How to apply scale to object with animations?

i found this stray cat on the internet and adopted it.


the only problem is it’s the size of a house, so i scaled it to cat size because i like to import assets into unity at their natural, real world size.
so far, so good, looks ok and animates ok using the animations that came with it.
the problem is, when i apply the scale transform with ctrl-A, i get this

scaling the mesh in edit mode gets the same result.

any ideas how to scale it and apply the scale? thanks