Grooming and Coat Care.

A cat can spend up to a quarter of her waking hours grooming. That is not vanity. It is a full-time maintenance department: temperature control, scent management, parasite patrol, skin repair, and, between cats who like each other, diplomacy.

Which means the coat is the most honest readout you have of what is going on inside her. A glossy, smooth, clean cat is a cat whose joints bend, whose mouth does not hurt, whose kidneys and thyroid are behaving and who is not itching. A greasy, spiky, dandruffy or matted cat is almost never a cat who has got lazy. She is a cat who has stopped being able to do the job, and the pattern of where she has stopped tells you why.

So this guide is in two halves. The first is maintenance: which brush, how often, how to deal with a knot without ending up at the emergency vet. The second is diagnosis: how to read a coat that has changed, and why the answer is usually a vet rather than a better brush. There is a short, important section at the end on the products that can poison her, including a whole category that should never be in the house.

If you have ever been licked by a cat you know the tongue is sandpaper. Under a microscope it is worse: hundreds of tiny backward-facing hooks made of the same keratin as her claws. Each hook is hollow at the tip and wicks up saliva, so every stroke pushes the hooks down past the top coat to the skin, releases the saliva there to cool and condition, and then drags back up through the fur like a rake, collecting dead hair, dander and anything else.

The design has one flaw. The hooks point backwards, towards the throat. Whatever they catch cannot be spat out. It can only go one way, which is why a cat who has just had a thorough wash sits there making that small, thoughtful swallowing face. Every loose hair she grooms off goes down.

Hair is keratin, and keratin does not dissolve in stomach acid. Normally it passes through in small quantities and comes out the other end. When more goes in than the gut can move along, it collects, rolls, and felts into a plug, which eventually irritates the stomach enough to come back up. It is tube-shaped because it was squeezed back out through a tube.

The hairball rule. The occasional one, especially in a longhaired cat in spring or autumn, is common, though vets are not agreed that any hairball is truly normal. Every fortnight, every week, or every few days is not normal, and is not a grooming problem to be solved with a hairball paste. It means one of two things. Either she is swallowing far too much hair because she is over-grooming, usually because something itches. Or the amount of hair is normal and her gut has stopped moving it along, which is how inflammatory bowel disease and other gut problems can quietly announce themselves. Either way, frequent hairballs are a vet conversation, and a brush is only half the answer.

A cat is not wearing one coat. She is wearing three, and they come out of the same follicles together.

On top are the guard hairs: long, straight, thick, and waterproof. The glossy layer you see. Underneath are the awn hairs, slightly wavy, a bit finer, doing the middle work of protection and warmth. At the bottom is the down, the undercoat: fine, crimped, packed tight against the skin to trap warm air. It is the undercoat that sheds in bulk twice a year, and the undercoat that mats, and the undercoat that a brush skating across the surface never touches.

The proportion varies by breed. A Siamese or a Bengal has almost no undercoat and barely needs you. A British Shorthair has a dense, plush double coat that feels like a carpet and sheds like one. A Persian has a long top coat over a thick down and will mat in days if left; a Maine Coon's silkier coat mats more slowly, mostly on the belly and in the armpits. Knowing which of the three you own tells you which tool and how often. The rest of this guide assumes you have looked.

You need two. Possibly three. Not the drawer full you have now.

The slicker brush. A flat pad of fine wire pins, each bent at the tip. The bend is the point: it hooks dead undercoat that straight bristles slide over. Cat skin is thin, so the pins must have rounded or coated tips or you will give her brush burn and she will leave. Good for medium and long coats, for the layers between surface and skin. Never dragged through an established knot.

The metal comb. A stainless steel comb with polished round teeth, fine at one end and wide at the other. Groomers call it a Greyhound comb. It is the most important tool you will own, because it is the only one that tells the truth. A brush floats over the top of the coat and makes it look done. A comb goes from skin to tip and either glides or catches. If it glides everywhere, she is clear. If it catches, there is a knot forming at the skin and you have found it before it became a mat. Use it after every brush, on every section.

The rubber curry or grooming glove. Soft rubber nubs that grip loose surface hair by friction and static while massaging the skin and spreading her natural oils. The right tool for shorthairs and for nervous cats who flinch at metal. Useless on long coats, where it drags and pulls.

The de-shedding rake. The tightly spaced steel blade that pulls out startling quantities of undercoat. Brilliant in April and October on a dense double coat, and damaging the rest of the time: used too often or too hard it can cut the healthy guard hairs and leaves the top coat dull and thin. Once a month in moulting season, lightly, and otherwise in the drawer.

Lilou, for the record, is a shorthair who tolerates the glove, resents the comb, and has never been introduced to the rake because she would not survive the indignity.

The mistake everyone makes is brushing the way you would stroke her: long sweeps down the back, over the top of the coat. It makes the guard hairs look lovely and it presses the loose undercoat flat against the skin, where warmth and friction turn it into felt. You are, with great affection, manufacturing mats.

Line brushing is the method for anything longer than a shorthair. With one hand, part the coat sideways and push the top layer up until you can see a line of pale skin. With the slicker, brush the fur below that line outwards, from root to tip, with light wrist flicks. Let down a centimetre of hair. Repeat. Work from the legs and belly upwards across the flanks and back. After each strip, run the metal comb from skin to tip; if it catches, tease the knot apart with your fingers before moving on. It sounds laborious. On a Maine Coon it is ten minutes a day, and the alternative is a shave.

A mat starts as a few shed hairs that did not fall out and got wrapped round the hairs still growing. Over a few days it collects skin oil, dander and dust and tightens into felt. As it tightens, it pulls. The skin beneath is drawn up into the centre of the knot. Left long enough, neighbouring mats join into a single felted sheet, which pulls constantly, restricts how she moves, bruises the skin underneath, traps moisture and heat, and breeds infection. In summer, a pelted cat is at real risk of flystrike. This is not cosmetic. It hurts.

Where to look. Mats form where friction, moisture and awkward angles meet: the armpits and the groin, where the legs rub; behind the ears, where she sleeps and the collar sits; the fluffy trousers at the back, which get soiled; the belly, which she will not let you near; and, in older and heavier cats, the lower back and the base of the tail, which she can no longer twist round to reach. Check these with the comb, weekly, even on a cat who looks fine from above.

Never cut a mat out with scissors. It is a common cause of accidental wounds in cats. Her skin is thin and stretchy, only about half a millimetre to two millimetres thick, and the mat has pulled a cone of it up into itself. What looks like a clear gap of hair between knot and body is very often skin. The scissors close, the skin opens, and she is under anaesthetic having it stitched. A tight mat is removed with clippers, dry, by someone who does it for a living.

Never bath a matted cat. It seems logical and it is the opposite. Wet hair swells, the scales on each shaft lock together, and as it dries the mat shrinks and welds itself to the skin. The water underneath cannot get out. Now you have a tighter mat over macerated, infected skin.

Small knots, caught early, come apart with fingers, and a little cornflour can help reduce the grip. Anything bigger than a fingertip, or anything that has been there more than a few days, is a groomer or vet job. There is no shame in it. There is a great deal of shame in the alternative.

A cat who has always kept herself immaculate and stops has not become lazy. Grooming needs three things: a body that bends, a mouth that does not hurt, and the energy to bother. Lose any one and the coat goes. The pattern of where it goes is the clue.

Clean front, scruffy back. The chest and front legs are tidy; the lower back, the base of the tail and the back legs are greasy and matted. In a longhair you get thick felted strips along the spine that groomers call dinosaur ridges. This is arthritis. Over 90 percent of cats past twelve have it on X-ray, few of them limp, and the first thing they stop doing is the twist round to reach their own back end. Look for a cat who thinks twice before jumping, or has started missing the litter tray edge.

Greasy all over, brown stains on the chin and front paws, dribbling. The tongue is the grooming tool, and it drags against the teeth and gums on every stroke. When the mouth is inflamed, grooming hurts, and she stops. Stomatitis, tooth resorption, which affects roughly a third or more of adult cats, and bad periodontal disease all present this way. Add bad breath, eating on one side, or dropping food, and it is a dental appointment.

Dry, spiky, with heavy white dandruff. Kidneys. Chronic kidney disease dehydrates her from the inside, the skin flakes, and she does not feel well enough to groom. If she is also drinking more, weeing more and losing weight, do not wait for the next annual check.

Greasy, clumped, thinning, and she is eating like a horse while getting thinner. Thyroid. Hyperthyroidism speeds everything up, including the shedding cycle and the oil glands. She will also be restless, possibly sick, possibly loud at night.

Thin, dull coat with flaking, in a cat who drinks a lot. Diabetes. The follicles are starved of fuel. A cat who has started walking on her hocks has diabetic nerve damage and needs a vet within 24 hours, and the same day if she is also unwell, not eating or vomiting.

Matted spine and a soiled back end in a round cat. Obesity, which is not a character flaw but a mechanical one: she physically cannot fold far enough to reach.

In every one of these, the brush is not the fix. It is the reason you noticed.

The opposite problem: a cat who grooms so much she licks herself bald, usually in neat symmetrical patches on the belly, the inside of the thighs, the flanks or the lower back. For decades this was called psychogenic alopecia and blamed on stress, boredom, or the new baby. Most of the time, it was wrong.

A study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association took 21 cats who had been referred with a diagnosis of stress-related over-grooming and worked them up properly: skin scrapes, fungal cultures, food trials, allergy tests, biopsies. Sixteen had a purely medical cause. Three had a medical cause with a habit on top. Two, out of twenty-one, were actually just anxious. Over 90 percent of the cats everyone had decided were neurotic were itchy.

The itch is usually an allergy: to flea saliva, most often, then to something in the food, then to the environment. You will rarely see her scratch. Cats groom in private and at night, and all you see is the result. Tiny scabs along the neck and back, or a bald lower back and tail base, are the classic flea allergy signs, and they can be caused by a single flea you will never find.

The other reason a cat licks a patch bare is that it hurts underneath. A cat with cystitis licks the fur off her lower belly, directly over the bladder. A cat with a sore knee or wrist licks that joint raw. She is not anxious. She is treating herself with the only tool she has.

The vet can tell over-grooming from hair that is falling out on its own with a microscope: plucked hairs that have been licked off are broken with jagged ends, hairs that have fallen out are tapered and whole. It takes five minutes. Ask for it before anyone reaches for a diagnosis of stress, and treat stress as what is left after everything else has been ruled out.

Most cats never need a bath. A healthy cat is self-cleaning, and a bath strips the oils she has spent all week distributing. The exceptions are a cat who has got into something, a cat who cannot groom herself, and a cat whose vet has prescribed a medicated wash. For those, the product matters more than you would think, for two reasons.

Her skin is a different pH from yours. Human skin is acidic, around 5. Cat skin sits close to neutral, around 6.4 to 7. Every human shampoo, including the gentlest baby formula, is built for the acidic one. On a cat it disrupts the barrier, the outer skin swells, the lipids between the cells wash out, and she is left dry, flaky, itchy and open to the bacteria and yeast that were waiting for exactly this. Her outer skin layer is a fraction of the thickness of yours. There is not much margin.

Whatever goes on, goes in. She will lick it off. Every product on her coat is an oral dose within the hour. Which brings us to the list.

Essential oils, as a category. Cats lack the liver enzyme, UGT1A6, that the rest of us use to break down the aromatic compounds in plants. The gene is there; it is broken. So the molecules in tea tree, eucalyptus, citrus, peppermint, wintergreen, lavender and pennyroyal, which to you are a nice smell, go into her bloodstream through the skin or the lungs or the tongue and stay there, building up in the brain and the liver. Tea tree causes staggering, a dangerously low temperature and liver damage. Eucalyptus causes drooling, vomiting, weakness and sometimes seizures. Citrus oils cause drooling, wobbliness and a low temperature. Pennyroyal destroys the liver and can be fatal. This is not a dose question. The natural flea spray, the calming diffuser, the lavender pillow mist, the reed sticks in the hall: none of them belong in a house with a cat in it. The word natural is doing a great deal of work on those labels, and none of it is for her.

The coat changes slowly, which is exactly why you miss it. The cat you see every day looks the same every day, right up until the vet runs a hand down her back and asks how long it has been like this.

The Maleb's Tracker has a coat field for this reason. Once a week, after the comb, note it: glossy or dull, where the knots were, how many hairballs, any bald patches. Photograph her from above once a month in the same light. In six months you will have the thing no vet can get from a ten-minute appointment: the trend.

She grooms for up to a quarter of her waking life. When she stops, or cannot stop, the coat says so first. Read it.

A change in your cat's coat, hairball frequency, or grooming habits that lasts more than a couple of weeks is a reason to see your vet. If you think she has been exposed to an essential oil or a medicated shampoo, phone the vet now rather than waiting for symptoms.