Thread: Please settle an argument ! lol

Originally Posted by inexcelsis

Don't want to hijack the thread, but it's sorta related:

We just took our boy for a check up at the vets. She said he wasn't overweight at all, but shouldn't get any heavier (6kg/ 13lbs) and gave a long lecture about measuring out food. I said that I heard that MC's were slow growers and took up to four years to fully develop. She scoffed at that and insisted that no cat grows after its first year, and that at 15 mos if there was any growth it would just be a bit of muscle.

Thoughts?

Find a new vet. 13 pounds would be on the lighter end of the male Maine Coon scale. What's true for a Munchkin cat is not true for a Maine Coon, so if the vet has no large breed knowledge, they need to be ditched. The male that we hope to father the kittens we're going to get, eventually, was about 12 pounds at 4 months when we saw him at his first show.

Originally Posted by inexcelsis

Don't want to hijack the thread, but it's sorta related:

We just took our boy for a check up at the vets. She said he wasn't overweight at all, but shouldn't get any heavier (6kg/ 13lbs) and gave a long lecture about measuring out food. I said that I heard that MC's were slow growers and took up to four years to fully develop. She scoffed at that and insisted that no cat grows after its first year, and that at 15 mos if there was any growth it would just be a bit of muscle.

Thoughts?

I have one boy who doesn't weigh much more than that & he is full adult but I agree that a vet who thinks "all cats" don't grow after a year should as suggested look into MC's as a breed,Welly put a final spurt on between 4 & 5 yrs old which confused me as all the others evened out at about 4,I am sure he grew overnight like they appear to do when younger,even had to get hubby to confirm my thoughts,his whole face had changed & he had gone up another full kg.......
MC's are a full new learning curve & the vets where I work now class themselves as "experts" on the breed,we have all learnt together about them & are still learning....xxxxx

I do like the idea of my baby still allowed to grow a bit - she's a tall cat, for a cat, but for a MC I think she's a bit on the smallish side. At the moment she doesn't eat very well, so she's oscillating between 5,5kg and 6kg at 2 and a half years old...
She used to eat and eat and eat - everything we put in her plate would just disapear in a flash and I could feed her up to 6 pouches and a bit of chicken and salmon per day (never forget the chicken!) now she has 2 halves of pouches, 2 handfuls of special MC dry food in her food maze, and sometimes about 100g of chicken... so - bottom line is she doesn't eat a lot any more, but she's not skinny by any means. But she doesn't seem to grow any more either. May be later.... :-)

Thanks for all of your input. I know two unrelated people that left this practice out of dissatisfaction, so I think I'll follow suit.

Originally Posted by inexcelsis

Thanks for all of your input. I know two unrelated people that left this practice out of dissatisfaction, so I think I'll follow suit.

Looks like you have had some very sound advise inexcelsis.