I'm living in my apartment for 4 years with my cat and my girlfriend. I have a balcony and since I do I put my cat's litter in there, and I have always left the door to the balcony open so that my cats can go poop and can also walk around without me always opening the door.
I don't mind my cat spending time with my neighbours, on the contrary me and my girlfriend are both working all day so I'm very fine with my cat being not being alone the whole day in my apartment.
But it came to the point where my cat is spending all its time at my very next door neighbor, who is retired and lives alone. I only hear her once a day when she come to do her thing into the litter... My neighbor is feeding her and my cat is getting very fat. She keeps giving my cat some stuff like yoghurt or tuna (from human tin can) and that kind of stuff, no surprise : my cat keeps coming back to her, but it needs some special food for sterilized cat. As you can imagine, what I offer in abundance (sterilized cat food) can't beat what my neighbor has to offer... At the beginning I was fine with it, my cat is a being and I like the idea of her being free to choose whoever she wants to live with, even though it makes me sad, she can choose to live with the old granny next door.
Here's the problem, few weeks ago my cat had some stuff into it's fur, the neighbour came to my place to tell me that may be we should look at it and bring her to the vet... We did it and the vet told us that it was because of the way she was fed. So I came to my neighbour and told her that she had to stop feeding her and that we were going to feed her again. That lasts few days where my cat was curiously way more at my place (what a coincidence!)...
Few weeks later I came to my neighbour to tell her that I'd like to give her the cat for real, so that it was official and I didn't have to think about it anymore as a responsibility of mine. For instance I would be able to go on week end and vacation without thinking of the cat, and I would stop cleaning my cat's poop for nothing. But she didn't want to, she told me it was too much responsibilities and that she would stop feeding her (which she didn't).
My question is the following :
How can I get her to stop feeding my cat, without being rude since I already ask her twice. And without jailing my cat.
My question is not :
- How to feed my cat ?
- How can I be more at home ?
- Is my cat a good person ?
- Shall my GF become a housewife to keep my cat away from the granny next door ?
Answer shall not include :
- Keep your cat inside !
PS : For what I know I feel like my cat made a slave out of the neighbor, she only have to start meowing for the neighbor to do whatever she want to. What she indeed can not do with us.
PS² : I'm in a good relationship with my neighbor, not to the point where I leave her my keys, but one day I forgot my key and she allowed me to escalate her balcony to get into mine and open my door from the inside.