posted by meowser
Poor Mr. Binkley, my poor big fat fluffmonster of a kitty. He has such a hard time reaching around to his back and flanks and between his legs, he just became covered with mats. Unlike both of his brothers, he hates to be combed (I guess I can’t blame him, given all the clumps in his coat) and I finally had to call a mobile groomer to deal with them, and Binks wound up getting sheared like a sheep. He actually seems more comfortable than when he was covered in mats, although he is seeking out warm spots more than he used to.
I actually caught myself feeling guilty at “letting” Binkley get so fat he couldn’t clean himself properly. He does weigh about 20 pounds, but I think most cat diet food is garbage, so I feed him Wellness wet food and Innova Evo Ancestral dry food, both grain-free, at the “normal size” adult cat doses (no free feeding any more), and he weighs whatever he weighs, screw it. But is he really “obese,” or is he just BIG? I tend to think the latter. He was big even as the 12-week-old kitten he was when I got him — twice the size of most cats his age, already with an adult-sounding meow and purr. I asked the vet then, “Are you SURE he’s only 3 months old?” The vet answered, “Yes, we go by the teeth.”
In his shaved state, you can see that he has a belly, but personally, I think he’d have trouble cleaning himself even without it. As the groomer put it, “He doesn’t have a lot of loose skin.” Of course, the last vet he saw slapped the O-tag on him (and on his baby brother Zevon, who is also 20 pounds and built like an oil tanker with fur) — vets, I suppose, have a “standard” for what a cat is supposed to weigh, and it’s not even as sophisticated as human BMI, length and height isn’t even taken into consideration. I got a big lecture about giving them the diet food so they won’t get the DIABEEEETUS, but you know what? Fuck that noise. They’re cats. They’re supposed to have a diet of mostly meat — as the holistic vet who treated my third cat, Pendo, for his cardiomyopathy put it, “Cats should be eating mice, not rice” — and those diet foods are just pure filler. I find it hard to believe that these foods are DIABEEEETUS preventatives for our feline friends, sorry. (And I want it noted that Pendo is the smallest of the three — he weighs about two-thirds what his brothers do — and has the biggest health issues.)
Anyway, Binkley would probably have an easier time cleaning himself if he WAS mostly fat. You wanna see a picture of a truly FAT (irresistible) cat? Here she is.
That’s Summertime, XH’s and my cat by way of my late MIL (now living with XH). Don’t you just want to dive in? And she’s CLEAN AS A WHISTLE. Even between her legs. I miss her and her Garfield beanbagness. (And as an added bonus, she loves LASAGNA! No, you really can’t make this shit up.)
