SnookieI was filling my cup at the coffee bar in Animal Care Clinic the other when I noticed one of the little Coffeemate creamer cups open on the floor. I laughed and took it to the reception desk to show them how silly our clients can be – offering œmilk  to our hospital cat, Snookie! The guilty faces revealed to me that it was our office manager that was treating Snookie! She defended herself by saying that it was just a little bit and he rarely drank the whole thing – she was doing this everyday!

If you have been in to Animal Care Clinic lately, you know we are emphasizing weight loss, and in fact have a display charting Snookie ™s weight loss progress (he is not exactly svelte!) We often forget that animals are much smaller than us – what seems like a small snack to me can be a massive meal to a cat.  Snookie weighs about 10 pounds and is overweight. Compared to a 150 pound person, he is 15 times smaller or 1/15 of our size. A Coffeemate creamer has only 30 calories in it, but when you multiply that by 15 you get a 450-calorie snack! That is equal to a Starbucks caramel Frapuccino with whip cream, an order of Wendy ™s Biggie fries or a Jack-in-the-Box double cheeseburger for you an me! Even a cream filled doughnut has fewer calories for a person than this little creamer has for our pudgy cat!

Please keep this in mind when you feed your pets snacks – make them small and healthy. For more weight loss tips, visit us or give us a call.

by Bonnie Markoff, DVM, ABVP