Justine Lee

Cats have hair for a reason - and it’s not just to drive your allergic boyfriend nuts. That shedding hair does actually have a function. It helps protect your cat from the cold, heat, damaging UV rays, and biting arthropods (after all, those insects prefer your naked skin to getting a mouthful of fur!). It also acts as a protective barrier against any skin trauma that could occur while he’s brawling with the neighborhood tomcat.

Since your little fuzzy fur ball doesn’t have the option of donning a warm parka in the winter or getting buck-naked in the summer, your cat’s coat has to be able to adapt to environmental changes. During short daylight, his brain maintains a thicker coat for warmth. In the spring and summer months, you may find yourself Swiffering your house much more frequently because during longer daylight hours, your cat’s brain is affected by the changing photoperiod (the amount of daylight he is exposed to) and he may begin to shed more aggressively. For this reason, we vets don’t advocate shaving cats that spend a lot of time outdoors, as they will (a) sunburn, (b) get attacked by insects, (c) get skin scrapes, and (d) get ridiculed by neighborhood tomcats.

There are three stages of hair growth: the growing period, the transitional period, and the resting period. Once the hair has gone through all these stages, it stays in the follicle as a dead hair until it is shed or removed by grooming or licking. Your cat then tries to help you out by purging all that dead hair on your Oriental carpet at three a.m. Remember that cats normally shed some of their coat to get rid of dead hair; however, if your cat starts going bald, or if you and your family start itching, bring your cat to a veterinarian and your family to the human dermatologist. While you should share your love with your cat, you don’t want your cat to share his fleas, mites, or ringworm. That said, don’t blame your cat unnecessarily without good forensic evidence first. I once had a couple bring in their cat to euthanize as the couple was itching from their cat’s “crabs”; upon further investigation, apparently they had shed their human crabs to the cat, not vice versa! Gross! Thankfully, after a strict lesson on disease transmission, the cat was saved, and the owners were remorseful.

Material from It's a Cat's World... You Just Live In It, available at Amazon.com. More information available at www.drjustinelee.com. Copyright © 2008 Justine Lee Veterinary Consulting, LLC.