What Do Cats Take Food Out of Their Bowl?
No matter how much pet lovers debate on the best pet to keep, the fact remains that cats are great pets, probably even the best, but that is where personal preference comes in. Cats are interesting creatures. Think about, while you will need to take your dog out for a walk or hire a dog walker, cats don’t need to be walked, saving you time and money. Cats also don’t need to be supervised or locked up in a cage. You can be at work all day, and you don’t have to worry that you will find your furniture gnawed on.
You can even go on a voyage yet your cat will be okay as long as she has everything she needs in place. Also, cats are very clean. They don’t go leaving a mess everywhere, unlike most pets. You may never need to clean after your cat. While dogs prefer to bark, which at times can be frustrating, cats will spend most of their time playing with their tails or snoring. If a cat needs something, she will communicate to you instead of getting jumpy and loud. We could go on and on about facts that make cats unique but we will not be able to exhaust them.
What can you say about cats if you don’t know about their weird behaviors? While cats are great to be around, they have strange behaviors you would find interesting. Every pet owner has their share of stories to tell. Have you ever caught your cat rolled up in a tight ball asleep? Or you might have switched your computer on then you find her comfortably sitting on your keyboard. Cats will mainly do this to keep themselves warm. Sometimes they will leave the comfortable bed you made for them, with an extra warm blanket and roll up in boxes or corners.
You might also be curious as to why your cat will stand at the window and gnaw at birds singing their morning away. Well, experts have it that it envies the birds as she is locked up and cannot go and catch them like their ancestors used to in the past. In addition to the endless fascinating cat behaviors, cats will also carry food out of their bowls. Does it sound familiar? You set your furry friend’s meal in his bowl, but instead of digging in she will carry it to a corner and eat there. it is quite a healthy and instinctual behavior that you do not need to worry about.
So, why do cats carry their meal away from their bowls? Let us jog our memory a bit! According to cat history, the cats that now sit comfortably on our couches watching tv were once wild animals. Cats lived in the wild, surviving by hunting and gathering. Being members of the big cat family, cats are very territorial. Whether it’s with their food or habitat, cats will fight off any close cat so they can guard their boundaries. Cats are not naturally used to living in groups. They prefer solitude in most activities they do. Even though it’s been almost 12000 years since the first cat ever was domesticated in the middle east, domestic cats today have inherited instinctual behaviors from their long-gone ancestors. With the short background on cats, let us go straight into the causes of this puzzling behavior.
Among lions, the group system works perfectly for them as they live in organized small groups. The lioness will go out and hunt while the lion lends a hand if the prey is too big to tear apart. They live in harmonious groups of families and share whatever little they have. The former is not the case for cats, however. Cats are extremely territorial. They will purr loudly and bring out their claws if another cat comes near their food. Therefore, it’s purely out of instinct that your cats will take out their food from the bowl if you feed them together.
So, how do you curb this behavior? If you are a pet owner to several cats, it is best that you buy separate feeding bowls. When you serve your cats, it will be in the best interest that you leave some space between the dishes so that none of them feels threatened. In case that does not work, you can move them to separate rooms. If you are going to be away for a long time, set up feeding spots that are distant from each other, so they don’t fight while you are away.
All cats have something for cleanliness. While wild cats would hunt near water sources or even go for fish swimming around in the shallow waters, no cat would ever settle and have its meal near a water source. Cats are intelligent creatures. Water contains bacteria of all kind that can get hooked on their meal and it seems cats are aware of this. The kill made near a water source can also contaminate the source making it unsafe. Well. Domestic cats remain with this instinct to date. If you notice that your feline will pull its food away from a bowl that is near its drinking bowl, you should immediately separate the two bowls.
In their journey of following in the paw prints of their forefathers, cats also take food out of their bowls to hide in dark places. When cats use to live in the wild, they had to hide food in case their hunt was not successful. Unlike the domesticated cat who is fed by the human owner, wild cats lived a difficult life. Therefore, our pets cannot escape the instinct to hide portions of their food for later.
In a bid to make our best friends happy, we may end up being the reason for their discomfort. As we know, the cat has very sensitive whiskers. If you feed your cat in a deep and narrow bowl, you might notice he purrs to indicate she’s hungry yet there is food in his bowl. Well, this could be an indication of discomfort. Each time he tries to dip his head in the bowl for a bite, his whiskers get triggered. When this happens too often, your feline will suffer from whisker stress. To protect herself, your cat will result in taking food out of the bowl to a more comfortable place. To help your cat, go for a wide shallow bowl which he can comfortably eat from.
Conclusion
Although cats have been our guests for millenniums, we are still learning them, and no single soul gets it right at once. So, unless you mind the mess your cat will leave by taking food out of her bowl, this is an utterly instinctual behavior that might take quite a while to get rid of.
