November 29th - Tiger, tiger …

Apologies for the lack of postings this month.  We have been in the UK.  John and I had one
or two social and family shindigs, and we needed to do some Christmas shopping.

If we are completely honest, apart from the inarguable pleasure of seeing our families, neither of us was particularly looking forward to this trip.  The work on the house is producing tangible improvements almost daily, but there is still a long way to go before The Mothers arrive for Christmas.  Far from being pleased to be going “home”, a kind of gloom set in several days before our departure.  Still, there was nothing we could do about it. Billy and Mrs F had kindly agreed to keep an eye on the cats. So we set the timer on
“George”, the automatic pet feeder, patted Tigger and Foggy on the head and sallied forth to Blighty.

In the event, the trip was a great success.  We saw everyone we wanted to, finished our Christmas shopping, stocked up on decorating materials at B&Q, and generally spent far more money than we had intended to … as usual.

We arrived home after 6 nights away to be greeted by … two furry footballs!  Regular readers will be aware that we have been concerned about the cats’ weight for some time now.  But this was different.  They were actually round!  Something had clearly gone very wrong with the feeding programme while we had been away.

On investigation, the automatic feeder had not been used at all.  It had opened according to my original timings, but had not been reset.  There was fresh litter in the tray, and there was no doubt at all that the cats had been extremely well fed. I couldn’t find the laminated sheet with the feeder instructions, and it began to dawn on me that Billy and Mrs F must have made a daily 45km round trip to top up the food, rather than the planned two-day intervals to reload “George”.

However, none of this explains how Tigger and Foggy had become so fat.

Now then, one of the friends that we visited back in the UK happens to be a prominent vet (a veterinarian rather than an ex-Marine, for the benefit of our American readers). Somehow the subject of the cats’ weight came up over a glass or two of wine.  “5.5kg?! What? Both together?” he asked.  “Err, no. Each.”  “At 7 months? Have they got stripes? Are you sure they aren’t tiger cubs?”

Back at home, it was clear that my previous attempt to limit the cats’ calorie intake had failed spectacularly.  Although I had already reduced their feed by about 25%, there had been no sign of them losing weight even before we left for the UK.  Following my conversation with Philip, who advised that dry feed manufacturers routinely recommend more food than is necessary, I began to suspect the Royal Canin measuring scoop. I decided to verify the weights given on the scoop with an electronic scale.

I carefully measured out 30gms of the Kitten 34 feed, leveling it against the appropriate scale on the scoop, then weighed it. Quel surprise! My 30gm scoop measure in fact weighed 40gms.  An accurately measured 30gms filled the scoop to about 1cm depth and was off the scale.  I then checked and cross-checked each of the scoop measures in turn. 40gms weighed 53gms. A scant 50gm, measured in the scoop, weighed 62gms.  60gms, the minimum recommended daily amount for a kitten aged 6 to 12 months, weighed 69gms. 70gms weighed 81gms, and 80gms, the maximum recommended amount, actually weighed 95gms!  It appeared, then, that I had been inadvertently feeding the cats the maximum recommended amount on a daily basis. I wonder if anyone has ever sued these manufacturers for weight associated health problems!

The problem had been further compounded by my supposition that ‘a little extra’, while we were away, would do no harm. Knowing that two 80gm scoops would practically fill one of the trays in the automatic feeder – sufficient for the two cats to share, I had asked Billy and Mrs F to simply refill both trays to the brim.  In the light of what I now know about Royal Canin’s scoop measures, this would have been bad enough.  A full tray of food in the feeder is probably equivalent to about 220gms food.  Unfortunately, while the cats’ regular bowls hold slightly less … there are, of course, two of them.

Poor cats.  The best I could do was to reduce their feed back to a carefully weighed normal level.  But next week the diet starts in earnest.

This entry was posted on 29/11/2007 at 09:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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