Too fat to walk: 17kg cat rescued from Russian hospital, put on diet

A cat living in the basement of a hospital in Russia was so overweight that he could not walk when rescuers found him.

The orange tabby tipped the scales at a massive 17kg – the average weight of a four-year-old child, according to media reports.

As a result, Kroshik, or Crumbs in English, was put on a diet and exercise regime at an animal shelter.

Rescuers said Kroshik was believed to have been abandoned and somehow found his way into the basement of the hospital in Perm, a city near the Ural Mountains.

Well-meaning staff at the hospital fed the feline with biscuits and soup.

“Kroshik’s story is an extremely rare case of someone loving a cat so much that they fed him to such a state,” the New York Post quoted a spokesperson for the Matroskin Shelter in Prem as saying.

Kroshik, who bears a striking resemblance to the cartoon character Garfield, is so obese that vets could not conduct an ultrasound scan because of his thick layers of fat.

For now, the feline is on a strict diet to ensure he sheds the excess weight.

He is also put on a treadmill as part of his weight-loss exercise.

He needs to lose about 70 per cent of his body weight to reach the ideal weight of 4.5kg, reported British tabloid The Sun.

This is not the first time that well-intentioned people have overfed animals.

In July 2024, a court in New Zealand sentenced a woman to two months’ jail for

overfeeding her pet dog to death.

The dog weighed 53.7kg when it was rescued in October 2021, having been fed eight to 10 pieces of chicken a day, on top of dog biscuits.