Why is my cat overweight?

[White shark]

My cat is 7 years old, and she has been eating a raw meat diet for 5 years now. Before that she ate organic grainfree kibbles. She got sterilized at 7 month old, and she gained a lot of weight shortly after that. I thought she would lose some weight when she started on raw meat, but she hasnt lost anything. I feed her only organic or wild meat, fish, liver and other organs, and i supplement with crushed bones and some vitamins and minerals. She is moderately active, i think, and i walk her once or twice a day. She only gets about 6 or 7 small cat kibbles every day as a snack, and she dont even want anything else. She eats 1-3 times a day, and i dont really think she eats very much. Some days she barely eats anything at all. I got another cat that is not overweight and he eats almost twice as much as her. I dont think its a good solution just to feed her less, then she will walk around meowing and looking for food, and maybe she will run away to other peoples gardens to look for food, i know some people have crap cat food in their gardens. I didnt think you would have to count calories on a raw meat diet, especially because she already eats very little. Is it just because she is sterilized? Her metabolism must be extremely low. But if i just feed her less, then will she get enough calcium and other nutrients? It irritates me when people say "you're really feeding that cat well! It looks like she is pregnant!" and things like that! She weighs 6,5 kg, and i would guess her normal weight is about 5,5 kg or so. Besides of that she is a healthy and happy cat, that can still play and run and everything.

[goodsamaritan]

>> She got sterilized at 7 month old, and she gained a lot of weight shortly after that.

This is OBSCENE.
This may be normal for your culture in your part of the world...
...but when I was a young boy with my sister when we were tourists in a foreign land where our host did this to her dog
...we were SHOCKED and HORRIFIED to learn that this other culture STERILIZES / SPAYs perfectly healthy pets.

Imagine a female human being being STERILIZED / SPAYED at 10 years old....

The mental block in your part of the world is thinking that STERILIZING / SPAYING your pet is normal and acceptable and healthy.

The message my sister and I got because we come from a 3rd world country is that this spaying female pets is done so it is more convenient for the pet owner so that their dog / cat does not menstruate all over their home or does not reproduce because the owner deems it so.

Just saying that your cat may be overweight because there is nothing natural about her state of health in the past few years... she got STERILIZED at 7 months.

[sabertooth]

I had a cat that would sneak off and eat commercial grade kibble from the neighbors back porch...make sure the cat isnt cheating on the diet.

I would also recommend a fat cat fast, when the cat looks a little pudgy dont feed it for a couple of days, its perfectly healthy, and it may even prompt the lazy puss to go out and hunt. If I dont feed my minx it will start bringing home half eaten chipmunks.

[White shark]

You should know how much i worry about my cats, and hate to "remove" something from a healthy cat, but you must also see it from my point of view. And i did definitely NOT do it because of the menstruation, wich is not even a big issue with a cat. I live in Denmark in an apartment, with other people all around me. I got my two cats from a neighbor who didnt take care of them, so they were starving and came to me. What about all her kittens? What should happen to them? I think its better to have one overweight cat, than over 100 kittens running around without homes, sick and starving. It also gets very cold in winther here in Denmark, and i see cats looking awful, very thin, and with eye infections. They are lucky if they are being taken in to an animal shelter, and there they will also sterilize them, to minimize the number of wild cats running around in the streets. And it helps, the number of wild cats in Denmark is low compared to other countries, and homeless dogs doesnt exist here at all. Many cats die because of the cold alone, and there isnt enough prey for them to hunt, especially near apartments where there isnt much nature around. I know how animals are treated in the third world countries, running around in the streets, many of them sick and starving. I couldnt bare to see my cats kittens just running away and dying off, because i cant find a home for so many kittens. Even now there are many cats the shelters cant find a home for. And i definitely wont feed her poisonous birth control pills, her intire life. Im not even allowed to have cats in my apartment, wich is not sterilized, and you are very lucky to find an apartment at all, where you are allowed to have more than one pet, most places you are not allowed to have pets at all. A woman in my neighborhood have gotten into trouble because she has cats getting kittens all the time. The animal organisation comes here once or twice a year to catch all the wild cats and kittens, and to sterilize them, and try to find them homes. The vets and organisations say you should sterilize them at 5 month old, but i think they are too young. In your country you might be shocked and horrified about animals being sterilized, but in my country we are shocked and horrified to see animals in other countries homeless, hungry and ignored. Your thoughts on it isnt any better than mine, as you would have one normal and healthy animal, but be the cause of many, many kittens or dogs living an awful life, with a terrible death. I would wish there was a better solution to both, but i cant find any.

Right now she isnt eating anything from others, because she is only out walking with me, but in summer i will try to keep an eye on her not finding kibbles at the neighbors gardens. I have read it can damage the cats liver not to eat for a day, especially if the cat is overweight, but is that true? I dont really know.

[goodsamaritan]

Thank you for explaining your culture's view on spaying pets.  It is indeed a cultural difference.  We prefer the animals duke it out in the wild to survive on their own and you prefer spaying.  Well to each his own.

That said, it seems to be a well known phenomenon that spaying a cat makes it fat.

https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=spayed+cat+fat&oq=spayed+cat+fat&aqs=chrome..0j69i57j0l2.7575j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Anecdotal thing because spaying is RARE in my country, last year I went to a beach resort and saw a FAT and LAZY male dog.  I asked the owner how their dog could be so FAT and LAZY.  The owner said they had SPAYed the dog.  Ohhh....

[White shark]

Yes there is a big cultural difference, and also a difference to how well the animals survive on their own. Denmark is mostly smaller cities and fields, with very few and very small forests. There are almost no places for wild animals to live, at least not carnivores, and you are lucky if you see a fox few times in your life. And the cats arent designed to our cold climate.

My sisters cat was also very fat, and she fed it the vets cat kibbles very low on fat (at that time we didnt know about real cat food), but it didnt help at all. My parents had two cats, one of them fat, and the other one very slim. I know other people with slim and normally looking sterilized cats too. So its a little strange. But i did think she would lose some weight on the raw meat diet. If she was just a little overweight then ok, its just crazy she is THAT fat.

[TylerDurden]

This article shows that Scandinavia, including Denmark, all have laws opposing neutering simply because they have sensible customs forbidding their domesticated animals from randomly interbreeding with neighbours' domestic animals:-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hal-herzog/the-ethics-of-neutering_b_2790315.html

There are no valid grounds for circumcision let alone for  full-on genital castration for either animals or humans, simple as that.

[TylerDurden]

http://jennifermargulis.net/blog/2011/09/norwegians-believe-spaying-or-neutering-a-dog-is-cruel/

[White shark]

You cant compare a dog to a cat at all. Its very simple with a dog, and there isnt any wild dogs in Denmark. Im talking about cats. Even if i kept my cats indoor, other cats are jumping through my windows, and there are many cats where i live. You may prefer to drown kittens and puppies, but i dont, and i also think its illegal here. I dont think you understand it, but cats and dogs cant survive in the wild here. The only healthy looking "wild" cats i see here, are being fed by other people. And the cats are suffering in the winther months. We dont have places with a lot of nature and forests, where animals go out and live on there own. I cant just open my door, and the young kittens walk away into a wilderness, because there isnt any. But its easy enough for others to say, who lives in a totally different environment. And there ARE rules about neutering your cat, if you live in an apartment.

[sabertooth]

Wonder if its possible to compromise on doing a tubal , or vasectomy for animals...sure its not 100% without problems, but at least by preserving the sex organs it allows for more natural hormonal development.

http://www.petmd.com/blogs/fullyvetted/2010/april/ligations_vasectomies-7245

[dariorpl]

In my culture it's very common for people to sterilize their pets, the vets have even convinced people that the pets' health will be improved if they are neutered/spayed, even though most pet owners I know report behavioral and/or health problems right after spaying/neutering, often constant problems for years upon years after the fact.

I personally have an internal reaction much like goodsamaritan, I don't like it at all, and I wouldn't want to have a pet or any other animal if I knew I had to do this (in fact, I don't have any pets, so I suppose some might say it's easy for me to say that). Unfortunately, bulls are also generally castrated to make their managing easier, so most of the beef I can buy, if it's from a male cattle, then it's from a castrated one, which I believe is likely reducing the nutrition value of that meat.

Anyway, because of it being almost universal where I live, I'm used to it, so I don't go into outbursts or anything like that, when someone tells me about this. I often don't even say anything, as I've found that to be of little use with most people.

Perhaps this isn't the case in the Philippines, but here, as in most of the world today, people are very much in favor of anti natalism, be it through vasectomies/tubal ligation, birth control, condoms, morning-after pill, or abortions (which are still technically illegal in most cases, but currently being performed for free in some public hospitals).  (Interestingly, the main alternative that makes sense and which had worked for thousands of years, that is abstinence and to limit sexual relations to within marriage, is the one that is not only not encouraged, but looked down upon and ridiculed). Being that this is the attitude towards themselves and other humans, we shouldn't be surprised that they also regard their pets' reproductive capacities as a disease that needs to be removed.

[TylerDurden]

From a RVAFer's POV,  neutering animals should be  a big no-no.  For example, the mass castration of bulls has directly led to severe inbreeding  as a result of  using only a tiny number of prizewinning bulls' semen to impregnate  a myriad number of cows. This has inevitably led to cattle with severely-lowered immune-systems whereby farmers feel forced to use vast amounts of antibiotics in order to stave off otherwise inevitable plagues from common, otherwise-largely-preventable diseases. This overuse of antibiotics is leading up  to what is called the "antibiotics apocalypse:-

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161010-all-you-need-to-know-about-the-antibiotic-apocalypse

In turn, farmers are refusing to lay the blame on their own ruinous dysgenic practices with their cattle  and are falsely accusing badgers and other animals of "wilfully" infecting cattle, and so far mass culls of innocent  badgers are happening within the UK, as a result. Absolutely disgraceful.

As a result of the UK BSE crisis, wholly caused by this mass-inbreeding phenomenon among cattle, ruinous red tape was forced on the UK/EU grassfed-meat industry, despite them being free of BSE, so that grassfed cattle are also forced to be slaughtered at 30 months. Plus, UK farmers now have to pay 2(!) vets, 1 from the UK government and 1 from the EU, so that it is ruinous for them to sell the organ-meats as the cheapness of the latter

So, due to inbreeding, the resulting raw meat is inferior in quality.

Basically, our problem in modern times is a sick, twisted preoccupation with so-called "humanity". This blithely ignores the reality that Nature/Reality is a combination of myriad opposing concepts/forces, and that therefore human morality is purely a matter of relativeness and therefore idiotic and unnatural. For example, not neutering dogs and cats is no big deal. Strays don't survive very well without hosts, anyway,  and , given encouragement, the local wildlife, already near-destroyed by humans, would benefit from feeding on the (nonneutered) stray, abandoned pet population.

Basically, there is a yin/yang approach in Nature, so that if one focuses on one aspect without also favouring the opposing side, one inevitably suffers great problems in the long or short term. For example, in the millenia before the Pill, women would routinely go to the local rivers(eg:- Tiber etc.) and dump their unwanted newborns into the flowing torrents because they did not have the resources to feed them. So, they were still, to some extent, affected by Nature/Survival of the fittest, in some ways, and therefore had to accept reality. Now, we have the Pill which, according to multiple reports, fouls up womens' mental states, ruins their ability to find the right partner, dampens their sex-drive etc.:-

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/06/new-study-highlights-birth-control-pill-s-negative-side-effects

Basically, we humans forget that we are just animals and are subject to Nature's laws just like all other species.Choosing artificial, unnatural solutions to various problems in the end just leads to disaster.My other point I was trying to make is that we should try to avoid/ban any and all  laws which restrict our personal freedom in any way. Some of us, for example, myself included at times, have been in favour of New York banning trans-fats or governments banning smoking everywhere, but, if we allow such interfering laws to be set up, we only make it much easier for our own RVAF lifestyles to be banned as well.My above point re the UK grassfed meat industry being ruined by worthless overregulation is one typical example thereof.

[sabertooth]

The apparatus of truly objective scientifically integral oversight is illusory.... in theory institutions could implement the scientific method guided by the light of reason to set guidelines for the pragmatic management of human activity...though in practice it appears forces of ignorance and greed have hijacked the system.

Unnatural and proven threats to human health or to the overall ecology, could be denounced universally by a fully free, informed and unbridled humanity. Trans-fats and other unworldly abominations could be made illegal in a truly enlightened society, without any major hindrance to overall freedom of the individual. Unfortunately we live in an emerging dystopic quagmire where natural methods and methodologies for living are deemed harmful for either nefarious reasons, ignorance, or some combination of the two.

It would seem like the "Fat Cat" phenomenon is symptomatic of wider dysfunction, caused by technologically induced schism from the natural order. This disruptive force unleashed as technology has taken over the role of creator; reverberates throughout the fractal universe, from the lowest house pet to the wall street penthouse tycoon. No longer bound by the laws of the jungle, or connected to the wheel of life and death entirely by biological imperatives, the technocrats and house cats through an artifice have become fat and sterile according to the biological standard, though in the ways of the brave new world they have become all powerful ....meowehahaha!

I agree with TD, that modern selective breeding of commercial livestock is hardly done in accord with what would produce the optimal, most vibrant, most genetically viable breeds needed to feed humanity in an ideal paleoistic fashion. The culling of all males who do not grow fastest, of produce the most offspring, as is standard practice also culls out the more subtle traits which helps herds maintain a better overall balance, genetic viability and greater capacity to adapt to environmental conditions. These truncations of the male variation, as well as other of the more wild traits, in breeding pools, could in epigenic ways alter the gene expression of those who feed on the domesticated lot, through micro RNA. So that after generations of eating genetically feeble, highly domesticated animal and vegetable crops, populations would have through RNA osmosis assimilated the more domesticated traits into their own Genomes.

I just gotten to eat my first bit of 10 year old intact Jojoba Bull, and I am very happy with its taste and quality. There is nothing like it on the local market, and Im tempted to go back in the fall and go in on a whole bull(if I could find someone else to split the cost). Typically all Males are either castrated early and slaughtered at 30 months as steers, or used to breed until they are sold for salami. For the most part the majority of humans living in the western world do not have access to the flesh of truly masculine land animals....unless you hunt your own or eat a lot processed meat which may contain some bull parts, along with god knows what else.

[surfsteve]

I know someone who had a dog that was extremely fat. They put her on a diet but she continued to gain weight. They gave her some kind of high protein diet dog food which the dog refused to eat but some how it continued to gain weight. When they went to work they would leave the dog chained up in the back yard. One day they decided to watch her to see if the neighbors were feeding her. Turns out they weren't. Instead they noticed that the dog was eating grass hoppers. 1000's of them. Apparently grass hoppers are fattening.

[sabertooth]

Ive seen cats that were neglected by their owners, surviving fairly well by hunting June bugs. The domesticated breeds of cats and dogs, evolved to be semi self sufficient, until very recent breeding practices has attempted to cull out a lot of the primal survival traits.

I personally advise a middle way approach (if possible).... where cats and dogs are allowed free range over some green space where they can have the opertunity chase some tail, and whatever other critters happen by. Feed them meat scraps along with the best quality processed food you are willing to buy. Then fast them regularly.

My cats wont touch any of my raw meat, and are damn picky about what kind of processed food they eat...but if I dont feed them for just one day there will be half eaten chipmunks, squirrels and mice everywhere...

I believe in the theory that cats and dogs began to domesticate themselves, scavenging from the scraps of human encampments. Originally these animals were allowed much more freedom to supplement their own diets with what instinct dictated, and the scraps from apex hunting tribes would have been used as extra security.

I constantly have guest being presented with half eaten trophies of our cats affection and gratitude, and I wonder if in primitive times people would gladly eat the left overs the cat dragged in.

[dariorpl]

sabertooth, why do you think it's necessary to supplement meat scraps with processed foods? Does it have to do with the lack of nutrients in meat scraps because you're consuming all the nutritious organs?

Also, while I've never had cats, I find it very strange that they refuse to eat your raw meat, why do you think this is? And have you offered them this meat since they were kittens, or were they first introduced to processed foods for a time?

[sabertooth]

I hardly think its necessary for cats to be supplemented with processed food, and only advise people living in urban areas who are not willing or able to afford the cost and inconvenience of feeding entirely raw, to make a compromise. The processed foods are supplemented with essential nutrients which could only be replaced if you where to feed the cats whole live animals, and most people in the civilized world wouldn't want to buy a couple of live rabbits, or a dozen mice each week to feed their house pet.

My cats were raised on processed foods, so no doubt they are addicted to the flavor additives. Though they will hunt and eat any small vermin they catch, they are totally uninterested in plain cuts of raw meat, be it sheep, beef, chicken or fish.

[dariorpl]

I wonder if it's the fact that they have killed their prey that makes them think of the chipmunks as food, and the cuts of meat from larger animals as non food.

Will they refuse plain cuts of meat even if served warm straight from the slaughter?

[marywash]

Cats are lazy and their job is eating and sleeping.