When your over-groomed cat starts grooming you

From time to time my feline housemates receive letters from readers who are bewildered by their cats’ behavior. Here is a letter to my cat Saffy about a seemingly obsessive Siamese.

Dear Saffy,

I have this Siamese cat who goes by the name Prince, and he assumes he’s royalty because I call him that. I’m writing you because his recent grooming habits have come to include me.

Here’s our routine. When I get home, the click of the door sends him running from his room upstairs. While I take off my shoes he starts rubbing against my legs. The Siamese are long cats.

While I’m changing to my house clothes he’s a foot away, meowing loudly. He will be meowing me to my death if I don’t pick him up and cradle him like a baby. Have I mentioned that when I talk to Prince he meows back?

Later I’ll be sitting on the sofa doing nothing or reading a book, and Prince will heave himself onto my stomach and curl up into a ball. Then he starts to groom himself. He licks himself all over and washes his face. He bites his fur and pulls it. This takes a very long time. Just when you think he’s about to cough up a hairball that could sink the Titanic, he repeats the entire process.

After what seems like hours, the weird stuff begins. He starts licking my shirt. At first I thought he’d missed a spot, but he keeps licking the same spot on my shirt until it’s moist. He doesn’t quit until I shoo him away. Whereupon he stares at me as if he is deeply offended, meows, and gets up on the window sill.

He’s done this quite a lot of times, and I suspect he’ll be doing this again when I get home. I am writing to you, Saffy, because I want to know  — what’s up with Prince?

Licked, momel

Dear Momel,

From your description Prince’s routine seems perfectly normal. The amount of time we cats spend grooming ourselves may seem excessive to you humans (We find your personal habits a bit lax, but that is another matter), but fur is a very high-maintenance outer covering. Put it this way: your most prized outfits require professional dry-cleaning or hand-washing. We’re not about to send our fur to the laundry, so we have to do it ourselves.

Cats lick their fur to clean it, of course, and to maintain the smooth sheen. However, our grooming habits are not based purely on vanity. As Desmond Morris pointed out in his book Catwatching, cat fur acts as an insulating layer. In cold climates, smooth, well-kept fur is a more efficient insulator. Here at home, grooming helps us to maintain our cool in this sizzling summer heat.

See, we don’t have sweat glands all over our bodies so we lack natural air-conditioning. When you see us panting, we’re not making fun of dogs; we feel hot. So we lick our fur to let the saliva evaporate on our skin and lower our body temperature.

Do us a favor this summer and brush our coats every now and then. This keeps our fur sleek and our bodies cool. Use a brush with soft rubber bristles–you can get them at pet shops and hardware stores — and be gentle unless you want us to tattoo “Animal abuser” onto your bare flesh with our claws.

Notice that right after you hug or stroke us we start grooming ourselves. Don’t be offended, it doesn’t mean we find you unattractive. If we found you unattractive we wouldn’t allow you to go near us, duh. But we cats have our own specific scents, and when you hold us your scent rubs onto our skin and masks our natural odors. We lick our fur so we can smell like ourselves again.

Also, after we’ve been sunbathing on the windowsill we lick ourselves in order to ingest the vitamin D produced by sunlight reacting with our fur.

As for the way we bite and pull on our fur while grooming, we’re not just being dramatic. We’re stimulating the glands at the end of our fur. So don’t worry about us, we know what we’re doing.

Naturally, self-grooming causes us to ingest fur, which collects in our alimentary tracts and turns into hairballs. Here’s your word for the day: trichobezoars, which means hairballs. As in, “Mummy, Saffy is making those weird Exorcist noises, she’s about to regurgitate some trichobezoars.” Again, perfectly normal — unless your cats can’t expel their hairballs and they cause obstructions.

We cats lick each other as a show of friendship and solidarity, and occasionally we lick our humans because we’re fond of them. Or they have spilled food on their clothes. Or they have been fraternizing with other cats, and we’re rubbing out the smell of these intruders.

There is something called displacement grooming. That’s when we’re stressed or freaked out by something and we lick ourselves to relieve the tension. If you think Prince is over-grooming, observe him closely to find the source of his stress. It could be some change in the household — new people, different schedules, even music he hates.

We suspect he just requires more attention from you. Perhaps he has written a novel and wants you to read it. Or he is bored and wants conversation. Talk to your cat more.

Meow,

Saffy

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To consult Saffy on your pet issues, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.