Ha! - No, the labels will be for me to read. I expect the cats to learn
their own feeding station by smell and orientation......My problem will be
having to unlock the doors manually for each cat. I wish those electronic
cat doors were cat's collar specific, but they are not, Any cat with a
magnetic collar can open any of them. So I will have to be home when any of
my four cats gets hungry.

On Jan 21, 4:52 pm, "William Graham" <w...@comcast.net> wrote:

How about feeding them in 4 different rooms. Put a cat in a room with
its food and close the door. Go back 1/2 hour later.  Remove the
remaining food from each room and dump it in the garbage disposal and
sterilize the dishes with boiling water and clorine bleach.  Let each
cat out to play but watch out they dont kiss each other.  Feed them
once a day.  Don't you think its kind of futile to try to prevent
contamination?  They've been together for a long while already.

Well, you're partly right.....The one with the FIV (if he has it) is the
feral cat, and he has never had much to do with the other three cats. The
vet says that they won't contaminate each other if just a few minutes goes
by between feeding/drinking.....IOW, the virus only lives for a few minutes
outside a cat's body, and the feral cat never eats or drinks anything like
close to the times that the other cats do. Also, the feral cat eats roasted,
chopped chicken almost exclusively, and the other cats don't much like
it.....They like canned and/or dry food. I would still like to train them to
each eat out of their own plates, and isolate those plates in separate boxes
just to be sure......Also, this would give me better control over their
weight......(they are all too fat) But they are all "outside" cats, so I
have only limited control over what they do anyway.......

A good quality canned food is *much* better for your cats.  Dry food is high
in carbs, which cats don't need.  Cats that eat dry food are more prone to
problems such as kidney problems and diabetes.  I went through exactly the
same issues that you describe when I moved my two cats from dry to canned,
and I felt really guilty about it.  However, you need to "bite the bullet"
and realize that they will adjust -- and that it will be much better for
their health.  To ease the transition, you might try letting them have a
*very small* amount of dry food and gradually reduce it to nothing.
Incidentally, it's a myth to think that cats will not overeat.  They will,
and you can avoid that by giving them a correct amount of canned food.  I
use several varieties of Wellness canned, and my twosome are thriving on it.
I give 1/3 can (5.5 oz size) of canned food per cat, twice a day, fed at
12-hour intervals or as close to that as possible.  That doesn't sound like
much, but Wellness has enough nutrition that their weight has remained
exactly stable.  Of course, the amount would need to vary if your cats are a
different size.  In my case: Duffy weighs a little more than 8 pounds, and
Holly weighs 9 pounds.

MaryL