A cat in Russia was found to be a whopping 17 kg – equivalent to a small human child – when it was rescued from the basement of a hospital, where the staff had been feeding him an over-the-top diet of biscuits and soup.
The orange tabby cat, named Kroshik or ‘Crumbs’ in Russian, was rescued and is believed to have been living in the basement after being abandoned by his previous owners, the Daily Mail reported.
Kroshik had been enjoying the rich diet and growing in size, to a point where he couldn’t even walk. Rescue workers took Kroshik to a veterinarian in the city of Perm. At the clinic, doctors struggled to conduct an ultrasound on the chubby feline due to its weight and put the cat on a diet. He is also expected to sporadically walk on a treadmill to shed some fat.
“Kroshik’s story is an extremely rare case when someone loved a cat so much that they fed him to such a state,” workers at the Matroskin Shelter told local media, the Daily Mail reported.
The shelter workers plan to make Kroshik work out and stay on a healthy diet until he loses three-fourths of his weight and is back up to speed.
Overfeeding pets, even if meant as a good thing, often leads to disaster. In a similar case, a woman in New Zealand was sentenced to two months in prison after she overfed her dog, named Nuggi, to an extreme 53 kg. She was feeding him up to 10 pieces of chicken and dog biscuits without any physical exercise. Despite losing nearly 9 kg in two months, Nuggi died from a liver haemorrhage.
