Cats, kittens, and chonkers

28 Jan, 2026

This has been a feline-heavy month. I mean, every month is feline-heavy when you live with five cats and your sister with another five, but this one's been special. So let's see.

Gaming

I've played Hidden Cats in Istanbul¹ and can't wait to get my hands in more titles of this series. So far I've only got this one and Spooky Town, which is still my favorite. But the best ones are from Devcats, if I'm honest. A Building full of Cats was my first game from them, but what made me fall in love was definitely A Castle Full of Cats, which has a more narrative gameplay. They're all available at a bunch of platforms; I myself play it on my Switch and it's a great companion game to listen to an audiobook or podcast. Highly recommend it!

Rescues

A dear friend and neighbor rescued a littler of five kittens a few weeks ago. They weren't older than twenty days, I believe, their eyes barely open and ears still flopped. It's the most adorable age if they have a mother to breast feed them, and the most worrying of ages if you gotta do it yourself. I've nursed a handful of neonatal kittens in my past of cat rescuer life, and I know the nightmare it is to wake up every 3 hours to bottle feed them, stimulate and wipe clean their little butts (kittens this young can't even do their business by themselves, guys) and change and reheat warm pads (they can't produce heat themselves so they need an external source)...

In the middle of the night, it's pretty normal to do all of this in tears due to sleep deprivation and absolute horror that you might fail them and they die because of you. No pressure.

So I'm helping her out as much as I can. I went over there to administer them their dewormer and give them the lightest of baths to remove street sludge. I also bought a bag of pet milk (which is super expensive) and checked to see if they needed anything else (flea treatment or probiotics etc). She's doing a pretty good job bottle feeding them. One already has a home!

The bad news is that even though the runt of the litter started putting on a little weight in the first week (from 118g to 122g; all her siblings were closer to the 200g mark at this stage), on the eight day she became unresponsive and cold and my friend rushed to the vet with her. But in the end she didn't make it... Gotta say, it doesn't get easier when you lose a little one. I always wonder what could've been done differently.

The other four are thriving, fortunately. Two certified girls (torties!) and two tuxedo kittens to be determined.

The dechonkification of cat

My own personal mission, however, is to de-chonkify my cat. Out of our five cats in the household, he's the only chonk, which tells me we're not overfeeding them, he's just... very food-motivated, I guess. We've started a new diet with a very expensive cat food specifically for chonks (aka "obese cats"), and we're separating him from the other cats. It's been a little bit of a nightmare though, because of course the other cats now want to eat the expensive dietary food, while the Chonk wants to eat his food and all the others'. Sigh.

So I can't leave even a single grain of regular cat food out because he will be chomping down on that... which also means the other cats, who are used to having a little bit of cat food laying around, are now complaining and wanting to be fed more often because of that. It's. A. Nightmare.

But we'll figure it out. I've also been trying to take my Chonk (his name's Snow btw) to walks up and down the halls of the building, have him go up and down the stairwells and all, to get him moving. He hates it guys, all he wants is to lay down and chomp on my neighbors' plants (which of course are not entirely cat-safe so there's that).

Final words

So there's that. I hope to bring good news about the dechonkification process soon! Have a good one.

#blog #cats #eng