Some of you may remember how I dragged Stokie out from under a porch, spent several hundred dollars on him (I believe we’re up to about 700, not counting prescription food) and found myself unable to give him away. Well, Stokie has flourished. He’s lost that foxy gaunt look, glossied up his fur, learned to get along with the other cats… and grew a sea urchin belly.
He was 6 pounds when I brought him into the vet the first time, and now he’s about 12. Somewhere in the middle there was his ideal weight, I think. The thing is, he’s already fed seperately - he’s on Hill’s Science Diet z/d, for his poop issues, and following the directions on the back of the bag he gets half a cup a day - a quarter in the morning and a quarter at night. It seriously looks like we starve the cat when you see that in the bowl! He doesn’t get any extra food - the other cats learned quickly that they had to eat in a hurry so when Stokie’s let out he doesn’t finish their dinners for them. He LOVES to eat - not surprising, given that for the first year and a half of his life he was feral.
We don’t feed them people food on purpose (although sometimes they steal - most impressively Edison once took a whole chicken breast off my boyfriend’s plate) but we try to keep everything locked up that they might get into. Every so often I’ll give them a raw chicken scrap, but that’s it.
He’s also very active - they’re always running around and wrestling and stuff. It seems like he gets plenty of exercise. However, in the last several months I have noticed him taking on a rather… round profile, particularly from above.
I’m going to ask the vet her opinion, but I hoped you guys might have some experiences to share or something - he’s already on a restricted, special diet, of which he doesn’t get much. I guess I can always reduce what he gets, but it seems like he’s just not overeating at all. He exercises himself regularly. He’s the very picture of health. And yet, he’s passing pleasingly plump on the way to Fattles McCattleson, and we already have one of those cats. (The vet says Edison’s just naturally that shape and as long as he’s getting exercise we shouldn’t worry about him. Edison, however, has a bigger frame than Stokie.)
I’ve got a lot of pets and two of them are overweight…probably just the genes or something. Anyway, my philosophy is let em’ eat. Who cares if they’re fat? It’s not like either of my chubby pets is going for a career in modeling or anything. The vet says this might make them die sooner than they would if they were lean, but so what? They might not live to be 20, but they’ll die happy. I’m all for quality over quantity anyway.
We had a cat (the late Rennie, may she RIP) that weighed over 20 pounds for most of her life. We fed her special food, took her to the vet for thyroid tests and diabetes tests, limited her food, exercised her, and nothing took the weight off. Our vet told us not to worry about it, that she was just able to conserve energy better than most cats. She had a good long life as a fat and happy cat.
Has Stokie been tested for thyroid trouble, diabetes, and worms? If so, then I think you’ve done all you can and might just need to resign yourself to having a rotund, jovial cat.
absolutely!
a fat cat is a happy cat…and a happy cat makes for a happy owner.(and a warmer lap )
If a human friend dies at age 65 instead of 85, you feel terrible. If a feline friend dies at age13 instead of 17, you get a new cat.
The first ingedient in that food is rice. Cats are carnivores. They don’t need grains, they can’t digest them properly, and that can cause weight gain. You may wish to look into Wysong (wysong.net), which offers prescription foods without grains.
Well, he’s on that food as a “hell, let’s try it” solution to his incredibly disgusting poo. We tried several courses of several antibiotics, deworming, etc., etc., etc. Tried the special food and it works. I’m pretty reluctant to mess with success, as it were. (Until you’ve seen a puddle of cat poo that looks like chocolate pudding that refused to set, you ain’t seen nothin’.)
My guess is that you might be feeding him a little more than he needs. If I remember right, the recommended feeding for a 10lb cat would be somewhere between 3/8-1/2 cup, correct?
We’re giving our cats just under 3/8 cup a day - 1/8 cup in the morning and again in the evening, plus a smallish amount (a little more than 1/16 cup, I guess?) at night before we go to bed.
It seems like a paltry amount of food when you look at the bowl, I’ll admit, and there was a bit of an adjustment period where they whined about it, but they’ve adapted well to this routine. Obviously, every cat will be somewhat different and every food will work a little differently, but in our case this portion has been perfect for both the normal cat whose metabolism leans towards chubby, and the diabetic cat whose metablism leans towards very very skinny.
He’s eating somewhere else too - possibly several elses. Most cat owners don’t realise that their animals hunt and scrouge while they’re away. There’s not much you can do about this, as a feral he’s conditioned to eat all he can as often as he can. You can try putting a disk on his collar that says something like “overweight and on a diet, please don’t feed me”, which will help if there are other houses that think he’s their cat too.
Do you let him go outside? My family’s current cat eats not only the dry food we give him but also the wet food our neighbor gives him (they think the family starves him when I’m not there to see it :rolleyes:.)
Have you considered feeding the z/d canned instead of the dry? Try a can a day, 1/2 in the morning and 1/2 at night. If he’s already getting meal-fed separately from the others it shouldn’t be too much of an adjustment. It’s gross, the consistency of flan, but less carbohydrates than the kibble. It’s the carbs that cause the weight gain.
I recently switched to all canned food for my three (about 6 months ago) because one had become chubby and was diagnosed with diabetes last October. I really resisted switching to canned food and opted for m/d kibble while using insulin. Once I switched to canned, she needed less and less insulin and has now been in remission for 2 months. I think she’d still be diabetic if I hadn’t switched to all canned food.
Might be worth a try. People say fat cats are happy, but not so much when they end up with entirely preventable health problems that their owners feel guilty about!
The posters who said that just leaving the cat to be obese and therefore happy are being incredibly irresponsible.
A fat cat is not a happy cat- obese animals suffer the same health risks as humans, such as heart disease, some types of cancer, type II diabetes and arthritis. Not only will the cat’s life be shortened (which these posters didn’t seem to think was a big deal), but his quality of life will suffer as well.
My dog was 50 pounds overweight when I first adopted him (a huge dog weighing 150 pounds and resembling a manatee). He could barely walk because the weight on his knees made it painful. I worked very hard with his diet and exercise and he did lose 50 pounds- he also had more energy, was friendlier to strangers, and just seemed like a happier dog all around.
It just bothers me to see people saying that obese animals are cute for people to look at and it doesn’t matter if they’re fat. The cat can’t decide for himself and it borders on cruel to not even attempt to manage his weight.
I think Zsofia’s quandary was that she has attempted to manage his weight without any success and was asking for help on what else to try, and I haven’t seen anybody advocating that she just give up and feed him bacon fat and M&Ms. For some of us, there comes a point when the few remaining solutions seem crueler than just letting the cat (or dog) be fat and happy.
There does come a point with some animals where one has to balance the length of life against the quality of life. That we are able to do that for our beloved animal companions is a blessing. I honestly believe that animals neither know nor care how long they live. A fat cat that lives a joyful 12 years has had no less rich a life than a slender cat that lives 20 years eating a macrobiotic Vegan diet.*
I had a cat that lived to 22 years old on Purina cat food with no change in her weight once she reached adulthood, and then I had the aforementioned 20-pound cat that would not lose weight regardless of what we fed her. I suppose we could have kept her alive longer if we had put her on a diet of wheatgrass and soy milk, but she would have had several miserable years, and I don’t think she’d have appreciated them much.
No offense meant to macriobiotics or Vegans or any combination of the two–just using that as an example.
Well, a cat wouldn’t live 20 years on a vegan diet - probably wouldn’t live 20 months.
Maybe he can just enjoy the anticipation of food. He’s hilarious - he begs and begs and begs for dinner, and tries to convince me it’s dinner time at noon, and every time I go into the kitchen where he’s fed he beats me to the door and tries to climb up it, and then I give him his gross-ass special food and he sniffs it and looks up at me, like he keeps hoping THIS time it’ll be the good stuff. (Then he resigns himself and eats it like a water hole crocodile taking down a zebra.)
Obligatory BCS link. You can check this and have a sense where your cat falls, not just “it is fat”.
As a game, you could post pictures of your kitty and we could guess the BCS.
Something else to consider is what someone else mentioned… even just half a cup may be too much for some cats, although IIRC, z/d is low calorie compared to other diets.
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You can check this and have a sense where your cat falls, not just “it is fat”.