Doc & Phoebe's Indoor Hunting Cat Feeder Review

What It Is

The Doc & Phoebe’s Indoor Hunting Cat Feeder is a bowl-free food-delivery system that is designed to encourage cats’ natural instinct to hunt small meals multiple times a day.

In plain terms: Each Doc & Phoebe kit comes with three mouse-shaped “toys,” each of which has a pick-your-size hole in it. Every morning and evening, fill the mice with either cat treats or dry food and then hide the mice around your home. Do this in lieu of bowl feeding (unless you feed wet or raw food).

Your cats’ natural instincts will kick in and they’ll “hunt” for the mice when they’re hungry, batting them around when they find them to dislodge bits of food.

Our Experience

We decided to give Doc & Phoebe’s Indoor Hunting Cat Feeder a try after our vet told us Monkey, one of our cats, needed to lose at least two pounds.

We already knew she was chubby but we’ve struggled with how to keep her weight under control. Of our six cats, she’s the only one with a weight problem so it’s always been easy to just leave two food bowls out with dry food and let them graze throughout the day.

But after Monkey’s vet visit, we knew we had to do something different. We’ve always been intrigued by the idea of a “hunting” feeder, and at a price point of less than $25 for a kit, we decided to test it out.

Each kit comes with a starter “mouse,” an oval-shaped feeder with several large holes so that food comes out of it easily. We filled the feeder with dry food and when Monkey came into the kitchen for food, we placed it in one of the feeding bowls as instructed. We left the other bowl empty.

Monkey could smell the food inside but no matter how much she nosed around it, she couldn’t get the food out. She finally took a swipe at it and food came tumbling out. She pawed it again when she’d finished the first bit of food that had fallen out.

Satisfied she was getting a good introduction to the system, we left her alone in the kitchen to play around.

A few hours later, we returned to find the starter mouse was gone. That was several weeks ago and it’s never turned up. We’ve looked everywhere.

How We Use It Now

Not sure of who got to play around with the starter mouse, we filled up two of the feeder mice and put them in the kitchen after leaving the food bowls empty for several hours. All of the cats came sniffing around. But only Monkey interacted with one, sending it rolling onto its side and spilling out a few pieces of food.

Not a single one of our other cats has figured out how to use the mice. Even when we leave the food bowl empty for half a day, only Monkey will use the mice to get to food. The others simply meow until we eventually give in and pour in a little dry food.

We’ve found, however, that if we put a little food in the bowl a few times a day to ensure the other cats get fed, Monkey does prefer to take her food from the feeder mice. We haven’t taken to hiding them yet because we’re too nervous she’ll revert to simply eating from the food bowl.

Nor have we been using it long enough to do a proper weigh-in to see if it’s helping with her weight loss, but we’re hopeful.

Pros

Doc & Phoebe’s indoor hunting cat feeder is portion controlled. You can measure out how much food you want to feed your cat and spread it out across the three mice (or use fewer if you’re combining with wet food feedings).

Cats that take to it (like Monkey) seem to enjoy the interaction. The fact that Monkey chooses to eat from one of the feeders rather than the bowl suggests she finds it more enjoyable. (She’s always been one of those cats that liked to paw her food out of the bowl.)

According to Doc & Phoebe’s marketing, the indoor hunting feeder is also supposed to help with “scarf and barf” behavior, which is something Monkey is prone to. Since starting with the feeders three weeks ago, she’s only thrown up once, and that was a hairball.

Cons

If you lose the feeder (or someone absconds with it), it’s difficult to train your cats using the actual feeder mice. And while Doc & Phoebe claims “quick learners will demonstrate the technique to the slow adopters” we have not found that to be the case.

But the biggest drawback of the indoor hunting feeder system we’ve discovered is how to make it work with multiple cats. It’s not an issue for us at the moment, since only one cat is using it, but were we to add more mice to the mix to ensure there was enough food for all our cats, there’s no way we could ensure Monkey didn’t get them all.

The Doc & Phoebe website offers tips for multiple cat households but we don’t find their tips to be particularly useful. Namely, the company suggests isolating each cat with their own feeders for a time so they can get their fare share.

Considering all of our cats are hungry at different times (unless we’ve purposely kept the bowls empty for hours), there’s no guarantee any particular cat will want to eat at the time we isolate them.

On the other hand, if we keep them hungry until we’re ready to feed them, then isolate each one for a period of time, we’re looking at hours of time needed for the feedings, as we only have two rooms for isolating. With six cats — and assuming each cat gets a minimum of 20 minutes for “hunting” — that’s at least two hours.

Overall, we believe the system is a great option for cats, but is best for a household with just one or two kitties.

Cost and Where You Can Buy It

The Doc & Phoebe indoor hunting feeder costs between $18 and $25. It can be bought on Amazon, Chewy.com, and Petco.

Making sure your cats are drinking enough is also important to their health. Check out the 10 top-rated water fountains for cats.