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

his expression told me this was not the time to mention the part-joking conversation I’d had in the pub with my friend Tom not long ago about ‘growing’ our cats.
    After Poppy had left, a black cat called Molly was brought into the room. At one point, said her owner, Michelle, Molly’s stomach used to drag along the floor when she walked, which wasn’t often. ‘I used to poke her with a stick and she wouldn’t move. She was a big fan of cheese and onion crisps and liked to eat the butter off toast, but she had really greasy fur and dandruff as well.’ Molly’s weight loss from 6.9 to 6.15 kilograms had left her fur loose around her shoulders. Her head seemed to belong to another, much daintier black cat. That said, unlike Smokey, the grey cat I met immediately after her, she had never looked ‘like a seal’, which is how her owners, Clive and Margaret from Wales, described the X-ray they were given of their pet upon first visiting the clinic. In the eight months since then, Smokey’s chest had been reduced by fifteen centimetres in diameter and she had been able to get upstairs unassisted for the first time in years.
    ‘Have you thought of holding cat aerobic classes?’ Margaret asked Shelley, Alex’s assistant. ‘No, I think that might be a bit difficult to arrange,’ replied Shelley. During this exchange, I’d been lost in a daydream about struggling to help an obese Pablo into a miniature stairlift, so there had been a satellite delay before it registered. I chuckled, belatedly, but it occurred to me that neither Margaret nor Shelley was entirely joking. Alex had, after all, earlier told me about another patient, a gluttonous two-year-old Labrador called Bruce, who regularly attended a water aerobics session in Southampton called ‘Doggypaddles’, held in a luxury hydrotherapy pool purpose-built for dogs.
    Alex told me about the importance of exercise for cats – how they are wrongly perceived as low-maintenance animals and their need for recreation is underestimated. Flashing on a mental image of Ralph meowing his own name outside the bedroom window while Shipley angrily demanded that I wipe the rain off his back with a rose-scented tissue, I tried to think of a time when I’d perceived my cats as low-maintenance, but came up with a blank. Having recently bought them a packet of Zoom-Around-The-Room organic catnip, I also felt sure in saying they were getting a fair amount of exercise. Nonetheless, I was a little nervous as I showed Alex a picture of Pablo on my mobile phone.
    Did Alex think Pablo looked overweight, I wondered.
    ‘Hard to say, looking at this picture. I’d really need to feel around his ribs,’ said Alex. A picture popped into my head of Alex feeling Pablo’s ribs, and Pablo immediately rolling on his back and sticking his tongue out even further than usual, while other, more sophisticated obese cats expressed their disapproval. For the third or fourth time that day, I gave thanks that I hadn’t brought Pablo to Liverpool with me.
    ‘Come in here a moment,’ said Alex, beckoning me through to his office. He double-clicked his computer’s mouse and a short film appeared on his monitor showing a tortoiseshell cat hurling itself maniacally back and forth, head over heels, in front of a battery-operated toy: a yellow plastic stand with a bendy antennae protruding from it, and a small chunk of fur on the end of that. In the background, the buzz of human voices could be heard. ‘That’s my cat, Clarence,’ said Alex. The toy, he said, was a Japanese contraption called the Panic Mouse, and had been instrumental in helping reduce Clarence’s weight. To illustrate, Alex pointed to a picture on his corkboard of a younger Clarence, presumably taken around the time Clarence was most liberally exploiting the perks of his job as restaurant critic for the Financial Times . ‘Clarence has really been a bit of a guinea pig for the whole clinic,’ added Alex, who, I was slightly