Watch out for those fat cats – and heavy hounds

It would seem that the feline population are now taking the notion of fat cats a little too literally. Because statistics from the States show that half of all cats and dogs are now obese or overweight and that’s just ten per cent less than the human population itself.

Maybe it’s all that lounging around and shedding of hair on the sofa – and like the rest of us, the problem is that once you get used to that more sedentary lifestyle and pile on the pounds, you’ll find it harder to shift them.

Perhaps it’s that dog owners are too busy for those long, lung-bursting walks anymore – and then again they do say that pets imitate their owners. On that basis, there must be an awful lot of cats and dogs with a passionate interest in the Premiership.

It’s not just the lack of exercise, of course, because we’re now feeding our pets with the same food we eat ourselves. And if it’s making us wider around the switch, then it’s hardly helping Rover or Fluffy to stay lean and fit either.

We’ve all seen those enormous house cats, stretched out across the couch like some sort of furry bean bag – only warmer and with claws.

And there’s the dog whose idea of daily exercise is to sheepishly make their way out the back door last night at night for their ablutions before resuming position in front of the fireplace.

But according to one UK expert – Robert Young, who is Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Salford outside Manchester – this obesity in animals is, well, spreading.

A study published this year showed that more than 40% of elephants in captivity are obese. They are so obese that it is negatively affecting their longevity and fertility.

The serious side of all this is that – in both humans and animals, the consequences of all this for animals include diabetes, cancer, hypertension or heart-disease.

So in the case of pets we are killing them with kindness.

Same thing, as it turns out, with birds because we’re throwing bread out the back door at them instead of the food they have eaten since Adam left the Garden of Eden.

There’s good and bad in this one because the upside for our feathered friends – according to Professor Young who was contributing to the always thought-provoking website called the Conversation – is that it enhances their survival chances during cold winter months but it also reduced clutch sizes.

And whatever about dogs or cats that are too fat to walk, you have a real problem with birds if they’re too fat to fly.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.