Fat Cats Disambiguation (tubby tabbies, or….?)

To (very loosely) paraphrase Murphy’s law :

 “If there’s a chance that something might be misunderstood, someone will come along and misunderstand it.”

That’s exactly what happened when Improbable came across a 2010 paper in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, entitled : ‘Novel dietary strategies can improve the outcome of weight loss programmes in obese client-owned cats’ A careful reading of the paper, however, revealed that it’s about cats which are obese, rather than cats with obese owners. But then another sentence jumped out:

“A total of 86 selected cats were identified during initial screening; two cats were recruited through the database, whilst the remaining 84 cats were recruited through the newspaper advertisements.”

– which is to say, Improbable believes, that the owners were recruited, not the cats. Improbable also noted that the study was funded by Royal Canin, the name of which might suggest to some that it manufactures dogfood – and it does – but Improbable finds that it also makes cat food. Royal Canin is owned by Mars Inc., a company which takes an interest in combating the escalating (human) obesity epidemic – it recently dropped its King Sized Snickers. Perhaps there’s still room for yet another misunderstanding though, because their commercial website, for distributors, not only continues to announce King Size Snickers® but also King Size Milky Way®, King Size Twix® and King Size M&M’s® Peanut Chocolate Candies.

Also see: Acute effects of a deep-fried Mars bar on brain vasculature