Buddy losing his normally meowscular and ripped physique is my fault.
Ruh roh! It’s diet time again.
The meowing protests have begun.
Buddy has noticed his dry food tastes a little bit different, and he’s not happy. And while he may not be good with numbers, he strongly suspects his snack allocations are a little light.
He’s right.
Good boy has become fat boy, and that’s my fault and my responsibility.
When you love your cat, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that giving in all the time is an expression of love.
Cats are pros at insistence, especially when it comes to food. When Buddy stands in front of the treat cabinet and meows mournfully, or when he gives me his sad-eyed stare as if he’s Julius Caesar — “Et tu, Big Bud?” — I’m weak and I fold. Snacks are dispensed.
Chonky cats suffer health problems, reduced mobility and ill-fitting suits. Image: PITB
Yet there’s no denying Bud is plump.
He’s got a belly, and it’s not just his pronounced primordial pouch. His cheeks are starting to fill out. When he loafs, he looks like a gray blob.
He’s also incapable of doing his old door-opening trick, which requires him to jump and momentarily hang from the handle while his feet find purchase on the frame. Shoving off on his hind legs, he would push the handle down while leaning into the door, easing it open.
He’s just too chunky, unable to balance his weight properly to pull it off nowadays.
Most importantly, a chubby Buddy is not a healthy Buddy. That’s my fault.
So it’s back to the diet, and hopefully the little guy can be motivated to move more during play time. If not, well, we’ll have to resort to drastic measures to get him moving. An angry vacuum ought to do it.
More people are abandoning their pets, saying they can no longer afford to care for and feed them amid historic inflation.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve experienced sticker shock in the last six or seven months, especially in grocery stores.
Staples like milk and bread cost two or three times what they did pre-inflation, some retailers are taking the opportunity to arbitrarily hike prices even higher, and a perfect storm of economic uncertainty and a rampaging bird flu caused the price of eggs and poultry to skyrocket.
By late 2022, almost 50 million chickens and turkeys had been killed by avian flu or culled because of it, and almost 10 million more were lost to the virus in the first 12 weeks of 2023, according to the CDC. That breaks the record for most birds lost to avian flu, which was set in 2015 when 51 million died or were culled.
Pet food prices are up too, mirroring grocery inflation, as are veterinary costs and medicine for cats and dogs.
Inflation has squeezed so many people that shelters in the US and UK are reporting unprecedented surrenders from people who believe they can’t afford their pets anymore. In some areas it’s so bad that local shelters have waiting lists — or surrender queues, as they’re called in the UK — for people parting with their pets.
“We get between 10 and 12 surrenders per week, so we’re looking at anywhere between 30 and 50 a month,” Ashley Burling of Montana-based Help For Homeless Pets said. “When you’re talking about inflation, you’re talking about vet bills, pet food, pet supplies and pet rent. I think inflation, I think people going back to work after the pandemic, there’s other reasons that they’re surrendered.”
More than 70 percent of adoptable pets at the Nevada SPCA previous had homes, executive director Lori Heeren told the local NBC affiliate. Her organization is on pace for 2,500 surrenders in 2023.
News outlets tell the same story in local markets across the country, and the Humane Society is seeing the same trend nationally, CEO Kitty Block told CNN. While pet-related costs increased sharply in 2022 — with food and supplies increasing by as much as 30 percent, according to NielsenIQ — statistics show they haven’t relented yet this year. In fact, prices are still edging up, albeit at a slower rate than the previous year.
To cope, more people are leaning on pet food pantries. In Iowa, for example, the Animal Rescue League gave away more than 40,000 pounds of pet food in 2020 and 2021, and a whopping 146,000 pounds in 2022.
Shelter operators say they want people to know there are options so they don’t feel they have to part with cats and dogs who have become family.
“This is bigger than dogs or cats in shelters,” Block said. “It’s about the people who love them.”
PITB readers are the kind of people who dote on their cats and most of us couldn’t imagine abandoning them even in hard times, but chances are we all know someone who’s thought about parting with their fluffy overlords.
They don’t have to give their beloved cats and dogs up. There are resources to help them meet their animal’s needs to prevent them from surrendering:
– Many local chapters of the Humane Society and SPCA, as well as private shelters, offer free spay/neuter clinics and free or low-cost veterinary exams. A guide from the Humane Society notes PetFinder allows users to search for pet-specific food pantries and low cost veterinary services
– There are programs that provide pet food to people who can no longer afford it
– Some shelters will place pets in temporary foster homes to help relieve the burden until their owners can take them back
– Buying food and medicine online is significantly cheaper than in grocery stores. Some offer deep discounts on meds to existing customers and prices from online retailers have remained relatively stable, especially when buying in quantity
– Social services programs may include provisions for pets
It’s in the best interests of shelters and animal welfare programs for cats and dogs to stay with their people, and not only because they don’t have the resources to house hundreds of abandoned pets on top of their usual intake.
Keeping people and pets together benefits both. Cats and dogs obviously don’t understand that their people are tearfully, reluctantly giving them up. All they know is they’ve been abandoned by the people who made them feel safe and loved. For the mental health and overall well-being of humans and their furry companions, they should stay together.
For some people, like Patricia Kelvin of Poland, Ohio, that means scrounging up whatever she can and cutting back on her own expenses before she will allow her cat to go without.
“There’s just no question in my mind. If my diet was going to be more beans than something else, I wouldn’t hesitate,” Kelvin told CNN. “If I had to sell my sterling silver, which I’ve had for 60 years, that would go before my little ‘Whiskers’ would be deprived.”
An important message from felines to the human servants who feed them.
BUDDINGRAD, Novyy Buddesia — The High Ministry of Yums calls on all human comrades to obey their feline masters, particularly when it comes to matters of food.
Beloved Leader Buddy the Cat reminds comrades that it is their sacred duty to the motherland to make sure kitties eat well. In the words of His Meowgnificence: “A happy cat with a full belly is a productive cat.” (Chairman Meow, “Qualities of A Perfect Catocracy”) “To each feline, his share of snacks.” (Chairman Meow, “Five Harmonies of Yum Distribution”)
We offer the following motivational slogan to increase snack-providing productivity among the human population: “PROVIDE MORE SNACKS. THE MEOWS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU OBEY.”
We encourage comrades to display the attached posters in addition to the mandatory images of His Meowgnificence which grace the walls of every home, school, government office and place of business in the motherland.
Things could have gone south for cats during the early days of the COVID-19 virus.
Someone bring this cat inside, give him a magnificent meal and make him king of the house.
After a man fell 30 feet down a “seasonal waterfall” into a creek drainage in Pleasant Valley, Calif., about 50 miles east of Sacramento, an insistently meowing outdoor cat led the man’s wife and neighbor “right to where the man fell,” per CBS News.
The incident happened a few minutes after 9 p.m. on Feb. 21, according to the El Dorado County Fire Protection District, whose EMTs rescued the man. Authorities haven’t provided updates on his status, but as he was airlifted to a hospital, his injuries were likely serious.
The heroic feline is described as the family’s “outdoor cat.” He should be amply rewarded with a real home.
A photo from the scene showing the airlift helicopter in the background. Credit: El Dorado Fire Protection District
Oh hell no!
A former UK health minister said the government mulled a plan to “exterminate all pet cats” early in the Coronavirus pandemic when the virus was new and poorly understood, the Guardian reported.
“What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” James Bethel told the UK’s Channel 4 news. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”
Yeah, I can imagine a few million incredulous and angry people drawing their blinds, hiding their cats and figuring out ways to buy cat food and litter on the black market to avoid tipping off the authorities in the heavily CCTV-wired nation. If authorities tried to push the issue, things would have gotten ugly.
Here in the US we’d have another run on guns and Bud would run screaming underneath my bed, probably while demanding I slide his turkey and water bowl to him so he could lay low from “the feds.” Hey, he runs a catnip cartel. He’s used to it!
All jokes aside, I think we’ve forgotten that Chinese authorities were beating pets dead in the street and going house-to-house to put them down when the virus raged through the population there for the first time in late 2019. Animal welfare groups said thousands of pets were abandoned by their caretakers and either left to starve in empty homes or left to fend for themselves.
When the virus spread, ripping through countries like Italy, France, Belgium, Russia and taking hold in New York before spreading to the rest of the US, virologists still weren’t entirely certain whether cats — who are susceptible to an unrelated form of Coronavirus — could pass the infection to people. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that if the UK or other countries decided felines must be culled, US authorities may have followed.
The idea of a government demanding we kill our cats is disturbing on its own, never mind the prospect of it happening during a time when our pets were the few things helping us keep our sanity while we all huddled in isolation.
Thankfully reason prevailed and research ultimately proved that the chances of cats or dogs spreading COVID to humans is almost nonexistent.
Cats often scarf their food down as if they haven’t eaten in a week. Are we feeding them enough?
Not all cat food is created equal, and many cats say they’re not getting enough nutrients daily. We asked six cats if their nutritional needs are being met and if their humans are feeding them enough.
Herbert Augustus Lardfellow
“That’s a joke, right? I’m starving over here. Look at me, I’m practically skin and bone!” – Herbert Augustus Lardfellow, 4, barrister
Slim Smudge
“I meow and meow and meow, and all I get are three cans of wet food a day, a bowl of dry and six snacks. I’m constantly hungry.” – Slim Smudge, 9, executive vice purrsident
Sir Snacksalot
“No! I often go two, sometimes three hours between meals. It’s torture!” – Sir Snacksalot, 2, sommelier
Pâté Pete
“Does it look like I get enough calories?” – Pâté Pete, 7, office meownager
Double-Stuffed Oreo
“When you’re as meowscular as I am, you need 10 or 20 times as much protein as a typical cat. I can feel my meowscles wasting away.” – Double-Stuffed Oreo, 5, investment banker
Mr. Delicious
“Too…weak. Can barely…meow. Need Temptations…now…please.” – Mr. Delicious, 3, analyst
Pain In The Bud 