Mike Wilson and Megan Hanneman work for a small private firm that makes special cat wall seats, shelves and ladders.
All this is done to make pampered and lazy house cats more comfortable and interesting to move around the apartment.
Mike and Megan have two cats living with them to “test” all the facilities, but about a month ago they decided to get another cat from the shelter. When they went to the local shelter, the first cat they came across was a kitty of incredible size named Bronson.
The cat was so fat he could barely walk and lay down most of the time. Mike and Megan didn’t take anyone from the shelter that day, but when they got home, all their conversations were about that fat cat.
The shelter administrator told them that Bronson is a very gentle and calm cat and that he is only 3 years old and that he came to the shelter after the death of his elderly owner, who most likely fed him greasy scraps from his plate.
Mike and Megan went back to the shelter the next day and they were determined to adopt Bronson and help him get his weight back to normal.
“Bronson turned out to be very affectionate and immediately started purring and pawing us when we started petting him. And then we saw that he had large extra toes on his paws. Bronson turned out to have polydactyly. His soft paws with those toes looked like mittens.
The boy and girl immediately took Bronson to the vet for a checkup. There they were told that it is very important for fat cats to lose weight as slowly as possible, since rapid weight loss can be fatal for them. They developed a special diet for the cat, and he gets 375 calories a day, of which half dry food and half wet food.
“At the vet clinic, Bronson charmed everyone, too. To look at our giant, all the doctors and nurses took turns coming into the room. They admired his thick ‘mittens’ and strong body.”
Bronson lay on the floor most of the day, but now they played with him for at least 20 minutes a day with different catnip toys. They also came up with the idea of carrying him away from his favorite pillow so that he would walk back to it on his own.
Then they came up with the idea of taking him to the top floor to go down the stairs, but when they saw that it was very hard for the cat to do that, they left the stairs for a later stage of weight loss.
To draw more attention to the cat’s weight loss problem, Mike and Megan started Bronson’s Instagram account. People gradually started adding to it, and when the cat was recently written about in the press, Bronson’s followers exceeded 50,000.
Bronson now has over 51,000 followers on Instagram. His original weight was 33 pounds (14.9 kilograms), and he now weighs 31.3 pounds (14.1 kilograms) a month later. At this slow and careful pace, Bronson stands a good chance of getting back to normal in a year.
