Fending away nasty furballs
Cats groom themselves for about 2-3 hours a day.
You are woken in the middle of the night by a horrible, persistent retching sound.
In your mad panic to find the offending cat, you stub your toe on the bed leg as you stumble to grab them and lift them outside or on to the lino.
But alas, you don’t quite make it. With neck and tongue outstretched, your furry feline deposits with projectile force a long, fluid-covered sausage at your feet on the carpet, or worse, the duvet. It looks like something that should come out the other end.
The Russian in the movie Cats ‘n Dogs does a great impression.
In the middle of the night it’s hard to determine what it is, but almost certainly it will be a furball or trichobezoar – someone was having a laugh when they came up with that name.
So what is a furball?
Cats ingest a lot of hair when they groom themselves, along with all sorts of other bits from the garden and the odd flea if we haven’t used a good flea product.
The hair clumps together and gradually builds up as the stomach contents slosh around. If the clump gets to a certain size, it won’t be able to leave the stomach through the outlet leading towards the blunt end. So it sits in there, gradually getting bigger.
Cats, and especially long-haired cats, groom themselves for about 2-3 hours a day. It’s a sign of a healthy cat. As kittens, the mother grooms them until they are 4 weeks old. After that they begin to groom each other and by 6-8 weeks, they should be grooming themselves.
Cats are amazing little guys. Check out their tongue. It has hundreds of backward-pointing spikes designed to lap liquid and rake through their coat, pulling out loose hair along with any dirt. It is difficult to move hair forward past these spikes and therefore everything is generally swallowed.
Grooming also has the function of keeping them cool, as the saliva deposited on the fur evaporates. Cats don’t have many sweat glands other than in areas like their feet – hence the term – ‘‘sweaty paws’’. People sometimes think their friend has had a little accident in the carry cage when they come to see me, but they have often just been sweating through their paws.
We have had to help a few larger and a few elderly furry friends lately that have come in with a small carpet attached to their lower back. These large clumps of matted fur build up because they are unable to reach that area.
A quick No 1 blade and problem is solved for a while. Others get more extensively matted and need a ‘‘lion clip’’, as we call it.
Sometimes it is impossible to avoid because some cats will rip you to shreds rather then have a comb anywhere near them, but others just need a bit of regular maintenance every day at home to stop the problem getting out of control. So back to furballs. Eventually, the furball in the stomach causes enough irritation to stimulate them to vomit, but the size of the furball often requires a fair bit of expulsion – especially at 2am.
Hairballs can also cause problems further down. If they pass into the intestines and are a reasonable size, they can cause an obstruction. These are difficult as they don’t show up on a plain X-ray film.
So what about prevention?
❚ Mild laxative products for longhaired cats. These are flavoured paraffin- or oil-based pastes applied to their food or paws every few days
❚ Regular grooming with a good comb or cat hair rake, if they will let you
❚ Specially formulated foods that contain oils.
Retching to bring up a furball can be easily confused with a cough due to a respiratory disease.
Other patients particularly prone to furballs are cats with itchy skin conditions that over-groom themselves.
And with these warm days there have been a lot of itchy cats and dogs and lots of grooming to cool down. Correction of the itch will solve the furball problem.