHOOL-Training-Kit-Tools/dp/B084NHN1ST. That company actually has a bunch of YouTube videos on how to train cats to do various behaviors with clicker training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjLBG9wsaAo.
This might help with your partner? I'm extrapolating a bit from dog training, but in general, I imagine that the right strategy here is going to be some operant conditioning: redirect her to a scratching post (or even a couch, anything is better than a leg) with the wand, and reward her for postponing or redirecting the scratch. Maybe even hang some bells around the house so that she feels like she has a way to get your attention? Hopefully, with time, she'll start opting for the non-leg option on her own, because she keeps getting rewarded for it. You may even want to have something scratchable in every room, just so that there's always something to redirect her from. This is the kind of behavior that will take a lot of persistence to modify, but with enough consistency, I suspect you'll be able to do it.