[Fleecewife]

That's the thing - nobody owns a cat  .  They might permit you to provide them with a home but they belong only to themselves.  A long time ago, back in our RAF days, we had several cats including Polkinghorne (I know - he was named after the person who gave his mother a home - too good a name to miss  ).  Polky was a randy Tom and got up to all sorts of infamous tricks around the air bases (including climbing in the Wing Commander's pantry window, spending the whole night eating their thawing turkey then being totally unable to jump back out) so that eventually there was no option but to take him for the snip    He left home in a huff  after that and was found 7 weeks later and many pounds heavier having convinced some innocent householder that he was homeless, and starving.  This gave him the brilliant idea of pretending to various people that he was a stray so for many years he had several 'owners' wherever we lived - and of course they all fed the poor starving wee soul - who could barely walk sometimes after the amount of food he had scrumped.  Eventually one of his new 'owners' was posted elsewhere and took Polkinghorne with them so we never saw him again.

[SallyintNorth]

Great story fleecewife 

I had a cat similarly learned the, "No-one feeds me I'm a starving waif," thing, but he'd had a broken hip and would get really stiff and sore if he got overweight.  So when he started putting on weight I'd strap a sticky-backed plastic-covered postcard to his collar, explaining that he did have a loving home and plenty of food, but was very greedy, unfortunately his bad hip would give him a lot of grief if he did get overweight and please would people not feed him.  It always worked - I had to do it once or twice a year!