A: This is one of those problems that sounds trivial until your cat starts waking you up at 3 or 4 in the morning. Cats tend to wake up earlier than people, often at or just before sunrise. Once they are awake the first thing they usually want to do is eat, so many will howl, scratch at the bedroom door, knock things over, or just walk all over their owners until they feed them. Unfortunately waking up and feeding the cat only reinforces the behavior long term.

A few different strategies can be effective. Personally I wear ear plugs and shut the bedroom door but everyone else cannot do that. One trick is to buy an automatic feeder that will drop a small amount of food at a set time early in the morning. The hope here is that the cat will begin to associate the feeder with morning feeding instead of you.

Another strategy is to feed one-fourth of the daily food in the morning and three-fourths in the evening in the hope that the cat will not be as hungry in the morning. Something else people can find successful is to try to play with the cat before bed time in the hope it will be a little less active the next morning. As a last resort we have boarded cats for two weeks to try to break them of the habit and let their owners get some sleep.

The indoor cat initiative at Ohio State has some good general information for enriching indoor cats' lives. The more they have to occupy them the less they will be fixated on food. The web link is www.vet.ohio-state.edu/indoorcat.htm.

I would like to make a correction to the tapeworm article that I wrote last month. I made it seem that people cannot contract Dipylidium caninum. In fact, that infection in people is rare but can occur. Cases are usually limited to small children accidentally ingesting fleas.