Obesity affects over 50% of pet cats and causes significant welfare harm through joint pain, diabetes, and reduced quality of life that is largely preventable.
Feline obesity is a welfare emergency hiding in plain sight: overweight cats are so common that both owners and veterinarians have normalized weight excess. Yet obese cats suffer genuinely - they cannot groom their hindquarters properly (causing skin disease and flea burden), develop painful arthritis that prevents normal movement and play, are at dramatically elevated risk of diabetes, and have reduced life expectancy. The chronic welfare harm of obesity accumulates across years, reducing the quality of a cat's life with every additional year of excess weight. Prevention through appropriate portion control, high-protein wet food diets, and environmental enrichment that encourages activity is far more straightforward than weight loss in an already obese cat.