#RETURN OF THE NEKKID KITTY

[solarishashernoseinabook]

(Image ID in the alt text)

Whelp, the nekkid kitty returns. She looks like a tiny goblin.

Chico's gonna be 23 in a couple of months. She's definitely showing her age. There's been a couple changes from the last time I updated everyone on her, though.

Some time around April or May, we introduced wet food into her diet. She used to eat dry food and would feed out of her bowl whenever she got hungry, and would eat between 50 and 75 grams of food a day. She was so skeletally thin her ribs stuck out, but she threw up undigested food regularly. In an attempt to get her to eat more, we gave her some wet treats and she loved them, so we tried wet food. Folks she went positively feral for that stuff, I held the tin under her mouth and she ate a good deal of it before I was able to get the tin away to put the food on a plate. Now she eats 170 grams of wet food a day.

What does this have to do with getting her shaved? Well, we got her shaved in June last year because she wasn't grooming herself and her winter fur got all matted. Her inner coat grew in after a couple of months, but her outer coat never came back - until we introduced the wet food, when it came back in a couple of weeks. That is, her winter coat came back - right when she should have been losing it. And without grooming herself, it got matted again before we figured out it was her winter coat, so we missed our opportunity to brush it for her. Not making that mistake again, we're gonna start brushing her regularly from now on - and she's at least grooming her paws herself again, which is an improvement.

Not all the news is so good, though. When she was last weighed in April she weighed 4.85 pounds. We thought for sure that with her appetite tripling that she'd gained some weight, and we could feel that weight on her. Turns out she's currently at 4.65 pounds. Average for a female domestic shorthair cat is between 6 and 16 pounds. I think the weight has redistributed slightly, but the fact that she's continuing to lose so much is concerning. I've seen enough personality changes in her that I feel confident saying the changes to her diet have given her more energy, though, and anything that makes her happier right now is good in my books.

One bright spot: the vet tech who spoke with me on the phone after her appointment says she observed Chico's grooming for a few minutes and said she was the best behaved cat she's ever seen :"3