over+++ Title = “Automated Feeding and Herding Cats” Date = “2019-02-26T20:43:00+13:00” Categories = [“Misc”] Tags = [“cats”] +++

Our two cats have quite a size difference; in spite of being litter-mates, Mini is, well, minuature, stuck at the size of a 9 month old at 2 years of age; Tui, while not a large cat in an absolute sense, was a solidly-built girl with a powerful head. Unfortunately Tui reacted to our habit - a hold-over from our previous cats - of feeding them from a hopper by gutsing as much as swhe could all. the. time; as a result Tui quickly moved from large to chonky. Chonky enough, in fact, that her vet has admonished us to help her lose some weight.

We’d had a hack at this over the last year, trying to seperate food bowls, taking food away and only feeding when we’re in the house and so on, and… Tui grew another 300g. Which might not sound like much, but when you’re only supposed to be 4 to 4.5 kilos, and you’re a kilo overweight…

Radical action was clearly called for. The vet advocated for a low-calorie food that she could pig out on while not getting as much nutrition, but this would be a disaster for Mini, who only eats tiny amount. And trying to put Mini-food out would just see Tui burgling the good stuff. Which is where the automated feeding comes in: both cats have RFID implants, which makes them compatible with RFID-reading cat feeders; having bought these, I introduced the cats to them. It was fairly easy to associate Mini with her device, inserting her into the cat feeder to be scanned. Tui was a little less keen and a few more scars were earned.

The training manual suggested that it would be about a week before the cats would get to grips with the system; Mini appears to have learned within a day or so how it works, with the only issue being a bit of uncertainty how far in she has to go to unlock her food, and a small start when the door opens.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are some other issues, but they don’t really relate to Mini per se. Mini is a clever cat - not long after we got her, I saw her in a hallway, climbing up to a door handle in an effort to open the door - and I’ve always had her sister pegged as a little dimmer. But I’m being forced to revise my opinion. Tui has gone from a certain bemusement at Mini’s feeder to rage-driven attempts to break into it. This started with hearing the whirr of the door opening encouraging her to run through to the kitchen and glower at her sister, or to shove her head into the feeder while Mini is trying to eat; to escalating into Tui trying to work out how her sister unlocks it - inserting her head, batting it, clawing it, biting it.

But the high point thus far - and the item which has forced me to re-evaluate her intellect - was today, with Tui escalating to trying to bully her sister from the lounge and then bedroom into coming through to unlock the feeder; having realised Mini is the key, she is now determined to herd her into the feeder in order to burgle more of the good food¹.