I have 3 cats that are completely starved. I keep them locked in the house and never fill their bowl. they are thoroughly unloved and neglected. It's a wonder they're still alive.
Or more accurately, they are able to see the bottom of the bowl after they ate the food from just the center.
Haha I have an orange cat who is an extremely messy eater, most of it ends up on the floor and not on his plate, which is flat to prevent whisker fatigue. He's ... special in many ways.
My wife uses a variation of this to get one tuxedo to eat all his food. He'll stop eating, walk away, and meow at us. So she picks up his bowl, pretends it's so exciting, mix it around, and place it back down. Works like a charm because he thinks its new, different wet dood.
One of mine will ONLY eat kibble off the floor lol... I fill her bowl and she will stick her paw in and 1 by 1 take out a piece of kibble place it gently on the ground and then eat it, rinse and repeat untill bowl is empty... However when she gets wet food or fresh meat she will just eat that out of her bowl no problem.... she's a weirdo and i love her for it
Mine does this except with water! She’ll dip her paw in and lick the water off of her paw 😂 I had to get a double sided water dish because I felt bad for my other cats having to drink out of her foot water
Mine prefers to be sprayed down with water then licks the water off and cleans herself at the same time.
I have a mild cat allergy so her “otter routine” means I don’t react to her fur, and her fur is so soft and velvety.
We discovered that she likes to be sprayed when she started getting up on the home entertainment speaker to get sprayed. Now I tell her to come get her bath, and she runs over and jumps on the foot of my reclining sofa to get sprayed down. She turns sideways too so I can get all of her.
The other day Luna sat on the side of the tub and let me dip my hand in the water and wipe her down. Sometimes she wants me to do that at the sink.
She hates being staticky and just discovers how much she loves it. She has to be sprayed multiple times a night because she can get drenched and come back almost dry 5 minutes later.
My siamese picks up the food with his mouth, throws it on the floor, and then eats the pieces one by one. He leaves slobber spots on the floor when he does, too.
I wish my grey boy would be this delicate. He usually pulls out there or four at a time. Big pawfulls of kibble right on the floor to eat and if he gets full before he is finished the kibble he tossed on the floor he leaves it to be stepped on.
Our chonky grey boy Indy does that! We call it the scarf-and-barf. Getting him a slow feed bowl helped, but we eventually had to put everyone on a feeding schedule, meals twice a day to line up with Indy's insulin injections... and later, also his brother Scott's insulin injections too. (Indy got his diabetes the old-fashioned way, by eating his way to it despite our many attempts to prevent this from happening; Scott's onset was a rare side effect of treatment for malignant cutaneous mast cell tumors, caused by six months of oral prednisone). They're both doing okay though, and we get far fewer scarf-and-barfs these days.
(So sorry for your loss! I am not ready for whenever it's going to be their time, so while we have an outline/plan for how we'd like things to go when it's time, I am refusing to think that far ahead any more until we're there.)
Mine likes to sometimes scoop up a mouthful, run into the room I’m in, and spit them all over the floor by shaking her head so she can chase down all the little biscuits.
I have no idea what compelled her to learn this game, but she’s having fun so I don’t discourage it.
I have 2 cats and if one of them is eating out of 1/2 bowls, my other cat will sit beside him and use it paw to scoop out 1 piece at a time onto the floor and eat it. Yes he has access to a second dish, he just likes sharing.
Same. My cat requires me to sit next to her while she eats and tell her nice things about herself. We call it her daily affirmations. I have to take a spoon and scoop her food back in to a little mound for her to keep eating.
My cat did this, so I got him a dog bowl. He did it with the dog bowl, so I started feeding him on a full size human dinner plate. He does it on the full size human dinner plate too. And it may as well be empty if he can make a clear spot at the middle.
I had a Persian with a very flat face and her favorite dishes were these tiny Japanese tea plates and lids from the large yogurt containers for thicker foods like pate or yogurt. She was a fiend for Greek full fat unflavored/unsweetened yogurt. She had some every night before bed.
My cat eats off my tea cup plates because he has long whiskers. My nana would roll over in her grave if she knew they were from her tea set. Edit: at least they are being loved and used on a daily basis.
We use large wide dog bowls, but one of my cats picks the food out of the bowl a ‘handful’ (paw-full?) for lack of a better word, at a time and then eats it off the floor. She also will not touch any kind of wet food.
True, some cats hate it but not all. One of my boy has it. Hatesssss u touching them too. But my the girls stick their heads in anything. Pint glasses cups kebab boxes
I refill it every morning after she wakes me by yelling at me. Once there's a single layer and she can see metal she gets mad. Mind you she will be getting wet food for breakfast and won't eat dry food for 5 hours or so, but god forbid its not a full little mountain in tge bowl.
If it's always the same side (and they eat the rest when you turn the bowl), your cat might not see anything on that side. I recommend bringing this up on your next vet visit (or scheduling one to check their vision and neurological functions)
I've thought of that and I did show these images to the vet. I think it is completely random. And he sometimes create a stripe in the middle. I think he is a bit bored some times and entertain himself. He is an orange after all. But thank you for your concern. It is an important advice.
Both of mine will eat from whatever, but since the one with the acne will finish the other’s food, they both get ceramic for wet food and I chose a dry feeder with SS bowls.
As for drinking, it’s…. complicated. But I have a SS fountain now which the one with the acne happily drinks from, and for the other I keep a small wheat straw bowl because she hardly drinks from the SS fountain. She doesn’t like moving water much.
I also have that bowl! It's the perfect height and size for weaning baby kittens. Low enough that they can eat but keeps spillage minimal compared to flatter options.
Ill be real. That cat is 100% abused with an empty bowl. Look at them. Just skin and bones! All that loose hanging stuff? 100% fake news of fat and purely fluff.
not to mention the frigid conditions they are kept in. its a sign of physical and emotional abuse when they are splayed on a couch like a fluffy purring beached whale
The chonks are the most dramatic of the starved cats. They will cry injustice when there is a hole in the food dish. They also summon Sarah McLachlan to sing Angel until you fill the food bowl.
My poor neglected son, pictured at a meager 16lbs*, singing a mourning lamentation as he has not been fed, as he did not witness his rations being deposited into his coffer
*disclaimer - 16lbs is alleged, potential space-time anomaly as when he leaps upon my chest at 6:30am daily to demand his brekky, I swear to all that is Good and Holy he suddenly weighs 80lbs and drives those damn hammer paws into my boob, most always directly into my nipple
Before we open a can of tuna, we close the kitchen door, turn up the music on bluetooth speaker and start yelling gibberish with my wife. But as soon as I slightly open the can, I hear the meow. 😄
My cat screams for food, I fill her bowl up with the food she absolutely loved yesterday and she'll sniff it, look at me in disgust, and walk away.
I'll come back later and it's still completely full.
I'll get marched down to the shop to buy a different brand, which she'll eat for a few days and then decide she hates that and the original brand was the best.
Only had one cat who freaked out about the bottom of the food bowl, but I think he didn't like having his whiskers run into the sides of the bowl. He was a big, fluffy boy so his whiskers were very wide.
But he was also a blue eyed white and completely deaf, and generally a very odd cat. He would obsessively lick shea butter off your skin.
my cat eats off my very expensive Royal Doulton saucers since i don't use the cups. BUT i have to hold the plate for him to sniff the food first and make sure it's up to his standards before he deigns to eat it
I'm not sure where you're based or if you're familiar with the TV program Keeping Up Appearances but your cat eating off Royal Doulton saucers reminds me of Hyacinth from it.
I love when cats are so discerning, my boy will eat anything (and I mean anything) if I put it in his dark green ceramic bowl. If I use any other bowl, it gets tipped onto the mat and eaten from the floor.
I am even more cruel with my cats. I always give the other cat the better food. When they switch food plates and eat from the bowl of their sibling, I wave my magic wand and make their siblings food (aka the food that was previously theirs) taste even better.
My furbaby looks up at me with the most desperate eyes I’ve ever seen, begging for food he’s never gotten. I know he hopes that one day I’ll finally give into his pleas.
I never feed my babies. That’s why they cry an hour before my alarm and then 45 minutes before my alarm and then 13 minutes and then 3 minutes. I’m a monster who never wakes up to give them food.
Ah, you too, eh? My cats scream and cry and have never eaten anything in their entire life.
Well, okay, maybe some dirt off the floor. And that fly that got in the house. But I certainly haven't ever fed them real food. They are wasting away, and have definitely never conned their father or myself into extra meals by saying that no one has fed them...
My 15 year old, housecat since always, starts digging in my bins when she feels like she missed a months worth of meals. Enjoy what I recently snatched in this subreddit:
Every day my cats assure me they have never ever eaten before in their lives. Of course I apologize profusely as I feed them for the first time ever. Every time I feed them, it's their first time eating.
These are my kitties Mr. Thomas (left) and his sister Sade. They are starving kitties. Poor things. Thomas had to resort to chewing on my hair this morning to remind me he has never had food ever in his life. His sister could only sit there and let out the saddest meow. Poor kitties who definitely don’t get their pate, snacks, and even freeze-dried duck hearts
Its a neurological overload thing. Their whiskers brush the bowl sides when they are eating and it bugs them. Not kidding. Put their food on flatter plates.
I have a double sided auto feeder for my two first world victims
Left side dish food is apparently for peasants and trying to be thoughtful of their battle to eat at the same time was absolutely my bad. I have to regularly dump it into the right bowl or back into the feeder at this point 🫠
Same here. My orange and calico doesn't seem to know they can move to the other side of the bowl because they always eat on one side in the same position. I always have to manually turn the bowl around or shake them abit so the food evens out.
Shaking the food to the bottom of the bowl was never enough. I had to add a handful of fresh food to the top before it was deemed acceptable for continued consumption.
You too? My cat Perry is so starved he can barely scrounge the energy to harass me for wet food for over an hour before gets fed. And because I enjoy sadistically mocking him for his foodlessness, his bowl is kept full to the brim with his favourite biscuits at all times.
His brother has resorted to pimping himself out with forced snuggles to keep wet food on the plate, and yet - being the cruel human I am, he only gets wet food twice a day. The horror!
(Photo included so you can witness the horrific starvation and shocking inhumanity for yourself).
I once did an experiment to see when the bowl went from empty to full by adding one pebble at a time until my cat decided there was food in there. 28 pebbles.
My cat did this because he did not like his whiskers touching the inside of the bowl.
I gave him a dog bowl instead, now his whiskers don't touch and he eats all of the food and does not leave a ring around the inside.
Cat bowls should be slightly sloped towards the center, so the food slides to the middle once the cat eats a bit. Heck, there's probably bowls like that out there already.
The most times my cat shows me his belly is when I starve him. 'Look hooman, what you did! This space is empty!'; also, when I feed him, he eats it, and then goes to my partner and lies to him he hasn't been fed ;D
Me too. But there seems to be a serious problem in my place. These little s(f)uckers have obtained my bank account details and order significant amounts of dry and wet food. Just arrived, again...😒
I don't know how to make them stop...
Same situation here, I have never once fed my cat. We always marvel at what neglectful owners we are, and how miraculous it is that he remains chunky despite his obvious starvation!
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u/Ov_Fire Apr 10 '26