Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond by Tom Cox

bored’, sat passively at her feet, alongside the scales that had just revealed she had gained a kilogram since her last visit. To me, this was a whole new concept in weight gain. Perhaps a whole basket of muffins could do this much damage, but one ? Really? ‘Yes, definitely the muffin. There was nothing else,’ Sandra continued. Nothing apart from the daily 370g of Royal Canin food – a special formula prescribed by German to provide Poppy with protein, vitamins, minerals and L carnitine, an ingredient that speeds up the metabolism and preserves lean tissue during weight loss.
    But suddenly Sandra seemed unsure. She knew she had been strict with Poppy, feeding her separately from her other dogs and walking her for up to an hour on weekdays and two hours every weekend, losing two stone herself in the process. But there had been signs that her husband, Charles, wasn’t quite so committed. German had already had to reprimand him, on a recent visit to the clinic, for letting Poppy help herself to large pieces of leftover chicken. Now Sandra became suddenly worried about further indulgences. ‘He’s just a bit soft,’ she said. ‘He feeds her the way a granny would feed a small child.’
    A few moments later, after Sandra had left, explaining as she did to Poppy that they ‘must have some serious words with Daddy’, Alex shook his head. ‘This happens every so often with joint owners. One will be committed to the programme, but the other just won’t take it seriously. What people have to realise is that to get your pet to lose weight is hard work. It takes all-round discipline.’
    I’d been sent to meet Alex by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, who’d asked me to write an article about the phenomenon of fat pets, after a report had come out suggesting that 40 per cent of Britain’s cats and dogs were overweight, and Petplan, a company that provides insurance for 80,000 pets in the UK, had announced a 60 per cent surge in obesity-related claims for pet health problems in the previous five years. According to Alex, the people of Britain were ‘taking less exercise and eating more meals’ which meant our pets were getting less exercise and more titbits.
    During the course of my research, I’d spoken to the owners of Benji, a formerly gargantuan ginger and white Tom from Hampshire whose profound inertia left him persecuted by the animal they referred to as his ‘brother’, a rabbit who would dive-bomb his enormous frame when he was least expecting it. I’d also heard the story of a dog who ‘couldn’t get enough’ of the faecal pellets that his owner’s rabbit left lying around the house and a parrot who gorged itself on ‘nothing but pizza and pasta’.
    I had to own up to a personal interest in the story, too. I’ve always had a fondness for roly-poly cats and, with Winter Pablo on the rise, rather liked the idea of meeting some other family-sized moggies. If my editor had also mentioned upon commissioning me there was a chance I’d meet a giant, pizza-loving parrot, I would probably have waived my fee on the spot, but on the whole my enthusiasm for overweight pets didn’t extend much further than the feline. A fat dog seemed shameful and sad, but for some reason a plump cat seemed like one of the hallmarks of any good winter living room, alongside a half-open Dickens novel, a log fire and an elderly relative snoring on an armchair with a string of Werthers Original-flavoured drool hanging from his mouth. After an hour with Alex, however, I was beginning to change my mind quite drastically.
    ‘We had a Siamese here that should have been five kilograms but weighed more than thirteen,’ he told me. ‘A lot of people with overweight or obese pets just see them as cuddly. But obesity can lead to numerous illnesses, such as diabetes in cats, osteoarthritis in dogs and pancreatitis, bladder stones and cardio-respiratory and orthopaedic diseases in both.’ Something – I’m not quite sure what – about