Kitten Eats My Older Cat's Food

[purrpurr]

I have had my 10 week old male kitten for about 2 weeks now. He keeps on trying to eat the food from my 5 year old female resident cat's bowl.
I feed them at the same time in their own bowls in different places. They both get dry food during the day and wet food at night, with kitten getting kitten food.
If I place the kitten in front of his food bowl, he will eat a bit from there (sometimes he eats lots, other times a little), then he would go over to my cats bowl and eat her food instead. Even when I put some of the adult dry cat food in his bowl, he still goes over to her bowl to eat. Sometimes I notice as he's walking away from his bowl, he moves his paw over the floor like cats do when trying to cover up something.
Once as my cat was about to eat, I caught my kitten shoving himself in front off my cat to eat her food. He straight up runs back to her bowl if I move him to another part of the apartment.
Does anyone have any ideas on why my kitten keeps wanting to eat food from my older cats bowl? And anything I can do to stop it?

 

[RufusGizmo]

feed them in separate rooms for a little while. I still have to feed my kittens away from my older guys after almost a year. did you get him from the wild? sometimes kittens need to learn that they are actually going to get fed on a regular basis, before they want to scarf down everything.

 

[aliceneko]

I agree that feeding them separately seems like the best solution. My two had a period where they would take each other's food so we fed Fudge in the kitchen and Toffee in the garden for a little while and it seemed to work as they haven't taken each other's food for a while now. I also agree that your cat's background might be a factor - Toffee and Fudge are former semi-ferals so it was most likely in their nature to steal any food they could find as they didn't know when they were going to get their next meal (they used to live in a cat colony in an abandoned building).

 

[duncanmac]

Why not feed them together instead. Not from a communal bowl, but put the bowls relatively close together. This way when the kitten migrates to the other bowl, the older cat can switch too.

My boys swap bowls quite a lot and do so in relative peace.

 

[purrpurr]

I got the kitten from a rescue organization and they also had about 5 other kittens.

My adult cat still is not super tolerant of the kitten, so she does not like to eat when he's around. I do put their bowls in separate rooms that are next to each other and close the door, but my older cat likes to take her time by eating dinner some of her food and then eating the rest later. So her food is left out for kitten to snag. I keep cat and kitten in those separate rooms with dry food while I'm at work.

I guess I'll continue feeding them in different room while trying to keep kitten away from my cats bowl until he learns there's a feeding schedule.