Hey everyone, Thresh here! My brother Finnick wrote a blog last month about Halloween, so you might remember my story a little bit. I have been here at Twin Maples for 4 years and my brother and I were dropped off with two other siblings by the back door! No need to worry though, we are happy as can be living here at Twin Maples! We have everything we need here such as food, shelter, and love.

Now as you may know, Thanksgiving is this month! Around this time of year, the humans here like to bring in a lot of food furr each other… which means we get the scraps that are dropped on the floor (hehehe). We hear the humans talking about how much they eat this time of year and how much weight they gain or how much they don’t want to gain. Luckily furr us, the cats here at Twin Maples don’t have to worry too much about gaining all that weight. The reason being is that we are all put on a feeding schedule! We don’t have the pleasure of eating whenever we please and to be honest, it kind of sucks. Yeah it’s nice being cute and skinny, but who doesn’t love a currvy kitty? I mean come on… we are all purrrty cute, right?

Since this month has a lot to do with food, I figured I would talk to you guys about one of the big concerns our doctors here have about all of our feline furrriends – weight. If any of you have kitties like Finnick, they LOVE to eat food from anywhere they can. That guy loves to run upstairs and binge eat Hank’s food, only to puke it back up right after because he ate too much and too quickly. (I’ve snuck up there a couple of times to try and get my turrrrn, but they snatch me back up and put me back downstairs).

We see kitties of all shapes and sizes come in here to get care. Yes, of course we love them all, but some of them come in hauling around a lot of extra weight. Now we cats know that you humans love us all very much… but it’s time for one of us to meow up! Cats should be on diets and feeding schedules just like dogs and humans are.

I’ve heard some of the cats come in here and tell us that their owners free feed them so they can eat whenevurrr they want to or they have those self-feedurr bowls that give them food whenevurrr they want! Trust me when I meow this… that sounds so PAWSOME!! But the doctors here say that is one of the most common ways for a kitty to get ovurrrweight. A lot of us felines live indoors, so we don’t have to roam and hunt furr our food. This means fewer calories are expended, so we don’t really need access to food all day every day!

I overpurrred a couple of doctors talking about how to prevent us cats from becoming ovurrrweight in the first place and I wanted to share some of those ideas with you! First, ask one of our pawsome doctors here which kitty food would be the best for your fur baby. Some of us cats need special food to help our bodies get the nutrients it needs! Secondly, I know I said it up there, but portion control is HUGE! A lot of the food bags overestimate the amount of food we need, so while you’re asking the doctor which food is best, ask how much to feed us too! Another tip is to try and not leave food out for your baby while you’re away at work or out furr the day!

Exercise… yes, I said it. Cats should get exercise too! All we need is 10 minutes of exercise a day. There are lots of toys that we cats will go crazy furr!! Furr instance, the laser pointer… oh em gee! That little sucker always tricks me! I can NEVER catch it, and I’ve been trying furr years. As soon as I think I lay my paws on it, the dang thing moves to another spot. Another thing that we cats tend to do is sleep next to where our food and water are. When we are fed here at the clinic, we have to run up the stairs to get our food. Which isn’t fair to me, I would LOVE to have it where I hang out all day. But the humans here say that it gets us moving and gets us exercise! If you have two cats and one is ovurrrweight, try feeding the ovurrrweight one in a separate room or put the healthy cat’s food up high so the bigger one won’t be able to reach it!

Sometimes it takes a while for us felines to lose some weight! But pwease don’t give up on us, sometimes it can take up to a year to lose the weight we’ve put on. Before putting your feline furrriends on a diet, make sure to ask the doctor so you know that you’re still giving the correct amount and there won’t be any malnourishment. We wouldn’t want a starving kitty, would we?

I think I’ve talked about food too much and now my stomach is rumbling… I think it’s time furr me to see what left ovurrr foods I can beg off of the staff when they come down furr lunch. But before I go, I just wanted to let everyone know how thankful we house cats here really are furr all that the Twin Maples staff does for us. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to the people we care about and we have SO MANY here that are so good to us and take care of us. If it wasn’t for them, who knows where any of us would be!

Be sure to give many thanks to family, furrriends, and of course your furr babies this Thanksgiving!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I hear someone coming down for lunch! I need to get my cute face on and see what foods I can get!