Nia's DW

Three or four years ago, we bought Kuro a microchip-activated feeder so that he could eat whenever he liked without the two young gannets stealing it.

Kuro was the smartest cat we've ever owned. He was also totally bombproof and insanely curious. To him, anything new was amazing - to be investigated instantly. Any new food he was offered, he would eat precisely because it was different and therefore great! Sometimes he would eat that new food for only a day or two, or maybe a week, and then go on strike and refuse to touch it again because it wasn't as good as his usual food once the novelty wore off.

We put the feeder down that first evening and pushed him into it to train it to his microchip. Then we pushed him towards it again. The door opened and there was food in it. Nom! He backed off and the door closed. We pushed him towards it again. Cool, more food! And then he ate enough and wandered off.

Half an hour later, we heard the whirr of the motor and crunching noises. He used it at his leisure forever after.


Now that Kuro's gone, his feeder was inherited by Yami. Her brother is an endless eater who would be obese if given half a chance. Yami self-regulates, just stops eating when she's not hungry any more, so having food available to her whenever she likes will be fine.

Yami isn't a dumb cat; she's perfectly smart, but she's incredibly apprehensive. Anything new is terrifying until proven otherwise. She disappears under the bed whenever the doorbell rings and won't come out when there's anyone else in the house. Offer her a new food and she refuses to eat it in case it's poison. She had to watch the other cats eat it for a couple of days before she'd agree to try it.

Fortunately, the noise of the feeder motor didn't bother her - she's been hearing it multiple times a day for years, after all. But the movement as the lid opened was a thing we knew we'd have to treat with caution.

We trained the feeder to her chip and set the feeder into stage one of its five training modes. In this mode, the lid is open and gives just the slightest twitch. That worked fine, so we put it to stage two - a little more lid movement. That was disturbing! But her food was right there and she was hungry and she was never murdered by it, so over four days or so, she stopped being weird about it and ate without hesitation. So on to stage three...

We are now into the final training stage where the lid is open just a fraction, so she can smell the food in there better, and she will use it with encouragement, but she's a bit humpy about it still. Once the lid's open, she's fine with it, but she disapproves of the opening movement right under her nose. And she hasn't learned yet that there's food in there all the time, so she could help herself at times other than when the humans yell at cat feeding times. But we're about 80% of the way there.

Kuro training time: 5 minutes
Yami training time: 3 weeks and counting