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’m sorry, but letting your cat get this large is neglect or abuse or both.
Says he’s a rescue. I’m assuming the person who sent him to fat camp isn’t the person who let him become obese.
He was abandoned in the basement of a hospital living on cookies and soup.
He was not abandoned, he was overfed by humans. Says so right in the article.
It’s believed that hospital staff enjoyed feeding him to the point where things went more than a little overboard.
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
Cats will actually eat until they get the necessary nutrients from their food, unlike us where we stop when we’re full, regardless of how good the food actually is. So a cat free feeding terrible food can become obese fairly easily.
Kibble is the absolute worst thing you can feed cats. It’s usually at least half fillers and binders. They’re obligate carnivores so raw meat or high quality canned food where it’s mostly meat with some hydrating broth or something is as good as it gets for them.
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.
People who let their pets get in that conditions should be charged with animal abuse.
He was a stray living / hiding in a hospital basement if I recall. Staff was feeding without coordinating with each other.
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.
Then again you really should notice long before a cat gets this fat. Unless you turned off your brain or something. This is way too fat to be considered an accident.
17.237kg
Crumbs is such a cute name, but a little small when he’s the whole loaf
