Using a Pet Sitter with Canned Food--How Does This Work?

I'm transitioning to a fully wet food diet for my young kitty. My senior kitty has already made the switch. I'm going on a trip soon and for various reasons, the senior kitty is coming with us and the young kitty is staying home and going to be taken care of by one of my neighbors. 

When you use wet food with an intermittent caregiver, what do you tell them to do? Is it a safe bet to have the pet sitter just give the cat a 3 oz can in the morning and a 3 oz can in the evening? If the kitty leaves uneaten food, is he going to get food poisoning? Or do you have your sitter sit there and wait until the kitty's done eating?

Thanks for any input, this is pretty new to me.

You might want to invest in an automatic wet food feeder that keeps things cold. I'm not sure if the eaten food gets tucked away right after a certain time or not. Hopefully someone can answer that!

Is your kitty a grazer? I know this is bad practice, but before I go to sleep, I feed 3oz of wet food to my cat and he'll eat about half of it and then somewhere in the middle of the night, he'll finish it off (maybe an hour or so after the initial feeding). Sometimes, he won't finish it at all and the next morning, he'll turn his nose at the food. 

So depending on your cat, you might not need to have your sitter watch the cat eat. 

Edit: if you choose to get an automatic wet food feeder, it might be a hassle for your sitter to set up every morning. That's something to think about!

When I had a senior cat that eating wet food only 2x daily my cat sitter would feed the cat and wait for him to finish eating.  I also am in a multi-cat household.  The only place Claude would eat his wet food on my coffee table.  Someone had to watch him eat so my other cats would not steal his food.  It was different for me because my cat sitter is a really good friend who also has her own cats.  She would come by and actually hang out and visit with my cats. She treated my cats as family.  Mycats are very comfortable around her and treat her like they do us.  I have one cat that never lets anyone else near her.  My cat sitter knows her hiding spots and can find her to check on her.

mingking said:

 
You might want to invest in an automatic wet food feeder that keeps things cold. I'm not sure if the eaten food gets tucked away right after a certain time or not. Hopefully someone can answer that!

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It depends on the type. Round feeders such as this one and this one rotate so a compartment is inaccessible once the tray rotates to the next compartment. Feeders with flip open doors like this one just stay open so the food is always accessible.

Crazy4Strays said:

 
When you use wet food with an intermittent caregiver, what do you tell them to do? Is it a safe bet to have the pet sitter just give the cat a 3 oz can in the morning and a 3 oz can in the evening? If the kitty leaves uneaten food, is he going to get food poisoning? Or do you have your sitter sit there and wait until the kitty's done eating?

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If you use a programmable feeder, show the pet sitter how to use it. With programmable digital feeders you will have the meal times programmed in, so all the pet sitter really needs to do is fill however many compartments as you specify with food, set the tray onto the feeder rotating mechanism correctly, and close the lid. What I do to check if the tray is in correctly is to set the tray on the mechanism with an empty compartment in the opening and press the button to advance to the next compartment which for me would be another empty compartment (I only needed two of the five compartments). Not all feeders have such a button. Rotating feeders rotate clockwise so if only a few of the comaprtments are used, the compartments need to be filled so that your cat will have access to the food as the tray rotates, not empty compartments.

For the feeders with manual timers, show the pet sitter how to set the time with the dial. The timer is usually in 2 hour increments.

Canned food left out all day whether in a feeder or in a bowl is fine to eat hours later. Your cat will not get sick from it. At the end of the day all uneaten food should be thrown away and the bowl or feeder tray washed. If your kitten is shy around strangers, he may not eat while the pet sitter is there.

Crazy4Strays said:

 
When you use wet food with an intermittent caregiver, what do you tell them to do? Is it a safe bet to have the pet sitter just give the cat a 3 oz can in the morning and a 3 oz can in the evening? If the kitty leaves uneaten food, is he going to get food poisoning? Or do you have your sitter sit there and wait until the kitty's done eating?

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I've been feeding my cat the EVO cat/kitten wet food (now discontinued!), which comes in a 13.2 oz can. I tell the pet sitter to feed her 1/5 of a can per visit and mix it with a little bit of water. My cat gets her other meal from her automatic feeder. I fill it with kibble before I leave, and I ask the pet sitter to refill the compartments as needed.

My cat's really food motivated, so she never leaves uneaten food. I know my sitter waits around for her to finish eating, but she doesn't really need to since my cat always eats everything.

Mogli never leaves uneaten wet food, but his predecessor would, so our pet sitter would simply throw out the leftovers during her next visit.

I work at a shelter, and in my experience the vast majority of cats simply won't eat whatever they haven't finished in about an hour. Food that's been down a couple of hours shouldn't make her sick as long as it's not too hot inside. If your cat is being fed inside, maggots shouldn't be a problem, either

We have a sitter com twice a day to feed.  I don't really know what was happening earlier in the year, but I know now that we've got the food amounts AND the behavior dialed in.  They finish their meals in one sitting at this point, and presumably will do the same with the sitter, although our being gone may throw one of them off, we'll see soon on an upcoming trip.  

Depending upon what the pet sitter's standard is for length of visit, they may be able to stay long enough to see that the food all gets eaten, but if not I wouldn't worry about it.  Some cats are grazers, and some may be put off routine by the disruption of you being gone and thus eat differently than when you are home.   We used to leave bowls out with leftover food until the next feeding 12 hours later, and it's not a problem.  Some cats will pick at that food hours later and some will not, but it shouldn't be a safety concern at all in terms of the cat getting ill from the food.

Since this is one of your neighbors, I suppose it isn't a big concern of a set amount of time per visit.  I would see how it goes.  Perhaps the neighbor can watch what happens and report back and you can decide together if something needs to change along the way.  If the neighbor leaves with food still remaining, and then your cat doesn't finish it all, it might be worth seeing if the cat will finish it all if the neighbor stays longer (assuming your neighbor is agreeable to this).  

One good thing is it's a lot less complicated with a single cat.  With two, I'm always concerned that one will decide not to eat and then the other will eat more than her fair share.  Heh.

Update: So the weekend that I was going away in August, we were still transitioning off the kibble, so I ended up leaving dry grain free kibble for my young cat and taking the old cat with us.

Sometime in September we used up the rest of the kibble and never purchased any more.

My young cat was initially picky and a grazer. After awhile though, much to my delight, he learned to eat a wide variety of canned foods and eat 3 oz at a time.

We didn't go out of town for awhile, so for a few months, pet sitting wasn't an issue.

I finally made the leap to doing all canned food with a pet sitter when we went away overnight this weekend.

I decided for simplicity's sake, that I didn't want the pet sitter to have to measure food or try to calculate portion sizes. So I purchased a case of Fancy Feast chicken and liver classic.

I cleaned all the bowls, scooped the litter boxes, and put out fresh water before leaving.

So the teenage boy who was coming over just had to open one can of FF per cat per meal and scoop boxes. 3 oz is a great portion size for my kitties.

The pet sitter came by last night and again this morning, giving 3 oz per cat each time.
I came home the next day to happy contented kitties and no leftovers.

I think that I will always purchase 3 oz cans for pet sitters, to keep pet sitting simple.

Crazy4Strays said:

Update: So the weekend that I was going away in August, we were still transitioning off the kibble, so I ended up leaving dry grain free kibble for my young cat and taking the old cat with us.

Sometime in September we used up the rest of the kibble and never purchased any more.

My young cat was initially picky and a grazer. After awhile though, much to my delight, he learned to eat a wide variety of canned foods and eat 3 oz at a time.

We didn't go out of town for awhile, so for a few months, pet sitting wasn't an issue.

I finally made the leap to doing all canned food with a pet sitter when we went away overnight this weekend.

I decided for simplicity's sake, that I didn't want the pet sitter to have to measure food or try to calculate portion sizes. So I purchased a case of Fancy Feast chicken and liver classic.

I cleaned all the bowls, scooped the litter boxes, and put out fresh water before leaving.

So the teenage boy who was coming over just had to open one can of FF per cat per meal and scoop boxes. 3 oz is a great portion size for my kitties.

The pet sitter came by last night and again this morning, giving 3 oz per cat each time.
I came home the next day to happy contented kitties and no leftovers.

I think that I will always purchase 3 oz cans for pet sitters, to keep pet sitting simple.

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I bought a set of the cheap plastic shoebox type containers. Marked one for each day we were gone and put the food, treats anything needed in them. Along with an insane list of detailed instructions on how to properly care for my cats. I also had him text me after a visit to give a quick update on the cats. I also left disposable bowls. Along with ' special food' should it appear one or more of the cats wasn't eating. 3 ounce cans work best.

After reading some of the horror stories of pet sitters that don't do their job or life circumstances making it impossible to fulfill their duty we always leave out a huge bowl of dry and put a pasta pot in the sink an fill it with water.