PetSafe Slimcat Feeder Ball – Interactive Game for Your Cat – Fill with Food and Treats – Green

Excellent solution for beggar cats, just generally an excellent product
I read about 100 reviews of this product before I finally sprung for it and bought it (I’m a grad student….$6 can be up to two meals if I try hard enough!) and all my worries have now gone out the window. I have a 4-month-old kitten, Kiki; and I have had this product for about 24 hours now.This is going to be a long review, so here’s the major thing that I was halfway expecting that did not happen: THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE BALL. By “exercise ball” I mean something like a ping-pong ball or tennis ball that kitty will play with herself like she’s trying out for the itty bitty kitty soccer league. I sort of thought it might be, due to the product advertising it as a cat weight-loss aid, but in fact most cats (especially fat cats) will bat at this with their paws and push it with their nose, not smack it across the room. It is not going to travel very far per smack and your cat will not be running around after it. I actually consider this a plus because if she were sending it across the room with every push, it might drop food where she wouldn’t find it, but instead she pushes it a little way, sniffs around it for food, then pushes it again. You can see this in the several very excellent video reviews that already exist for this product. Every other benefit of this product that it claimed/that others reported in their reviews has now been validated by my own experience.Here are the things I was worried about that did not happen:Worry #1: That Kiki would not be able to figure out how to use it. She’s a pretty smart little cat, but I was afraid she’d dislike the idea of working for her food or something, and keep going back to her bowl. Instead, I filled up this ball with 1/2 cup (=4oz., the daily suggested amount) of her dry kitten kibble (it has pretty tiny x-shaped pieces, <1-cm square and 3-mm thickness), twisted the ball so that the holes looked big enough to let a few kibbles out at once, and put it on the floor. I rattled it around quite a bit as I was filling it/carrying it so she was very interested and seemed to have figured out before I even put it down that her food was in there. As soon as it touched the ground she poked it with her nose, it moved about half a foot away from her, a couple kibbles fell out, and she was munching. I didn't even have to take away her food bowl! (That would have been hard because it's attached to her water bowl =P And by the way, she still drinks her water from the usual place.)Worry #2: That Kiki would be too smart for the ball; i.e., she would manage to get her food out too fast and still be eating it all at once. Since she got the hang of it so quickly the first time, I made the holes smaller the next time I fed her with it (basically as small as possible while still allowing kibble to come out). It's pretty difficult to get the kibble out with the holes this size actually -- I can shake the ball gently with the holes pointing downward and have nothing come out. Kiki still rolls the ball around the floor and the kibble now comes out at a rate of 1 kibble every 10-15 seconds. This does not deter her from continuing to push the ball around, and because it requires a non-trivial amount of effort to get food, she won't continue to eat after she's no longer hungry.Worry #3: That it would not be able to hold enough food to last her 1-2 days (I bought the ball primarily because I'm going on a short trip soon and she'll be all by herself for 1.5 days. For longer trips I'd ask someone to come feed her, but this seemed like a better solution for just a 2-day outing). Last night to test the capacity I filled the ball with 1/2-cup around 8pm, gave it to her, woke up the next day at 2pm (long story) and went to check on her and there was still food in the ball. WIN.Worry #4: That the ball would make a huge mess by leaving lost kibble pieces all over the house. We have hardwood floors so it wouldn't have been such a huge problem anyway, but I was concerned about her pushing the ball under the couch (she always loses her smaller balls under there) because that would be a pain to clean. In reality, two things happen: first, Kiki follows the ball closely with her nose -- if she pushes it and nothing falls out, she sniffs all around the ball before she pushes it again. She's basically a vacuum cleaner with this thing. I left her with a full ball for 18 hours and all I found afterward was 1 forgotten piece of kibble in a corner under the sink (which I brought to her and she promptly gobbled it up). Second, the fact that the ball does not travel very far effectively limits it to whichever room you put it down in. I usually leave Kiki with it in the kitchen and by the time she's done with it it's still in the kitchen. After 18 hours I found her with it about 6 feet into the living room, but there was no breadcrumb trail of kibbles behind her or anything like that =PSo, maybe all this tells you is that I worry a lot, but basically this product delivers. It limits the amount of food my cat can eat at once, stimulates her instinct to hunt for food (AND reproduces the natural reward for hunting: feeding!), reduces/eliminates begging, keeps her out of trouble by distracting her for long stretches of time, and prevents the bulging stomach I used to see after her feeding times. It's difficult for me to weigh her but just by looking at her I would guess she has already lost 0.5lbs (and she only weighs about 5lbs so this is excellent) and it is all in the belly bulge area. She seems more active too (running up and down the stairs, asking me to chase her, running after her ball toys, etc).For those inclined to criticize:I know she is a kitten and a lot of people free-feed their kittens because they are supposed to be growing at a tremendous rate for the first several months of life, but the other thing to remember is that what you expose your kitty to before the age of 6 months is what she is going to be expecting for the rest of her life. I don't want to teach her bad habits (like expecting a full bowl of food 24/7) just because I can't resist her sad-kitty-whimper face. I can always tell if she is actually hungry or if she is just begging for lack of anything better to do because if she's just bored she'll stop begging as soon as I pick up a toy.

Gracias a este producto mi gato se entretiene con la comida, y la mejor parte, come lentoDesafortunadamente mi otro gato no le gusto, no entiende como funciona

My cat likes this always playing with it hoping there is something in it keeps him busy

Produit super ! Ouverture réglable selon la taille des friandises, c’est nickel