My cat is almost 5 years old. She is the type to overeat to obesity, probably because she was abandoned at ~1yr by her previous owner. For half her life my partner and I have been feeding her like clockwork 3 times a day, minus all of 2-3 weeks of vacations where our roommate took over.
I have to exert a constant effort to maintain our bedroom door and the rubber that I lined on the jamb to prevent her from rattling the door at 5am to ask for food - the paint is a lost cause. We have a white noise machine. We ignore her cries for food. We ignore her pawing things off our desks. We have a system to keep track of food we give her so she can't "trick" the other person. She knows exactly when we feed her (the meows get cranked up a notch about an hour before food time) but despite not giving in, she keeps acting like meowing at us is going to go anywhere.
No luck. And we know we're not underfeeding her - she's getting the calories appropriate for her (currently normal) weight, is being fed wet food, has fresh water, lots of attention and toys, all that stuff.
Unfortunately we have to give this up because we've got a baby on the way, and it's just so frustrating to lose 2+ years of effort put into having her not weigh 18lbs...
Even though we kept a tight feeding schedule, our cats used to start meowing and pestering us an hour before dinner time. Now, they just sit quietly and stare at the automatic feeder until it dispenses their food.
All the kitty guides on webbernets say, "be firm and don't give into kitty's demands." Whereas I read on the ASPCA website, "buy an automated feeder."
Guess which worked? Happy automated cat feeder owner, and our cat mostly doesn't drive me insane around feeding times.
For reference, I also own this model of cat feeder and have not needed to harden, though I do have it wedged up next to a wall to lessen risk of tipping.
It was certainly this way with my cat. I really regret the months of different punishments we tried on him to discourage his bad behaviors as it changed his personality.
We turn it on when we close the door at night. The cats haven't figured out when it's on or off, but they have figured out if the door is open, they can run really fast past it and it won't get them.
It did stop the door scratching, but now the door scratching has turned to 5am serenades.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/PetSafe-KIT19001-SSScat/dp/B000RIA95G
This seems to have worked so far to avoid the cat bothering us in the morning.
He's a very big strong boy now (20ish pounds) and is just very happy.
My thinking was that he's a cat and what's the point of a cat being unhappy for his whole life.
We really had to push the weight loss because it was clear she wasn't meant to be so big. Her asthma was significantly worse when she weighed more (multiple attacks a week vs now I don't even remember the last one within the past year), and there were huge patches of her body covered in greasy dandruff because she couldn't groom herself. It would have eventually led to a lot of problems. Better for us to put up with her antics than to watch a painful death, really.
Cats are awesome, especially at finding our weaknesses...
So he would surely wake us up if fed at 7:00am, so one solution is to feed at night. This results in a cat constantly underfoot begging for food for two hours, which is literally a tripping hazard.
The solution is to feed him from a machine and to make sure he never sees us touching the machine. Now, at feeding time he sits by the machine and stares at it, waiting for it to open.
> This results in a cat constantly underfoot begging for food
> for two hours, which is literally a tripping hazard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)#Exti...
He'll maybe learn to give up. Or he's like one of our cats where we have to install a baby gate on the outside of the closed door to our bedroom to make it difficult for him to bang on the door all night/morning so that we can sleep.
She is way too old to give a fuck anymore and there is nothing to indicate she will ever change at her age. Just like a human.
She is evil. If her dinner is felt to be sub par she goes into the sleeping child and claws the kid. She has come very close to a final vet visit with this behaviour.
Animals are complex machines, just as people are. They are mirroring a lot of our traits, as anger or ignorance.
As a final resort, give the cat up by letting someone adopt it. That actually works! Good luck!
Operant conditioning.
Watch out though for that extra-hard last ditch effort he will put out before giving up. Stay strong.