Delaney Williams and I wondered if our cats (DQS and Salem (My sister's cat, Rachel) respectively) were overweight. In order to determine whether Salem and DQS were overweight cats or not, I decided to find a dataset of cat weights and visualize them in histogram form using python to see where the two cats were. Below are the final two histograms. The first one is the weight (in kilograms) of the body weight of a male cat. The second is the weight (in kilograms) of the body weight of a female cat:

Male Cats

Female Cats

My sister's cat was 15 pounds, and DQS was 18, which is 6.8 kg and 8.1 kg respectively, which seems super heavy according to this dataset. However, this cat dataset was collected in 1947, even though it appears to be the most cited publications for cat weights.

We decided to look for newer dataset publications. Delaney found an online forum of datasets from different animal shelters, 42 of which had the keyword "cat". However, none of them appeared to record the weight of the cats. https://catalog.data.gov/dataset?tags=cat

I found a newer publication from 2015 that studied cat weights in Australia, which found the following histogram:

According to this new study, our cats aren't really that fat. Woo hoo! However, this dataset was not made publically avalaible (as far as I could find), and hope someday to find an update-to-date open-source cat weight dataset.

Here are pictures of Salem and DQS, respectively, so you can decide for yourself

The data were obtained from

Fisher, R.A. (1947) The analysis of covariance method for the relation between a part and the whole. Biometrics, 3, 65–68.

https://github.com/mathisonian/datasets-cats

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167587716304068