Cat slow feeder

Is your cat too fat? Do they scarf food down too fast and then vomit it up and try to eat it again? Would you like them to get a little tougher? That was my situation, so I dived into the world of slow-feeders. They are quite recommended by professionals.

Features:

• Cat less lazy
• Cat very cute when obtaining food (much more so than when eating out of a dish)
• Cat cannot scarf down food (to vomit later) because obtaining food is slower
• Refill less than once a week per container per cat
• Easily see how much kibble is left

It's been a journey of several parts, both for me and our two cats. I started out with some toilet paper tubes with pinched in ends, which introduced the housecats to this foreign concept of “working for food.” Eventually, I made this design but with cardboard held in with hot glue. Now, after several months, the cardboard started failing, and I - and the cats - liked this slow feeder design enough to settle in. So I learned CAD and modeled and printed this. No glue required on the inside.

You'll need:

• A yogurt-like container (but clear)
• Xacto knife, hot glue, lighter
• Modify the onshape file to have dimensions for your container, export as 3mf, and print it
• Love for your cat

Recommendations:

• Use clear containers, so it's easy to tell how much food is left. Yogurt containers might work for your initial prototyping though.
• Exacto knives are good to make the couple holes in the container. Then I used a lighter to melt the plastic a bit so it rounded itself off - the kitties like to stick their tongues in the holes, so don't leave them sharp.
• Hot glue on the outside. A smooth round plastic container is hard for a cat to manipulate. I put ribs along the length, and also a ring around the lid for traction. To help them stick, try to make your glue lines short rather than tall - not bumping out far from the container surface.
• The dimensions on the included 3mf file are quite unlikely to be the dimensions you need. Conveniently, I made the onshape file parametric - on the right side there's a “variable table” you can pull up to change numbers. Then right click the tab on the bottom to “export” it, and print! I recommend printing a fast test version once you think you have about the right parameters from measuring your container, before printing a good solid one.
• Introduce new slow feeders slowly. Try doing it alongside the normal food, and fill them with treats and catnip. One of my cats got the hang very quickly, but the less food motivated cat took weeks of encouragement to learn it. Don't give up! This was the most time consuming part of the journey for me, but it's a great excuse to hang out with the cat. Slowly introduce more mundane food into the mix until there's no more treats/catnip inside. Note that cats will always choose the easy food option, so they'll always gravitate toward food bowls - which you'll have to take away at some point, and they will protest! But survive.

Inspiration from http://foodpuzzlesforcats.com/nashtrashkitty-instagram-gets-diy and thanks to my cousin for all the cat resources and knowledge!

The attached file here has parameters tuned to the specific egg drop soup takeout containers we had lying around. I suspect that you will not have the same! → onshape model here.