Click below for:
Our Cats
FrontierLand Home Page
Return to Home Page

In general, cats don't like change. So we expected some problems when we first adopted Hugo and Daphne. But we never expected to spend so much time and effort dealing with our cats' eating disorder.

We brought them home and decided to try free feeding them dry food because that would be easiest for us. "Free feeding" means to leave food out at all times so they're free to eat on their own schedule. They seemed to be doing well like this, until our first visit to the vet. "You've got to put them on a feeding schedule," the doctor said, "or they'll probably eat too much and get fat."

So we switched to feeding them half their recommended meals twice a day. Soon, we noticed a brown runny mess appearing on various carpets throughout the house. We called the vet to report that one of our cats had diarrhea. Of course, he wanted to know which one it was, so we separated the cats for a night. The next morning, Daphne's room had a brown puddle in it.

We packed the poor frightened kitty back into her carrier and took her to the vet's office, where she was poked and prodded some more. Eventually, the doctor recommended giving her a liquid medicine to help control the diarrhea. So twice a day, we had to wrap her in a towel, hold her still, and try to inject sticky goo into her mouth.

After the first bottle of medicine was used up, the vet suggested switching to Kaopectate. That still meant torturing our poor little girl with the procedure for getting her to take the medicine.

Just as we were considering yet another trip to the vet, we began to notice some patterns. Finally one morning, Jon caught the "mess" in the act. It turns out it was Hugo, throwing up, just before breakfast.

We had the wrong end of the wrong cat the whole time.

We began to suspect that the anxiety over the empty food dish was making our cats throw up. So without consulting the vet, we went back to free feeding. Almost immediately, the vomiting slowed down to just two or three times a week.

Some improvement, but that still meant having to clean up vomit (or "blorp" as we like to call it) pretty often, not to mention what stains it was starting to leave on our new white carpet.

---

Special thanks to for their comic strip that inspired us to use the word "blorp."

---

Not only that, but they were eating a lot. We were having to fill their food dishes three or four times a day, with much more food than they should have been eating. If ever a dish even came close to being empty, the vomiting would immediately get worse. In just a few months, they each gained 5.5 pounds. That's a lot, especially considering Hugo started at just 13 pounds, and Daphne originally weighed just less than ten.

But then, we noticed that they suddenly weren't downing quite so much food. We didn't have to refill their dishes nearly as often, and the blorping had nearly stopped, too.

So we tried cutting them back down to a fixed feeding schedule. Lo and behold, they ate what we gave them, and stopped getting sick about it. It took about six months overall, but at least now they're eating more healthily, and have finally returned to their healthy weights.