Feeding Flow

Rizzo-adjacent Medieval Troubador Cat

As soon as I had conducted an analysis on the feeding pattern of the two cats in my household a couple of summers ago, I began to drift toward the unconscious creation of a system of feeding them that would automatically provide each of them with a fair and equitable variety of meals. To recap, both cats share a self-feeder filled with dry chicken kibble, but for wet food, which they get in the morning and at night, it's got to be fish, and it can't be the same fish meal after meal.  To summarize the parameters, Rizzo is an older male who has been eating a half can of wet food at each meal from the start of living with us.  Blanche is a younger female who was introduced to wet food (after at least a couple of years without it) with a quarter can at each meal and never outgrew the portion. Consequently I dole out a total of 0.75 can of wet food at each meal.  

The irregularity of it inspired me to analyze the feeding pattern.  The analysis revealed that Rizzo received at least half of each can that was opened, but since he sometimes got half of a freshly opened can in the morning and the other leftover half of the same flavor at night, without my taking care to mix up the distribution a bit, Blanche in particular was at risk of being deprived of a flavor from time to time.  Unconsciously, I refined my feeding method which had been characterized by the purchase of a wide variety of seafood (had to be pâté), arranging it haphazardly in stacks and doing my best to mix it up.  I guess one day it occurred to me to stack by flavor.  I started buying a 24 pack mix of 3 flavors, Ocean Whitefish, Salmon, and Cod & Sole, which, when unloaded to fit into the cupboard, made an arrangement of  2 stacks of 4 cans each (totaling 8) per flavor, into a structure 4 cans high, 3 flavors wide and 2 stacks deep.   

Thanks to my earlier analysis I realized that 3 flavors were not enough.  Since 3 cans are consumed over 4 meals, it would still require planning, memory and decision making on my part-- you know, thought -- to ensure that Blanche got at least one meal of each flavor in the course of 12 days.  I found myself throwing in an extra flavor or two here and there just to increase the chance of variety for both of them, but at some point, I settled on one additional flavor-- Seafood Feast.  When the cupboard got bare, I would now replenish it with two 4-can stacks each (one stack in front of the other) for all four flavors, in this order, left-to-right: Seafood Feast, Ocean Whitefish, Salmon, Cod & Sole.  The stacking is a crucial preparation since new cans are always taken in front-to-back, top-to-bottom, left-to-right order, ensuring a different flavor than the last each time a new can is opened.

At some point, I observed that I had stopped thinking about what I was feeding each cat.  Instead, at each meal, I would look in the fridge to see if there was an open can of food.  If so, there would be at least a quarter, sometimes a half, and sometimes 3/4.   I would give Rizzo half a can if I could, and Blanche the quarter.  If there was less than 3/4 of a can left, I would use it up, then look at the stack of cans in the cupboard and locate the leftmost can in the top row of the forward-most array of cans, open it and feed whoever was not fed from the cold can.  The flow chart below diagrams the decision tree (click to enlarge):

I drifted into this system, but with my earlier analysis on my mind, I started observing that without my thinking about it, Blanche was getting some of each flavor at least once every 4 days.   It was time for another analysis to seek confirmation:

  

Confirmed!  Over the course of 4 days, 8 meals, 6 cans, each cat is getting a taste of each flavor.  No more than half of the meals for each cat is cold; half are fresh.  But the analysis does demonstrate that it takes 8 days (16 meals, 12 cans) to work through a whole cycle.  The situation can be thumbnailed by using upper case A through D to represent fresh cans of each of the four flavors and lower case a through d to represent cold cans of those same flavors. The sequence of flavors and the pattern of cold and fresh meals is different for each cat: 

Rizzo:        ABbcDAabCDdaBCcd

Blanche:    AaCcDdBbCcAaBbDd

Rizzo gets a day of fresh followed by a day of leftovers as he cycles through his flavors.  He gets a different flavor most of the time but every 4 meals is a leftover repeat of his last.  Blanche gets a fresh breakfast of flavor A on one day followed by leftovers of A for dinner.  The sequence of fresh to cold repeats for another flavor each of the next 7 days, but the sequence of flavors changes in the second half of the cycle.  At the end of the cycle each flavor represents 25% of each cat's diet.

What have we learned?  What is the point?  At this juncture, I am not prepared to say.  Maybe next time.

Blanche-like Zen cat (Hishida Shunso, Black Cat, 1910)