Mars is a Bengal. He's mine. For eight years he cleared the top of the fridge in one jump — until he didn't. He started going up via the counter, and I called it him mellowing out.
A few months later I could feel his spine under my hand when I stroked him. He was still eating. The bowl still emptied. I called it him getting older.
One afternoon at the vet we found three things at the same time: degenerative joint disease in the hips. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Kidney markers already elevated. He was eight years old.
The plan was "keep him comfortable." I drove home with him yowling in the carrier the way he always does, and somewhere on that drive I stopped accepting that plan.
Months of reading led me to the sentence I couldn't get out of my head: older cats don't stop eating — they stop absorbing. Same bowl, less in. And when the bowl runs a deficit, the body borrows from the only reserve it has left. Muscle. The spine I could feel was Mars eating himself to stay alive.
I built Meows M-1 because six supplement bottles on my counter wasn't a system. Nothing on the shelf did the job of what a cat actually eats in the wild — because nothing on the shelf was built for the deficit.
Mars is ten now and he is doing better than ever.