Cats’ natural drive to primp benefits their health
Have you ever noticed that your cat routinely primps more than a teenager before a big prom date?
Why all the fuss about the fur?
Instinctively cats know that a healthy coat of fur helps keep them hot or cold, depending on the season; distributes their unique scent – or cat-cologne, if you will – across their whole body; provides a first line of defense against external parasites; and provides a social bonding opportunity for cats to groom each other.
Adult cats spend up to 50 percent of their waking time in some form of grooming activity.
A cat’s coat is also a health barometer.
“Each of the hundreds of thousands of individual hairs are made of keratin (same thing claws are made of) and are 95 percent protein,” says Amy D. Shojai, author of “Complete Kitten Care.”
“And when cats feel bad, they stop grooming. That’s why one sign of feline malnutrition is dull, lifeless fur.”
Most cats have four types of hair in their coat:
• Down – short, fluffy with great insulating properties.
• Awn – mid-length hair.
• Guard – longer, straighter hairs.
• Vibrissae – specialized hairs called whiskers (most cats have 24 whiskers, divided equally on opposite sides of the face and arranged in four rows. They also have whiskers on their forelegs that help with pat-pat-patting objects.).
There are exceptions to the four-hair model.
For example, the Cornish Rex has no guard hairs, and the down and awn hairs are crimped, as are the whiskers.
The Persian has a long coat where even the down hairs are long, making the coat prone to matting.
And the unique hairless Sphynx typically has only a bit of fur on the extremities, with the rest of the body covered in peach-fuzz.
Mother Nature has equipped cats with a remarkable tongue that acts like a combination comb, brush and pet-hair pickup. Their raspy tongue, which someone once described as feeling like a caterpillar wearing golf spikes while walking across your finger or face, removes dead hair (which later comes out one end or the other as a hairball), removes dust or debris from the coat and provides the coat with loft.
For a cat, grooming comes as naturally as breathing. And most cats can groom themselves quite handily.
However, older cats, overweight cats and extravagantly furred breeds like Persians need some human help.
A cat with arthritis won’t be able to move comfortably to groom themselves effectively, and an overweight cat might not be able to reach all parts of its body. A cat that is ill might not feel like doing this “basic to being a cat” behavior.
Good grooming is so integral to being a cat, that if a cat stops grooming, that is a good reason to visit your veterinarian.
Cats are very ritualistic in their grooming behavior and can do it on autopilot. Kittens rely on mom to groom them for the first couple weeks of life (she’ll even lick around their anus to stimulate them to defecate), but by the third week they start a grooming process seared over the millennia to a very predictable front-to-back pattern.
Cats start by licking their lips, then using this moisture to wet the side of their paw. They take the damp paw and rub it over the side of their face.
This process is repeated for both sides of the face. After a good face washing, they lick, in order, their front legs, shoulder and side. Moving down the body they sequentially hike each rear leg straight up in the air while cleaning their genitals, then the legs themselves.
To finish, they lick their tail starting from the base and moving out to the end that flicks.
Yup, it’s a tip of the nose to the tip of the tail groom-a-thon.
The end result: a beautiful coat that’s ready for the human family members to caress – a caress that can sooth stresses, make you relax, or bring a smile to your face.