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Does this sound familiar? You feed your cat and see them take the food out of the bowl to eat it. Maybe your pet takes the food into another room or eats it off the floor next to their bowl. Why on earth do felines do this?
There are a few reasons your cat takes food out of their bowl to eat, including their instincts and learned behavior, and none of them involve simply trying to create the biggest mess possible. Here are the four reasons your kitty removes their food from the bowl to eat!
The 4 Common Reasons Cats Take Food Out of Their Bowl to Eat
1. Feline Instinct to Play With Prey
Our domestic felines are ancestors of big wild cats, and as such, they’ve retained many wild instincts. So, it might be that by removing food from the bowl, your kitty is simply following those instincts—in particular, hunting their prey.
You may have seen a video of a leopard or ocelot making a kill and playing or pawing their food. This behavior can also be an attempt to guard their prey, more common in multi-cat households (even if your cats get along), but it can occur in single-cat homes, too.
2. Learned Behavior
Removing food from the food bowl may be a behavior your cat learned as a kitten. If a litter has several kittens, they compete with each other for food (whether from their mother or later as they move to solids). As they become more competitive, some cats will take their meals to another room away from the others. Like most behaviors, this snatch-and-run behavior can become ingrained so that your pet still needs to do it even if no one else is around.
3. Whisker Fatigue
You might be unfamiliar with the term “whisker fatigue,” so what is it? Your feline’s whiskers have receptors that receive sensory information via vibrations. For example, whiskers give your cat a better idea of the environment around them. If their food bowl is too deep and narrow, it can irritate their whiskers when they eat.
This constant brushing up against a food bowl with their very sensitive whiskers can sometimes cause stress to your pet. When whisker fatigue occurs, your pet will often take food from their bowl to eat elsewhere or even tip the entire food bowl over to avoid this sensation.
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4. Dislike of Bowl Placement
Finally, your favorite feline could simply dislike where the food bowl is situated. If the food and water bowls are near the litterbox, most cats will drag some of the food away or even refuse to eat. Your kitty can also be displeased by the food bowl being too loud appliances, or high-traffic areas.
How to Remedy the Behavior
Cats prefer to eat alone. If your cat is trying to guard food from other cats, whether because of instincts or learned behavior, you can arrange all your pets’ food bowls so they aren’t situated near each other to remedy the situation. You might be able to place the bowls far apart, but if your cat still doesn’t eat from the bowl, you’ll likely need to feed them in a different room than the other animals.
If whisker fatigue is the issue, you can buy a wide, shallow bowl that doesn’t contact their whiskers.
Most cats don’t like to eat in noisy areas, and it’s best to place the bowls in a quiet area away from loud appliances and electronics.
Final Thoughts
Having your favorite feline constantly taking food out of their bowl to eat can be annoying (purely because of the mess). It may be due to their instincts, learned behavior, whisker fatigue, or displeasure with where the food bowl has been placed.
In most cases, the issue is relatively easy to remedy, but you might have more trouble if the cause is related to a learned behavior. Still, you can make your pet’s eating experience as pleasurable as possible to avoid future problems.
Featured Image Credit: Elena Spac, Shutterstock
