How to Help Your Indoor Cats Hunt for Their Food

If someone wants to help a cat hunt for their food, what would you recommend?

My suggestions tend to vary depending on the individual cat and how food motivated that cat is. Very food motivated cats may be willing to work hard to find small treats, while other cats need easy wins and lots of encouragement when they first start.

If you want your cat to hunt for their actual meals, kibble or freeze-dried raw food works best. Otherwise, if you’re feeding a diet of mostly wet or frozen raw food, you’ll want to look for some freeze-dried treats to encourage hunting. Also, if your cat isn’t extremely food motivated, looking for a treat that has a strong smell can help your cat find it more easily.

There are treat balls, like the Egg-Cersizer ball, that you can fill with treats or food. Then, the cat rolls around the ball until food falls out of it. You can make the holes in the toy bigger or smaller to change the level of difficulty.

Another option is to use a cardboard box to create your own treat toy. Just take any cardboard box and cut various size holes in it. And then you can put treats or food inside the box, so the cat has to fish it out with their paws.

Using a cardboard box allows you to vary the game a lot. You can use different boxes with different sizes and shapes and then cut various holes in different locations. That way, it’s not the same game every day, and you can change the box once your cat has mastered that particular box configuration.

But for a beginning game for cats who aren’t food motivated, I recommend that pet owners try a game using tiny paper Dixie cups. You start by placing a couple of treats in the bottom of one of these cups, and then you leave the cup open-end up in the center of the room. You want your cat to find it, and then figure out that they need to knock over the cup to get the treat out.

Once they’ve mastered that technique, you can move the cups around the house, and you can use multiple cups. And you can hide these cups in a cat tree, on a windowsill or some other place that your cat needs to explore the house to find. That way, when your cat is roaming their indoor territory, they can use their sense of smell to get small portions of food or treats.

This game encourages that territorial patrolling that many feral cats instinctually do. Outside cats will wander the borders of their territories and look for changes. So, if you can add small amounts of food to different areas of your home, you can get your cat to start patrolling that interior territory.

If you do feed wet food or raw food, are there ways you can make your cat hunt for their food?

Cats have a natural daily cycle, where they instinctually hunt, eat, groom and sleep. For cats, it’s very straightforward. A cat catches a mouse, eats the mouse, cleans up after eating, and then sleeps. Once they’re regained energy, the cat will want to reproduce that cycle again. And a normal cat will follow this cycle several times each day.

An indoor cat is not likely to have an opportunity to hunt a mouse. But play or any other physical activity triggers the same hunting mental response. Activity can stimulate appetite. Playing with your cat right before feeding helps them believe that they’re hunting for food. Then, when they’re eating, it’s as if they’ve caught the meal.

Overweight or older cats may not like to play. So, try doing just five minutes of interactive play right before you feed them. Ideally, you’d work up to ten minutes of play, and help encourage a routine of exercise before eating. And following that routine before every meal will trigger more engagement from your cat.

Cats like predictability, so your cat will come to expect playtime before meals once you start the habit. It’s also a good way to try to curb a cat’s impulse to play when you don’t want to play. If your cat is waking you up in the middle of the night to play, you can try to shift playtimes, so they take place before meals. If you want your cat to sleep all night, you have a play session, followed by feeding. That routine then triggers the instinct to groom and go to sleep.

It’s also important to realize that cats like to have smaller, more frequent meals. Outdoor and feral cats eat small meals, which might be the size of beetles. Then they’d need to groom and sleep before hunting again.

The more often you can feed your cat, the more your household’s schedule mimics their instinctual behavior. Ideally, you should feed your cat at least three times a day, but it’s more important to make a schedule that you can follow all seven days of the week. Your cat doesn’t know what day of the week it is, so they won’t be willing to sleep in on the weekends. Consistency is key