Tag: obese cats

Oh Oh Oh Ozempic For Our Oh Oh Oh Obese Cats? It’s Close To Reality

In apocalyptic news for house cats everywhere, a pharmaceutical company is kicking off a trial of a GLP-1 drug for felines.

If cats could read newspapers, chances are they’d be gripped by a cold terror right about now, wondering if they’re among the unfortunates to have their yums curtailed by the same weight loss drugs their humans have been gobbling.

As the New York Times reports, a biopharma company headquartered in San Francisco, Okava Pharmaceuticals, is about to begin a trial to determine if GLP-1 drugs can help our chonksters slim down. More than 60 percent of American pets are packing extra pounds, the Times notes, while consequences like diabetes are shortening the lifespans and reducing quality of life for felines and canines.

“It is our belief that the condition of obesity, the condition of being overweight, is by far the number one most significant preventative health challenge in all of veterinary medicine,” Okava founder and CEO Michael Klotsman told the paper.

The upcoming study will include 50 cats. Most will receive a GPL-1 medication while a control group — about one third of the cats — will be given a placebo.

Since cats aren’t exactly known for being cooperative when it comes to taking oral medicine and weekly injections at a veterinary office are impractical, Okava has developed a system with a patch about the size of a microchip that will dispense the weight loss drugs over six months before a tiny cartridge needs to be replaced.

If all goes well with the trial, Okava will seek FDA approval and address other obstacles like convincing caretakers that their little pals can benefit from the feline version of Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy.

That may be easier said than done considering our relationships with our furry friends and the role food plays in things like training, bonding and every day life

For lots of cat caretakers “their main way that they interact with and show their love to their pet often revolves around food,” Dr. Maryanne Murphy, a veterinary nutritionist at the University of Tennessee, told the Times.

How could the dynamic between cat and human change if the flow of yums is reduced to meals only? Will training — for everything from walking on a harness, to entering a carrier and fun tricks like high fives — still work if the reward is just a bit of encouragement or a scratch behind the ear?

An earlier weight loss drug developed for dogs, Slentrol, did not catch on because, as one veterinarian noted, “the main way [people] interacted with their pet was by feeding them, and seeing their excitement and happiness when they were eating the food.”

There’s also the not-so-small matter of cost. GLP-1 drugs are in high demand, and they’re expensive. One in eight Americans has taken Ozempic or one of its competitors. At times, the demand has threatened availability for diabetics, for whom the drugs were developed in the first place.

If the trials are successful and the GLP-1 drugs for pets gain FDA approval — which would require a series of much larger scale, more rigorous studies — the company hopes to offer them to consumers at a cost of about $100 per month per pet.

Even if this iteration of the drug fails, it’s unlikely to derail the larger effort. Vets have been prescribing tiny doses of the human version to cats with diabetes, and perhaps most telling of all, pet obesity continues to rise despite years of efforts by the veterinarian community to get people to play with their pets more and feed them less.

As Dr. Ernie Ward, a veterarian and founder of the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, told the paper: “We haven’t moved the needle.”

And now we check in with our correspondent, Buddy the Cat. Buddy, what do you think about the possibility of GLP-1 for your species and the end of the proverbial gravy train?

Buddy? Bud? Are we having technical difficulties?

I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we can’t find Buddy the Cat. We’ll resume this segment if and when we manage to locate him.

Morbidly Obese Cat Completely Transformed After Shedding Half His Weight

Patches was the biggest cat the staff at a Virginia animal shelter had ever seen, and was within snacking distance of the all-time record.

When Patches was surrendered to a Virginia animal shelter in mid-April of 2023, the staff — including longtime veterans of cat rescue — were taken aback.

The six-year-old feline weighed in at a staggering 40-plus pounds and was so big, the shelter staff had to keep him in an office because the largest crates they had were barely large enough for Patches to turn around.

“We thought we had seen big cats before, but he was definitely the biggest that we’ve ever seen,” Richmond Animal Care and Control’s Robin Young told the Washington Post at the time.

Patches was in dangerous territory for his personal health, and if allowed to continue gaining weight, he’d threaten the world record for a domestic cat, which is more than 46 pounds. (Guiness World Records stopped recognizing the heaviest cats decades ago because the organization didn’t want to encourage people to overfeed their cats in pursuit of the record.)

Top row: Patches in the early days shortly after his adoption. Bottom row: Patches after losing a significant amount of weight.

Last week, Patches reached a new milestone, weighing in at 18.94 pounds after more than two years of eating healthy and getting exercise with the help of Kay Ford, a retired businesswoman who adopted him.

It’s an incredible achievement, and one that was hard-fought, as anyone familiar with cats will know. Many well-fed cats can convince almost anyone they’re starving.

Ford’s pitch to the shelter made it easy for them as they fielded a flood of adoption applications for the chonkster, who had attracted plenty of attention as soon as the shelter posted about him online.

Ford told the shelter she was experienced, committed to helping Patches get down to a healthy weight, and would look forward to the challenge. She’d put on a few pounds during the pandemic, she added, and would lose weight alongside her new pal.

“I’ve had cats all my life,” Ford told the Post at the time. “It just seemed like the right thing.”

Ford with Patches shortly after meeting him. Credit: Richmond Animal Care and Control

She agreed to meetings at the shelter to review a weight loss plan and began documenting Patches’ progress on a Facebook page, Patches’ Journey, which now has more than 53,000 people following the feline’s transformation.

His diet isn’t over, and it’s a lifestyle change meant to be permanent, but there are a lot of people who are proud of the (much less) big guy, who now looks like a completely different cat.

Images via Patch’s Journey/Facebook

Crumbs The Corpulent Cat Is Already Enduring Treadmill Sessions

Crumbs was rescued from a bad situation where people fed him without regard for his health. Now he’s got a lot of work ahead of him as his new caretakers help him lose weight so he can walk on his own again.

Crumbs, the morbidly obese tabby who was rescued from the basement of a Russian hospital last week, is already putting in the work to melt pounds.

That means he’s enduring two things most cats hate — exercise and water. You’ll recall from our earlier post that Crumbs weighs 38 pounds and cannot walk under his own power, so his new caretakers at Matroskin animal rescue in Perm, Russia, have him on a special waterproof treadmill where he gets the benefit of buoyancy while he gets his steps in.

The big guy is not a happy camper in the video, but he’s doing his best.

I’ve heard horror stories about the hospitals in Russia and Ukraine, so if it sounds strange that the staff at a hospital would feed cookies, soup and other inappropriate food to a cat, well, let’s just say it’s not the kind of environment most of us picture when we think “hospital.” (Which is another reason to be grateful for living in the west, where we have it much better than most of us generally realize.)

Hindustan Times article
Non-native English speaking staff at the Hindustan Times may have confused Whiskas the cat food brand with whiskey, the alcoholic beverage, or there may have been a translation error.

Interestingly, a Hindustan Times story about Crumbs claims the hospital employees served whiskey to the obese cat in addition to the junk food, a claim repeated in the headline and article.

That would add another wrinkle to an already ridiculous story, but thankfully it’s not true. Your intrepid friends here at PITB checked the original text and with the help of translation software, determined it used the Russian word for “Whiskas,” as in the cat food, not whiskey. (It probably goes without saying, but never give alcohol to your cat. As little as a teaspoon of whiskey could be fatal.)

So if there’s some small comfort here, it’s that the people who fed Crumbs for so long weren’t completely ignorant to his needs, and it appears he got at least some species-appropriate food.

Crumbs the Cat
Crumbs shortly after he was rescued. Credit: Matroskin animal shelter

Rescued Cat Gorged On Cookies Till He Was ‘Too Fat To Walk,’ Now He’s On A Diet

The abandoned cat found his way to the basement of a hospital in Russia, where staff members provided him with inappropriate food — and way too much of it.

Animal rescuers in Russia have their work cut out for them after taking in a mega-chonky cat weighing 38 pounds.

The orange tabby, named Crumbs by his rescuers because he leaves none in his wake, is so overweight he can’t walk and has been placed on a strict diet to meet his first goal of becoming ambulatory.

After that, his rescuers said, the real work begins as they try to get Crumbs down to about 10 pounds, which they believe is a healthy weight for a cat of his original size.

Crumbs the Cat
Crumbs with one of his rescuers who is helping the morbidly obese feline shed pounds.

Staff at Matroskin Shelter in Perm told Russian media that Crumbs was abandoned by his owners and was living in the basement of a hospital in the city.

It wasn’t clear if Crumbs was already obese when he was surrendered, but hospital staff were not providing him with the kind of protein-rich meat cats need to stay healthy. Instead, they plied him with cookies and calorie-dense soups, apparently putting no limits on his food consumption.

“Kroshik’s story is an extremely rare case when someone loved a cat so much that they fed him to such a state,” shelter volunteers said.

Crumbs is in for a shock as he adjusts to his new diet, but the more difficult challenge may be the treadmill sessions that await once he’s able to move under his own power.

Screenshot_2020-11-15 barsik-cat-2020-1-1 jpg (WEBP Image, 915 × 610 pixels)
Barsik suffered the indignity of being labeled “The Fattest Cat In New York” and even made the front cover of the New York Post, but the former chonkster and his new human had the last laugh:

The problem of overweight cats has received more attention in recent years, with veterinarians warning people not to intentionally overfeed their cats. Unfortunately, some people have taken to fattening up their felines for the sake of social media success, looking to copy others whose extraordinarily “chonky” cats have earned equally massive online followings.

In Poland, Gacek the cat was removed from his street-side tiny house and taken indoors because visitors to the city of Szczecin would not stop feeding the overweight celebrity chonkster, despite signs pleading with them to stop. (It also didn’t help that people tried to steal Gacek after he became internationally famous.)

Gacek

Above: After Gacek went viral for being the top-rated attraction in his home city of Szczecin, Poland, a steady stream of admirers made the pilgrimage to see him in person, offering tribute in the form of snacks.

Here at Casa de Buddy, I had to put His Grace on a diet because he was pushing about 12 1/2 to 13 pounds, up from his natural weight of about 10 or 11 pounds. That might not seem like much, but Bud isn’t a very large cat despite his belief that he’s a hulking tiger. Two pounds is as much as 20 percent of his ideal body weight.

As you might imagine, the little guy was not happy about his significantly reduced snack allotment and made sure to communicate that to me loudly and often.

chubbybuddy
“I am NOT chubby, I am meowscular!”

There have also been success stories. Barsik, once dubbed “The Fattest Cat In New York” after tipping the scales at an astonishing 41 pounds, made a second round of headlines after he shed a significant portion of his weight. Nowadays he’s looking happy and healthy as he’s able to run and jump like a cat should.

The Obsession With Chonky Cats Has Gone Too Far

The fatter the cat, the bigger its online following.

Metro’s editors want more fat cats.

The newspaper recently profiled Manson, a 28-pound behemoth who lives with his humans in Silver Spring, Maryland, but the god of internet traffic is never sated, so the story ends with a request — or challenge — for more morbidly obese pets to drive clicks.

“Do you have a pet who’s even chunkier than Manson? Get in touch to share their story,” Metro’s editors write.

You know things have gotten out of hand when readers and editors alike respond to a story about a kitty almost three times the weight of a normal feline with a collective “Eh, that’s all? Show us a fatter one!”

In the world of Online Famous felines, popularity is directly proportional to fat, inspiring a caloric arms race among those seeking fleeting fame from fickle followers.

Indeed, the Metro story notes that while two-year-old Manson can’t hop up onto his humans’ bed without assistance, he’s amassed more than 10,000 followers on Instagram, as if an abstract measure of online “fame” — which he can never comprehend and makes absolutely no difference to him — counterbalances the maladies he’ll suffer due to his weight.

People apparently think it’s funny to see a two-year-old cat who can do little more than nap, eat and roll himself around the house. Anyone who expresses alarm for the welfare of the cat is a “troll” or a hater, according to the Metro article.

Are people stuffing their cats for followers and upvotes?

There’s really no way to determine that short of cat owners admitting it. Manson’s owners say they see no problem with their cat’s diet.

Most of these “chonky cat” stories come from shelters, where staff and volunteers are left with the hard problem of getting huge furballs to slim down after they’ve been abandoned by their humans or orphaned due to owner death. That was the case with Bazooka, a 35-pound ginger tabby whose owner had dementia and fed the cat constantly.

“[Bazooka’s owner] thought he was doing the best thing for his cat by feeding him,” an SPCA spokeswoman said at the time. “We need to look on this with a compassionate view. He was loved.”

Those viral chonky cat stories have been a boon to shelters, highlighting the good work they do and driving donations from cat lovers and well-wishers.

But those shelters are trying to get the cats in their care to lose weight, not pack on the pounds. That’s because they see first-hand what morbid obesity can do to a cat’s quality of life and life expectancy.

As for the rest of us, we should probably rethink our tendency to reward the owners of massive cats with our attention.