Why do cats eat
so much at night?

The full narration of the video.

Four-thirty in the morning, a soft paw lands on your face. You open your eyes. The cat is sitting by your pillow. The bowl is already empty. Cat owners often say it: cats are night animals, and they eat the most at midnight.

So let's rewind from this empty bowl and see when, exactly, it ate tonight. Researchers in Britain gave one hundred thirty-four pet cats a bowl that weighs itself. Every bite, when it happened and how much, all written down.

Over a day, a single cat ate six or seven meals. Each one was tiny, twenty to forty calories, about the size of one small mouse. That's no coincidence. A cat's wild ancestors lived on mice. About ten a day, catch one, eat one.

So a cat's stomach is built for many small meals. So where do those meals fall in the day? Take a guess: is it around midnight? It's the opposite. Midnight is when cats eat the least.

Cat meals come in two rush hours: one around dawn, one around dusk. Think of a market. Before sunrise, the morning market opens; in the evening, the night market opens. At noon and at midnight, the stalls close, and the cat is mostly asleep.

Why those two? At dawn and dusk, the light gets dim. A cat needs only a sixth of the light we do to see clearly, so that's when it hunts. Animals that are busiest at dawn and dusk are called crepuscular.

Then why does it feel like your cat eats in the middle of the night? Because its morning market opens while you're in your deepest sleep. In summer, the sky starts to brighten a little after four, and the cat's stomach opens for business.

If the bowl is empty, it goes to the only one in the house who can fill it: you. Get up and feed it once, and it remembers: a paw on your face means breakfast. So it's not that cats eat more at midnight; their mealtime just runs into your sleep.

Want a full night's sleep? Try three things. One, split the day's food into a few small portions, instead of filling the bowl once in the morning. Two, play with a wand toy for ten minutes before bed, then give the last small portion. Tired and full, it settles down more easily.

Three, use a timed feeder to drop a small portion before dawn. It goes to the bowl, not to you. When it paws at you, stay in bed, or it learns the trick all over again. One more thing to watch: if an older cat suddenly eats a lot more but gets thinner, take it to the vet for a check.

Try it tonight, and tell us tomorrow: what time did your cat wake you up?