Last Updated on June 4, 2026 by admin
The pantry door was solid wood. Patches headbutted through it.
This is a cat who, when he was first surrendered to Richmond Animal Care and Control in 2023, weighed forty-two pounds. That is roughly the weight of three average house cats stacked on top of each other. The shelter posted his picture on Facebook with a caption that called him gloriously gluttonous. Within a week, he was a national story. Within two weeks, he had been adopted by a Mechanicsville woman named Kay Ford, who saw the photo and decided she was going to be the person who helped him live longer than the vets predicted.
He is eight years old now. He weighs about seventeen pounds. He is one pound away from goal.
When Patches first came home, Ford fed him five small meals a day. He cried in between every single one of them. She switched him to four. He cried less. She started counting his calories the way you count macros for a bodybuilder, which, in a way, is what she was raising — a cat who could no longer rely on the muscle mass underneath all that fat to support him. Walking hurt. Stairs were impossible. His back legs gave out if he tried to stand too fast.
Three years later, he climbs his own cat tree.
He still headbutts. Patches is what his owner calls a steamroller. He leans his entire body weight into things he wants — laps, doors, knees, the corner of the kitchen island when he thinks dinner is late. In late January of this year, the steamroller broke. He pushed his head against the pantry door, which contained his food, and the pantry door gave. Ford described the moment to local reporters with the resigned affection of a person whose cat has just committed light vandalism for snacks.
He has 54,000 followers on Facebook. They send him birthday cards. One of them, a Virginia woman named Katie Chlan, lost more than 100 pounds and ran a marathon after watching his progress posts for two years. She drove to Mechanicsville to meet him at a bookshop called Books, Beads & More in April. Patches sat on the table. He let her pet him. He looked, by all accounts, completely unbothered.
There was a scare in March. Patches stopped eating his lunch — which, if you have followed this cat for any length of time, is the equivalent of the moon falling out of the sky. He hissed when people approached. Ford took him in. The vet diagnosed arthritis, most likely related to years of carrying too much weight. He went on medication. He is, the latest update says, back to demanding lunch on schedule.
The thing about a chonky cat story is that the chonk is never the point. The point is that someone looked at forty-two pounds of cat that vets had basically given up on and said, all right. We’ll try.
Three years. Twenty-three pounds. One bookshop appearance. One marathon. One pantry door.
And according to a three-year anniversary update from his local CBS station, Patches is still going.
What does your cat do when dinner is late? Tell us in the comments. 🐱