Please don’t consider this an approval of his chonkiness - he is at “fat camp,” which is the obviously right thing to do. Don’t overfeed your pets, people!
I get it! A friend adopted an overweight dog once, whose previous owners let free feed on cat food. Getting her to a healthy weight took a while, and everyone wants to share pet pics.
I don't really understand how cats even can get this large. I've kept a number of cats and always just fed them dry food in big bowls or auto-feed dispensers where they could eat as much as they wanted whenever they wanted it, and they always stayed a normal weight.
Probably a similar reason to humans. A cat in a healthy environment will regulate itself, but when stressed it may form eating disorders from using food as a coping mechanism. Or when given unhealthy food that has imbalanced nutrition
I've had two kitties that got one or two pounds overweight and both were long-hairs. I always figured that cats that are built for colder weather have an instinct to eat and bulk up in case of food scarcity. My short-hair kitty has stayed slender which, to me, seems to back that up. But I don't know anything scientific or medical, it's just an observation.
Something like that almost happened to us. There was a stray visiting our apartment building and we feed him a couple of times until the building manager call us telling us that there were already other 3 neighbors feeding him, and that he was taking care so please stop. But he just keep running and crying for food every time we came in to the building.
I wonder if they shaved him before or during the shoe rack, and is he eating out of a crock? This seems like a Southpark episode for some reason. Next they're going to say he snuck an amusement park in...
I looked up the full article about his case and they wrote that the shaving happened because he has to walk on a treadmill to help him loose weight. They submerged that treadmill under some water to help ease stress on the poor cat's joints. They also take him getting stuck as a good sign because he used to be so fat he wasn't able to move at all and his attempt at escape is proof that he's becoming more energetic.
Staffers had reportedly fed the portly pet a diet of cookies and soup, which caused him to balloon up to a scale-shattering 37.47 pounds — so heavy he couldn’t even walk.
Even more likely since it seems like he was a stray. Seems to me, like he cried at everyone around about how hungry he is and found more than one bleeding heart.
Really obese cats can’t groom themselves well enough, so they get really bad fur mats
Our households cat is a healthy weight yet he still gets severe matting. He has to be shaved every couple years otherwise the matts will hurt him. Brushing doesn't seem to help. He has a weird, almost silky feeling fur.