Cat Blogging: Fat Cat

Friday Cat Blogging brought to you on Monday because I don't like to play by the rules...

In reality, until today I was oblivious to the rules, but it makes me sound more bad ass the other way...

Today I will introduce you to the plus size diva of our household. Weighing in at 20+ lbs., this is our "grossly obese" cat with attitude Calisto. She kind of reminds me of the pom-pom art projects I made with my daughter long ago, a big multi-color pompom with four pipe cleaners sticking out of it and a smaller pom-pom head complete with googly eyes. Add her comical blob body and swishing-tail waddle to the fact that she will take any person's, cat's or other creature foolish enough to cross her path's head off in a flash, we have a winner in the ever popular House MacBoudica Diva contest here. She even beets me on a PMS week if you can imagine.

Since Calisto is now too fat to properly clean her nether region, her name has been changed to Collapse-o or Cholesterol--take your pick, and I have been forced to put her on a diet. Amazingly, I am alive to share this experience with you. Will wonders ever cease?

Who knew dieting a cat could be so tedious! Being myself, I of course had to research this topic thoroughly, devoting a whole day I did not have reading commentary from various schools of thought regarding cat diets. Remember the good ol' days when we all just knew that cats had to be fed dry cat food or their teeth would rot out of their heads? Evidently, that school of thought is so '86. No, now it is much more fashionable to feed your cat a diet that more closely resembles their natural carnivorous diet of mice. Now the school of thought says that even the worst canned cat food is better for your cat than dry food. Apparently cats are experiencing an epidemic of obesity much like humans are. Evidently, unlike human causes (or maybe similar after all--marketing junk food to cat owners?), cat obesity is linked to the food we feed them, cheap dry cat food. Pet food companies, who responsible pet owners assumed were the experts and would never do anything to harm our pets, market this stuff to us that is actually very harmful to our pets. Dry food is made like meat flavor coated corn cereal run through a vitamin sprinkler, a real boon to big ag corn growers (I had to fit a corporate jab in here, you know). Cats lack the enzyme necessary to digest the carbs in the cat food thoroughly so it turns to fat. In addition, they are not biologically wired to recognize that they have recieved enough calories from all the carbs in the food to quit eating. This is especially bad for cats like mine and many others in modern times that have constant free access the food because it is left out all day for them. They just won't stop eating. The cat doctors and philosophers say cats are getting too many carbs and not enough protein. Switch them to canned. Some even say feed them these lovely raw meals that we can sell you or you can make on your own (eeeeewwwwwwwww!!!! I draw the line totally at grinding up raw food for these critters. After all, what have they done for me lately besides knocking over glasses of milk, breaking knick-knacks, leaving hairballs outside the bedroom door for me to step in in the middle of the night, etc?).

Anyway, I did what any good scots woman would do in my situation. I looked in the grocery store, discovered that feeding three cats canned cat food was fricken' expensive as hell, and mosieded on over to the dry section. I bought the best bargain of the dry diet foods I could find, Purina One. It still has some corn in the recipe, but turkey was the first ingredient, moisture level was 12% (anything over 10% is good because cats usually don't get enough moisture from cheap ass dry food either), and it has over 40% protein. It was more expensive than the cheap ass food I usually buy, but I was committed to spending a little more on this project (being scots, that is very hard for me to admit). And I discovered a local pet supplies store that sold it for a much better price. My plan was to feed the cats twice a day and begin by mixing in the regular cheap food with the diet food.

She has been dieting now for two weeks. Actually, it is not going as well as I had hoped so far, but that is my fault. I couldn't bear to waste the third of a bag of old food we have left so until this weekend I have been mixing it with the diet food. She has lost one lousy pound! Oh well, at least she hasn't gained any weight. The worst part is the grooming I have had to do on her. She practically rips my arm off any time I get near her with a brush and I have never seen her run so fast to get away from me. I guess I can count her grooming sessions as the increased exercise she needs to really work that weight off.