We gave her only a quarter cup of indoor formula cat food twice a day. That's, like, a quarter of what the bag said to feed an adult cat of her size. But she always went after the dog food, and even though we'd put it up when the dog didn't eat it, it wasn't possible to keep her away from it completely.
We never thought she was getting enough of the dog food to gain so much weight, nor did she ever get people food, but she still turned into Puddle Cat (she's on the left):
A while ago, because all three cats were getting into the dog food more and more, we cut back on that quarter cup of dry, indoor-formula cat food. Maya was only getting an eighth of a cup because she'd gotten so big. I noticed that it was working. She didn't puddle so much. Then Dolly died, and there was no more dog food for her to get into. And WHOA.
She weighs less than BG, aka Tiny Cat (the cat on the right in the above shot)!
Wii Fit has a Pet Stats feature so you can weight your pets, and that's how we know. Maya is still pouchy, but she's squeezable enough to get through the bars of the gate we have at the top of the basement stairs:
That's about 2.5 inches between bars. !!!
So that's the backfiring part. We don't mind Maya getting downstairs, but I'm afraid she's going to hurt herself. Every day, I hear her either coming up or going down, squeezing herself through those bars.
The gate is up to keep Frisbee from going down. She's a big cat, weighs more than the others because she's longer and a heavier breed (and got into the dog food, too), and hates to jump down from any height greater than about three inches, so the gate works. But I think we're going to have to take it down, and take a chance that she forgot how much she likes to pee on the rug downstairs, just to keep Maya from dislocating a hip or causing internal bleeding.
OR, we could just let her get fat again.
Nah.
So here are my kitties now:
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