Making cat food less attractive to baby - ideas please!

[stargazer1]

Hi all,

Our ten-month old is now crawling and - as expected - finds nothing more fascinating than the cats' food bowl. After several foiled attempts she finally managed to get her hand in it yesterday and was seconds away from eating it before nasty Mummy came and spoiled her fun.

Does anyone have any bright ideas about lidded bowls etc? Was thinking those ones that operate on a timer might be a good idea if it's possible for me to over-ride the timer but perhaps not so easy for baby to! Might also be useful in summer when food tends to sit around all day going off and attracting flies.

We're quite limited for space so moving the feeding bowls to a higher spot out of reach isn't really an option.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated - thanks!

Get an auto feeder, you can override them.

My cat pulls the lid up and pulls the tray out with his teeth so he might override it for you.

Work out the route your baby usually takes to get to the catfood and litter it with other forbidden items such as mobile phones, the only set of car keys, open kitchen cupboards full of breakable things, glue and indelible pens.

I guarantee the cat food will remain untouched

Move the bowls somewhere the baby doesn't go much, a hallway might work?

Only have them out when the cats ate eating (it means there's less time for him to get at them)

When I had a dog I bought an extra litter tray, the kind with a lid and a door, to put the cat food bowls in - that could work quite well?

Two things:

Switch to dried food, not so gross if DC does have a chomp plus does not attract flies.

Train cat to eat at certain times, and pick bowl up in interim. Easier to train cat than DC in my experience.

Thanks everybody. Unfortunately the cats are 'grazers' so we tend to have the food bowls out all day, probably not a good idea in hindsight. Plus they're a bit 'special needs' so not really v trainable!!

Will definitely give the auto-feeder a go though.