BIG as TEXAS!

Bringing Your Fat Cat Down to Fighting Weight

Crevice Dixon and I were lounging around one afternoon and the conversation turned to our 7 year old Tabbycat, Tex Richardson. We remembered when he was a slim, agile lad, ready to take on any other feline that questioned his dominance over our apartment complex. “Now look at him, the sorry sack of atrophy… West, you feed him too much,” blamed Crevice. Getting defensive, I responded “It’s not that… he never leaves the house… never gets any exercise!” This was true, he just liked to sleep, eat, and get rub-downs by Crevice, but the fact is that I kept his food bowl full because I didn’t want to hear any whining. So Crevice comes up with the idea of getting Tex on a fast-track diet and an exercise program. How were we going to get him to exercise? Was there some kind of giant gerbil wheel? Could we put him on a leash and run him while riding our bikes?... pull Crevice on his skateboard? So we brainstormed for a while and came up with this 3-step program which we hope to market in a pet store near you:

1) Starve His Ass! We put him back in the food chain, fighting for survival, and we locked him out of the house with only a bowl full of water for 2 weeks. In this situation he was tangling with dogs, skunks, possums, and other cats in the concrete jungle, and we hoped that just maybe his hunting instincts would kick in again. After this drastic drop in weight, it was time for some serious cardio work…

2) Run His Ass! There is no dangling carrot bigger than fear. So we strapped a harness on him, put him in his cat carrier, grabbed my deep-sea rod and reel, and headed off to Dusty Rhodes Dog Park. As soon as we got near the park Tex started to get squirrelly. He could smell the stench of canine from 500 yards out. It was time to tie the fishing line to the harness. He knew where he was, and he was getting as antsy as a chicken knowing there’s a fox in the henhouse. So we set the cat carrier containing Tex right in the middle of the dog park and opened the carrier gate. Immediately he shot out of there, juking, zigging and zagging. We let him get about 100 yards out then I set the drag on the reel, slowing him down to a stop, deep-sea rod bending like it had a 30 pound Bluefin on board (like a Volkswagen Bug body with a Mack truck engine!). Slowly I reeled this fighting fur-ball madness in while Crevice kept the dogs off him. We repeated this method 5 times, each time setting the drag on the reel tighter, like the friction on a treadmill. Then the final step…

3) Run His Ass Harder! This step used the cat carrier, rod and reel, but this time we changed to a more challenging venue… Dog Beach. This was no giant litter box, as Tex found out. This sand was deep and was littered with many scurrying wet, frothy, sweaty, stinking dogs with lolling tongues. This step proved very challenging to Tex because not only did he have to overcome a heavy drag, he had to jump as he ran to keep from getting bogged in sand.
If Tex could talk, we know he would be thanking us. He is now in the best shape of his life… back down to fighting weight!