feeding neighbour's cats

[whoneedssleepanyway]

My neighbours are on holiday and asked us to feed their cats and fish whilst they are away for 10 days.

DH's parents have now asked us to come over this afternoon and stay the night and stay for lunch tomorrow, they haven't seen the DDs for ages and we have plans the next couple of weekends. They live about 45min drive away.

WIBU to ask our other neighbour to feed the cats tonight and tomorrow morning...? I know the other neighbour quite well and would be happy for her to have keys to my house. I don't think my two neighbours know each other well though (know who they are but not really to talk to...). I don't think I would have a problem if someone did this to me, but I feel a bit unsure as they have trusted us with their keys and obviously wouldn't expect us to give these to someone else.

Other alternative is we feed the cats before we leave this afternoon and then I drive back first thing to feed them and then go back to MILs for the day (prob 1.5 hour round trip so inconvenient but not the end of the world).

What do you think?

I totally appreciate that Fire. We don't have neighbours that could do that for her, we don't have a catflap into the house. Plus she sleeps on our bed with us at night and there is someone at home most of the day. Her routine would be totally wrecked.

Luckily she is fine at the cattery. She has been many times and loves the cattery lady.

And I know she isn't going to go missing.

Arrhhhh the dreaded anthropomorphism! Cats are physiologically different from humans. They are sporadic-feeding carnivores and feeding them two/three meals a day is a human construct. We can't imagine going 24 hours between meals so project that onto our animals and assume they can't either.

OP, if the wet food cat will only eat wet food then yes, best to return in the morning as it's a maggot-risk to leave that out too long. But if they were both on dry they'd be fine for 24 hours. However it's easy for me to say that about my cats, different when you've got the responsibility of someone else's!

Thanks Smells

OP my mum often feeds my cat (dry food) when I'm away and because she works shifts she sometimes has to feed the cat mornings on one day and the then in the evening the following day. This means the cat can be left for up to 36 hours with extra dry food and extra water and will be fine.

With wet food you could put an ice pack from a cool bag under the bowl and the food will keep longer.

There are cat feeding bowls on a timer on the market which allow cats to be fed at set intervals over a 2-3 day period which just use ice packs to keep the food fresh so this is essentially the same.

Not saying no food Smells, sorry if I wasn't clear - I think you and I were suggesting the same thing.

If I have to leave our cats for 24 hours they get a number of extra bowls of dry food left dotted about and an extra water bowl in case of additional thirst/one of them knocks the original over.

But it is a fact that cats cope physically a lot better than humans at being fed at much more sporadic intervals simply because that's how they're designed, so there's no need to worry about leaving a cat with food for up to 24 hours because it could cope with worse if it had to. If any of that makes sense, which it probably doesn't Definitely not advocating starvation!