My cats hate each other, but this automatic feeder is helping

Over the course of nearly a decade, my husband and I have dutifully carried out a four-times-daily ritual of feeding a pair of lovely cat siblings who hate each other. This was mostly manageable for years, but in 2024, disaster struck for my small dependents: We had a child. Suddenly, the cats were no longer our first priority. Despite our best efforts, their dry-food snack times began slipping or getting missed altogether. It was time, we decided, to turn to the pet-tech industry and hope automated feeders could deliver the attention we couldn’t.

Four machines and a few hundred dollars later, our hope has proven mostly well founded— though no technology can cure the darkness of the feline soul. And as a bonus, my travails have helped me accept being a cheap, lazy shopper in the age of optimization.

There’s a responsible process for getting home goods in the 2020s. Type “[PRODUCT CATEGORY] wirecutter” in a Google search box. Click the handful of reputable outlets that come up: the Wirecutter, of course, but also places like The Strategist. Sort through the set of features that will best suit your needs at the correct price point. Read about the unexpected pain points. Make a well-informed decision. Ideally, wait for a sale.

The less responsible process is to go to Amazon, type in a few keywords, and click “buy” on something in your budget range that doesn’t have a slew of terrible reviews. We were already dedicating hours to finding precisely the best version of every sometimes multi-hundred-dollar purchase for our baby. My brainpower was devoted to studying the tradeoffs between several subtly different categories of stroller. Guess which path we took.

The one thing we really needed to account for was our cats’ personality disorders. Our big orange man, who is either sweetly timid or remarkably charming around any human he encounters, is a swaggering bully who will gobble food until he vomits and appears to resent the fact that his tortoiseshell sister exists. Over the years, his constant looming has driven her to neurosis — no matter how often we chase him away, she eats like a hunted fugitive sneaking bites of food between glances over her shoulder. You can’t feed them too far apart or they’ll both converge on the closest dish, but they must be separated by at least one door (which crucially can only be closed after the commencement of feeding, or the tortie will see it as a sign of danger and flee), so from the get-go, those elegant two-cat feeders were out.

Beyond that, I had a vague sense that our cats would probably attack any weak point in a feeder, and that anything requiring an app was a nonstarter — so we scanned for the simplest and sturdiest thing we could dig up. We were sold on a then-roughly $90 PetSafe programmable feeder by a review promising it was raccoon-resistant, which seemed like a good indicator of quality despite the fact that our cats live entirely indoors.

Two of these feeders — simple black plastic tubs attached to an aluminum bowl — absolutely solved our basic problem. The cats started getting fed more regularly. And while I was braced for a siege situation as they found ways to get extra food out, turns out they simply aren’t that hungry or that smart.

But the feeders themselves became a point of constant, low-level irritation. They each run on four D batteries, which last a long time but basically require turning the feeders upside down when they do need replacing, an exercise in pure annoyance. The five-button interface is, even by the standards of pre-touchscreen systems, so abstruse that I’m the only one with the frustration tolerance to handle it. There’s a command to initiate immediate release of a food portion, but, as far as I can tell, only by skipping the next scheduled feeding. (To make things worse, they use a food treadmill that requires several turns to work kibble through their system if it ever runs dry.) The minimum portion is just slightly too big. Their clocks drift out of sync, creating gaps that let our orange bully finish his meal and rush over to bogart his sister’s. Perhaps most egregiously, that treadmill rumbles gratingly every time it goes off — loud enough to jolt our daughter out of her bedtime routine if feedings fall during it.

In case it’s not abundantly clear, I’ve developed an almost irrational peevishness toward these functionally perfectly adequate products. And it’s shared enough by my family that we’ve tried to improve our circumstances! Last year, we tried again with a pair of roughly $55 automatic feeders from a company called VOLUAS, one of those interchangeable-sounding all-caps Amazon storefronts, which seemed to solve essentially all our problems. The new feeders plugged into the wall with batteries for backup. Their silicone wheel design was quiet enough to not annoy us yet just loud enough for our cats to hear. The smallest portion was exactly large enough. The interface was, if not intuitive, a little less painfully arcane. It had a button to dispense extra portions instantly. It even looked more elegant: a neat rectangular prism with a translucent top for checking the quantity of food still in it, instead of something that looked a bit like a garbage bin.

This would all be fantastic if we hadn’t left them in storage for a while, some food still in them, while traveling. We returned to two messy piles of mouse-chewed silicone and two inoperable feeding wheels. Back to the sturdy but unloved PetSafes we went.

For several months now, my husband has been suggesting we simply order more of the new feeders. I keep insisting that the ones we have still work — all I’ve got to do is, somehow, fix this one part! The VOLUAS website has an email address for support, and I keep meaning to ask about a replacement for those little silicon wheels. But my situation is just tenable enough that I keep putting it off. The old feeders work… fine, and may well last the rest of my cats’ lifetimes. The ones I like better are so close to functional it feels wasteful to buy replacements. I’m so accustomed to cat feeder purgatory I’ve almost forgotten paradise.

I imagine my cats feel similarly resigned, to both my diminished free time for cuddling and to each other. After two years, the charming orange man has developed a rapport with our toddler, who’s slowly learning to pet his fur the right direction. Our tortie is still terrified of her, but has put faith in impregnable fortresses like Exact Center of Under the Bed and Chair Turned Toward the Wall, where she’s a little harder to spot. I’m pretty sure they will always wish my husband and I would divorce and split up custody to free them of each other’s company forever, but at least The Robot, as we’ve dubbed our system, gives them consistent snacks.

Meanwhile, I can take solace in one fact: That review was absolutely accurate, because not a single raccoon has gotten in these things.