--- title: "Reddit’s r/cats fills with photos of adopted cats that turned from scruffy strays into puffballs" url: https://badiyaa.com/adopted-cats-fluff-up-reddit-puffball/ published: 2026-11-09T21:05:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-09T21:05:00+00:00 section: Pets & Animals publisher: Badiyaa --- # Reddit’s r/cats fills with photos of adopted cats that turned from scruffy strays into puffballs A stray adopted in June as medium-haired had become a puffball by November, and owners blamed stress, food and the seasons in a thread that reached Reddit's r/all feed. A cat adopted as “medium-haired” in June had, by November, become what her owner calls a puffball, and the photo set off a long thread of owners posting the same surprise. The post went up on the r/cats forum on Reddit under the title “Did anyone else’s cat ‘fluff up’ after adoption?” An automated moderator note on the thread says it reached the site’s r/all and r/popular feeds, the pages that pull in readers far beyond one community. > “I thought we were adopting a ‘medium-haired’ cat lmao, she has very quickly turned into a puffball. I’m not complaining!” Her owner added in the replies that the cat was a stray found in a barn with many other cats, and spent only a few days at the shelter before going home with the family. ## More than 100 photos, one recurring plot Commenters answered with their own pairs of pictures. One owner adopted a nine-month-old that looked like a shorthair, then watched a mane arrive around her first birthday. Another said vet paperwork had listed a now very fluffy cat as a domestic shorthair. A third described a former stray as going “from scraggly skeleton to floofy chonk.” One reply compared the change to “a 3 stage Pokemon evolution.” The most useful numbers came from an owner whose cat weighed 9.5 pounds at adoption and 15 pounds six months later. That is a gain of 5.5 pounds, or about 58 percent of his starting weight (5.5 divided by 9.5), and the owner says he had been around six pounds underweight when he arrived. ## Three explanations the thread keeps returning to A commenter who said they once ran a cat adoption center offered the stress theory: “Stressed cats can stop grooming themselves so their fur looks unkempt.” Cats do spend a large share of their day washing, [licking their coats clean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat), so on that theory a cat that quits has a coat that shows it. Food is the second theory. Owners in the thread argued that a stray eating whatever it can catch has little left over for growing fur. The veterinary school at Cornell University describes cats as [obligate carnivores](https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institutes/cornell-feline-health-center/health-information/feline-health-topics/feeding-your-cat) that need more than a dozen nutrients beyond protein and fat, which is a demanding menu for an animal living rough in a barn. The third is the calendar, and the original poster raised it herself. Cats carry thicker fur through cold months and [shed down to a lighter coat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulting) around spring and summer. A cat adopted in June and photographed in November is being compared across exactly that swing. ## What the photos cannot prove Age muddies the picture too. Several of the most dramatic pairs start with a kitten, and owners of those cats say the adult coat arrived later. Nobody in the thread ran a controlled comparison, and we found no study in the pages we read that measures coat change between shelter and home, so these remain owners’ accounts rather than findings. Seasonal timing also gives the thread its next test. The owner who started it wrote that she is curious what happens next spring and summer, when her puffball’s winter volume should start to drop. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Moulting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulting) - [Wikipedia: Cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat) *Illustrative image. Image: Hollakr, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*