We have three cats and need to control eating on one of them. #1 Sierra (orange tabby) is a grazer who eats many small meals throughout day and maintains weight well. #2 Izzy (persian) is now on a twice a day wet food schedule. #3 BK (brown tabby) is a pig and will eat anything until the bowl is empty.
BK is a stray who we recently re-acquired after he got out for 4 months. During his first stay of 3 years he put on a fair amount of weight leading to nicknames such as "fatness", "BK broiler", "fatty, fatty 2x4", etc. He has dropped wight from being outside and we would like to keep it that way.
Based on their eating styles I think the ideal solution would be to get a magnetic or RFID bowl for Sierra (#1) the grazer. The other two we can then control with specific/timed feedings. Has anyone here had any experience with this type of feeder? There are a few on the market but none of them have a decent rating.
Even though I'm a DIY guy I'm also not up for building my own.
Build your own RFID cat feeder.
I'm curious to hear about this too. I have 3 cats and one is a fat berkeley, but I'm not home for long periods of time so scheduled feeding is out.
gamby
UltimaDork
12/14/13 5:14 p.m.
Interested in this. My current 2 are both self-feeders and it's working out great. I don't know what will happen when new kitties enter the picture.
The convenience of self-feeders is spectacular. 
Girlfriend's vet suggests finding a food that the cat doesn't really like, but willing to eat, so that the cat only eats when it is hungry. My girlfriend feeds her cat science diet.
ihayes
New Reader
12/14/13 11:04 p.m.
Stay away from the cheap timed feeders. I bought and tried a couple. My fat orange cat was able to first, throw out off the dryer where he was being fed to break it open (later Velcroed it down), then force advance it to get to the next round of food. A determined cat can do quite a bit of damage...
What are you feeding these cats to that they need ID?
ihayes wrote:
Stay away from the cheap timed feeders. I bought and tried a couple. My fat orange cat was able to first, throw out off the dryer where he was being fed to break it open (later Velcroed it down), then force advance it to get to the next round of food. A determined cat can do quite a bit of damage...
Yep. The biggest problem with ours was them sticking their paws up in there and tricking the next round of food to pop out.
I've family who have used these systems on their dairy farms. Past tense is an important operative word.
To work, the feeders must be isolated in separate rooms with room access triggered by the RFID tag. Otherwise, the bully cow or hungry cat will shove the other out of the way and eat their food. Even with room access (or shutes in the case of cows, the hungry/bully will quickly learn to shove its way in along with, or just in front of the properly tagged animal.
Some animals will not ever use the system, either through fear, cussedness, or stupidity.
Feeders jam and break, or simply fail to properly dose the feed. Cheap is usually worse, but even expensive state of the art systems are not immune to it.
Feed shape greatly influences how well the system will work. Round pellets are best, cute kitty food shapes are the worse. Comp,ex shapes interlock, jamming up doors and slides and augers.
Living with your situation and our own cats. Fat girl on a diet, an anorexic who barely eats, and a few others. We switched to hand feeding in individual bowls, and sitting guard while they eat, armed with a squirt gun. It's worked for us. Not perfectly, but pretty well. Multiple small feeding throughout the day.
foxtrapper wrote:
Living with your situation and our own cats. Fat girl on a diet, an anorexic who barely eats, and a few others. We switched to hand feeding in individual bowls, and sitting guard while they eat, armed with a squirt gun. It's worked for us. Not perfectly, but pretty well. Multiple small feeding throughout the day.
We free feed here even though one of monsters is a fat little piggy so we have to use the spray bottle. Also I mix in food they don't like with the big bag of stuff they will.
I have shown this photo before, the big orange one can pickup almost 30lb's and throw it across the floor. But the Persian, mister fatass, when he gets hungry will shove the bigger guys right out of the way to get what he wants.
Haha the orange one looks like he's part lion!! I can't offer any help as we just free feed ours, but we also just got a stray off the street back after she was gone for six months so were back up to four cats
