Girl seeks diet for chubby feline

By Amanda Gillooly

I admit it: I’m a bad mother. My cat, Lincoln, is a fat ass. I’ve denied it for more than a year, but now that his belly almost rubs the floor when he saunters across the room, I can no longer turn a blind eye to his rotund figure.

It isn’t like I haven’t tried to get him to drop some poundage. I’ve limited his food. I switched to the Big Boy brand for fat cats. I’ve thrown toys. But the only time he hauls ass is when I pretend to go to the basement.

Every time I open the door, he zooms past me and whizzes down the steps. But you can only fool him so many times. Linc might be morbidly obese, but he’s not dumb.

My uncle, who I live with, thinks that by calling the formidable gray and white cat such names as “Big Fat” and “Lard Ass” will somehow motivate him to get his heart rate up. I don’t think it’s done much but hurt his self-esteem.

But I digress. I’m actually worried. The cat door into the basement is becoming too small for Lincoln. As it is, every time he jumps through the door, it trembles in its frame. If he gets much bigger, he’s gonna be too big to get downstairs.

He has to be a good 30 pounds by now. That’s many, many pounds heavier than my youngest cat, George. But that doesn’t stop the black menace from attacking his older counterpart, taking bites out of his fur and causing the remaining hair to become matted.

Thing is, Linc is so damn big that he can’t stretch to clean any body part south of the nipples. When the clumps of hair became too pronounced last week, my uncle brushed him for several hours over several days to remove them.

It’s gotten so bad that I’ve turned to kitty uppers to help me energize my 5-year-old buddy. I get a stash of homegrown catnip from my boyfriend’s mother. After scarfing down most of the leafy green stuff, he rolls around in it. Sometimes, if I get lucky, he’ll bat around a toy mouse for a while afterward.

Short of buying a leash and walking him (which I believe would be a poor life choice), I don’t know what else to do. I’ve jeopardized my relationship with the publisher of this blog, Scotty B., for making this Web site look like a “cat blog.” But the purpose of these few paragraphs isn’t to entertain you; it’s to earnestly ask for some help.

I need a cat whisperer hardcore.