Recommend me a robust dry food dispenser with portion control

[Galliano]

We adopted a stray in the summer. He’s a really big cat who weighs 6kg but I do have vet’s assurance he is not overweight. He is still the same weight as when he moved in. Previously in his living on the streets life he was fed outside but he’s still very anxious about food availability. We feed him small portions often and he eats whatever you give him within seconds. Recently a misunderstanding led to 3 of us feeding him at the same meal time and he polished off 3 meals within 10 minutes.

I really need to go back to the office a bit so need to put something in place so he can get his meals through the day. He eats a mixture of wet and dry food, but it’s primarily dry food he would eat when I was out. He’s not very bright, but is powerful, so I need something that can dispense a number of small portions, doesn’t just use gravity to provide a constant supply and can’t be broken into by brute force.

Any recommendations?

Would a slow feeder help? Dry food would be available all the time, but he would have to make an effort to get it. This would both slow him down and give him something interesting to do. One of these, for example.
Though with some designs he might just learn to bash the thing or turn it over! We have the Digger for our 6kg boy, who used to inhale dry food and beg for more when we got him.

We also tried this one, but dcat was so unimpressed by it that he barely ate anything, just nagged us instead. A more food-motivated (rather than just greedy) cat might like it. It's heavy and solid, and I think impossible for a cat to overturn.

You might also find one of these useful

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08HVJ92D5/ref=cmswwrcppapiglttfabcM3YS4HCJWJPQV56V0QP3??encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks - we have made a whiteboard tracker for food since the 3 dinners incident!

I’ve tried ordering the digger on the catit link to slow him down when I am in. And something called the cat mate c500 to stagger his food if I’m at work because I’m still not confident he wouldn’t get through a days way of food in the first 30 mins after I left instead of the first 30 seconds! I just hope he can manage not always having the same routine.

I think I also need to change what he eats. Currently he has gourmet perle wet food and iams dry food as these were what our local Tesco express had when he moved in. I do wonder if other more specialist brands might satisfy him better but every time I look at the variety I get daunted!

Recently a misunderstanding led to 3 of us feeding him at the same meal time and he polished off 3 meals within 10 minutes I wonder how many times he's caused this "misunderstanding" to occur by doing the 'I'm hungry, I'm starving, feed me or I'll die' routine?

Ha ha I think he might have got away with it once or twice. In this case my cleaner fed him because he seemed hungry, then DH messaged me asking if I could feed him as he was on a work call so I did, but because I didn’t actually answer the message DH assumed I hadn’t seen it and nipped off the call for a minute to feed him! Normally we were quite organised to ensure no doubling up - though I suspect he may have done well on cleaning days as didn’t realise the cleaner would consider feeding him!

There are six of us in this house. By week 2 of lockdown DCat had perfected his starvation face and was averaging 6 pouches per meal.