how can anyone be so mean to an animal????????
fat animals are not happy animals….

lol the chub-ness its killin me!!!!
it looks like something out of an anime

it’s abusive to overfeed your cat. people think it’s cute, but it’s really just lame and sad.

That cat is the biggest one ive ever seen in my life. Was he really born that way or what? Freaky……..

how many pounds did he weigh when he was born?

One of our cats is a 7-year-old calico and one is a two-year-old black longhair. They have two food bowls, one diet and one regular. I add 1/2 cup to each bowl each night. There is always food left (they both “graze” rather than eating meals). They usually get 1-2 Pounce treats a day too, but no table scraps or anything. Yet Saima (the calico) is probably up to 14 lbs. (that is even with the increased exercise she has been getting by sumo wrestling with the kitten) and Freya (the kitten) is about 6-7. I mean, granted Saima probably eats more than Freya in the final analysis. But they both appear to be eating the amount they want. Nobody is gorging (they just wander in sometime after I pour the food and have a snack, then wander back out and eat more later) and nobody is begging me for food. I just really can’t get too upset about it. The vet once told me to cut Saima’s food to 1/4 cup a day, but a) now she would just eat the kitten’s food, and b) said vet’s office seemed to contain an awful lot of kitties so thin I could see their ribs. So I ignored her. Anyway, does anyone have any statistics on how often obesity in cats leads to the complications that have been described in the first place? Saima’s life expectancy has got to be far better than if she were an outdoor cat, and she’s happy and her movement is not hampered at all. So who cares?

One of the things that worries me in this thread is the apparent glorification of fat by some people. I know there are some conditions that lead to obesity, as in humans, but it seems to me that, like humans, there is a greater percentage of fat cats in the USA than there is in the UK. I have lived around cats for all my life, and have only ever SEEN one cat that is fat. I think it’s to do with lifestyle, and a ‘fat’ culture.

You CAN exercise your cat, cats CAN be trained not to pester their owners for food, most cat obesity CAN be treated by proper diet and exercise. I apologise if you’ve truly done everything to bring his weight down, but Meg, Please PLEASE start learning how to make him slim again. There’s plenty of material on the web if you choose to look for it.

Some people are getting waaaay too upset about this. Sure, the cat could probably use some exercise…but having the owners ARRESTED?

It’s not like they’re feeding the thing Cheetos. The only way a cat could get that fat is if it had caring owners who feed it enough. It might be an older cat that’s starting to slow down. He also just looks like a big cat, maybe a Maine Coon, and the fact that s/he’s all spread out probably makes him/her look larger than s/he really is.

I had an overweight cat who lived healthily and happily and subsisted on DIET cat food for a couple of years without losing a pound before she was pts (cancer). Overweight cats are like overweight people…sure, some of them got that way through poor eating habits, but some of them just tend to gravitate around a higher “set point” than the rest of us.

All of you who say having a fat cat is cruel have never owned a fat cat. I have a cat that weighs 20 lbs. Very much overweight but she is very healthy otherwise. She doesn’t eat that much but gets very little exercise. It’s kind of hard to make a cat exercise. Have you ever tried to do that?

ayy fatty bum boom!

I have two cats. One is thin, the other is, well, not. We went to an all wet food diet, and the older, thin one’s tummy couldn’t take it. So we went to part dry and part wet. The chubby one is still chubby, and the thin one is close to average. Can someone please tell me how to feed the cats differently? Because if you can come up with a way to do that, I’m sure you’ll make a mint.