Such sad cats

[MaggieTheCat]

So, my husband and I have two cats, a boy and a girl. I've posted about them in the past. They're great cats and we love them and for the most part they're pretty well-behaved. But lately they have been crying and crying and crying around meal-times and it's getting very annoying.

The girl cat has kidney disease, and as such, she is on a special diet of a certain brand of canned food. The boy cat eats adult light dry food since he was overweight. The boy cat LOVES the girl cat's canned food. He'll do anything to have some of it. So we end up separating them when we feed them, or else the boy cat would hog the girl's canned food and she wouldn't get her proper dosage. We feed them twice a day, once in the morning when we get up, usually between 6:30-7:00, and once in the evening between 7:30-8:00. We also usually leave the dry food out until it's gone; the boy cat refuses to eat much until we let the girl out of her room so we just leave his food out so he munch whenever he wants.

Lately, the girl cat has started waking us up between 5:30-6:00 every morning begging for food. She will climb on top of us, paw at the bed/blankets (thankfully she's declawed) and meow constantly. If we kick her out of the room, she just sits outside the door and yowls, which is just as bad and sometimes worse than if she's in the room.

The boy, on the other hand, will sit outside the room that we stick the girl in when she eats and do the same thing while the girl is eating. He'll yowl constantly until we open the door to let the girl out. We don't let him have any of her food (mostly because it's expensive); if she doesn't finish her full serving, we pick it up and stick it in the fridge.

Any suggestions on how to stop a cat from yowling so much?

[BookstoreEscapee]

No, but she sounds like my boy cat with the yowling outside the bedroom. He just tries (and sometimes succeeds) to open the door, and you hear the handle thwanging over and over. He doesn't want food, though (they have dry food out all the time); he just doesn't like that he's been shut out of the room.

[BookstoreEscapee]

How to stop a cat from yowling so much? Spray bottle filled with water. Unless the kitty LIKES water (like my sister's does), then a short blast of the canned air will do ya. Hell, my cat flinches when I open a bottle of soda, so it works!

Spray bottle worked on my cats for a while, until boy started challenging the bottle.

[Aethian]

Can you trick him into giving him some sort of food that looks like hers? Or could always do the thing I do with my dogs, food goes down for twenty minuets...if in that time they don't eat it goes back into the container. They have learned to eat in that amount of time.