The food bowl is probably the wrong shape

Here is a thing you can check in ten seconds. Look at your cat's bowl after a meal. If there is a ring of food left around the outside and a clean patch in the middle, the bowl is too deep and too narrow. Whiskers are not hair. They sit in follicles packed with nerve endings and they map the space around a cat's head. Pressed against the sides of a bowl, meal after meal, that is a constant low-grade signal the cat would rather not have. So it eats the easy middle, gives up, and walks off. The owner reads that as a cat being difficult about food, and the next bag of food gets blamed. The fix costs nothing: a wide, flat, shallow dish, wide enough that nothing touches the sides. A dinner plate works. Same for water, and a cat that suddenly drinks more from a wide bowl was probably not drinking enough from the narrow one. This is not true of every cat and it is not a diagnosis. A cat that stops eating, or eats and loses weight anyway, has something else going on and the bowl is a distraction. Call us for that one.