Last Updated on July 2, 2026 by admin
Picture a house cat the size of a Thanksgiving turkey with legs. That was Patches on the day he arrived at a Richmond, Virginia shelter — 42 pounds of orange-and-white cat, too round to reach around and groom his own back.
The staff at Richmond Animal Care and Control had never put anything like him on the scale. Most house cats top out around 8 to 12 pounds, according to the Cornell Feline Health Center. Patches was carrying the weight of four of them.
They posted his photo to Facebook on a Wednesday in April 2023, half-hoping someone brave would take a chance on him. He was adopted within hours.
A cat too heavy to groom his own back has lost more than half of himself — and 54,000 strangers have cheered every single pound.
The someone was Kay Ford, who drove home to Mechanicsville with a cat she could barely lift. Patches couldn’t jump. He couldn’t walk far. What he could do was eat, and for most of his life, that had been the whole problem.
Ford didn’t crash-diet him — you can’t, not safely, with a cat this size. She started him on five small measured meals a day, then cut him back to four, counting calories like a line cook. Progress came in ounces, not pounds.
She documented all of it on Facebook, and the internet fell for him hard. Patches now has more than 54,000 followers who track his weigh-ins, his naps, and his slow, stubborn shrink. Three years in, CBS 6 in Richmond reported he had dropped 23 pounds and settled around 17.
One outlet described him as “liberated from his girth,” which Ford would probably appreciate. She has never once framed him as a punchline. To her he’s just Patches — a sweet cat who earned a second body to go with his second chance.
It hasn’t been a straight line. Earlier this year he started hissing and skipping lunch, which is deeply out of character for him. His vet suspects arthritis or an old back injury — the quiet bill for years spent hauling too much around — and put him on anti-inflammatories and gabapentin while he rests. Ford confined him to one bedroom to heal, and her followers held their breath right alongside her.
He’s still here. Still orange, still stubborn, still shrinking one careful ounce at a time — the cat once called the biggest anyone had ever seen, now closing in on a goal weight. When TODAY first covered him, nobody was sure he’d get this far.
How much does your cat weigh? Drop the number in the comments 👇