Quote:
Originally Posted by catlover2
TQ, Q. Can u teach a cat how to chew his food?
A. Nope.
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it's actually rather easy, and as I was reading through the posts, I was SURPRISED I did not see someone else answer this.
in the wild, a natural wild cat will hunt and kill their food, so chewing is needed to get the flesh off of the carcass, and to crunch up the smaller bones they eat with the rest of the animal: bird, rodent, reptile, fish whatever.
they do not need to chew or masticate the food as we do, and in fact you will see wild cats swallowing horrifyingly large pieces of raw flesh without any chewing except to get the piece loose,......perfectly normal for all size kitties, even 650lb ones
I work as an animal/human trainer, and my usual solution for house cats that don't chew their food, is to simply choose a dry kibble where the pieces are large enough so that the animal is forced to chew the piece, to break it up enough to fit in the mouth and swallow, or cut your raw diet pieces larger forcing the animal to gnaw off a hunk and chew it enough to swallow.
now an animal that has been used to licking their food will take some time to get used to the new diet, be patient, if they don't eat the food within a specified reasonable time, remove the food, especially raw foods, where spoilage is a concern, and put out a SMALL amount of the large sized dry kibble, and then on the cats next regular feeding, repeat with the larger hunks of meat, again for only the specified time, so that kitty learns "eat now, or it's gone",....sometimes kitty will need to be pretty hungry for the tearing/chewing instinct so be brought back out, after basically learning to lick, instead of chew, or gnaw, so be patient, pretend you are mommy cat and keep at it till kitty picks up the new way.
also you MUST make an attempt to have the meat at room temp at feeding time, I have noticed many, many cats that just WOULD NOT eat any cold food, and instead would lick it till it was warm, then they ate normally once the food was warm.
in the wild you don't see cats eating much things that are cold, even polar region cats will drag a cold/ frozen carcass back to the den, and let it warm before eating much more then a few bites.
it might take several days of this for the animal to get used to the larger "chew diet" (we can invent a name if we want, right?
), just be patient, stay calm, don't pay any more attention to the animal when eating than you usually would, and when they get hungry enough, they usually tear the food apart, once they realize their mouths are efficient little meat shredding machines, and in fact you'll see most cats ENJOYING just tearing apart chunks of meat,....remember what they do to a ball of yarn which they are pretending is a mouse, or bird.
work within what your cat finds attractive, and transfer play time (hunting, stalking, wrestling, grappling) to meal time, just like mommy cat would, and you'll find that your cat will respond to raw diets, and for "lickers", bigger is better to get them started.