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Hair Balls in Cats     

Most cats are quite fastidious about keeping themselves clean and well groomed. They use their tongue and often a moistened forepaw to get to all parts of their body. This grooming keeps the coat flat for better insulation and also stimulates the glands in the skin to produce the oils that keep the coat shiny and waterproof. As they groom they often remove old loose hair that is then swallowed. In most cases this hair passes through the gastro-intestinal tract uneventfully, however in some cats it accumulates and forms matted lumps of hair in the stomach. These hairballs can cause coughing and gagging and often the hairball is vomited out. In severe cases the hairball may cause an intestinal blockage that can require surgery to remedy.

Preventing hairball accumulating involves the following steps::

1.   Regular grooming of your cat with a good brush to remove the loose hair before your cat swallows it. We recommend a good quality slicker brush like that in the GripSoft Range  

2.   Good flea control. When cats have fleas they will over groom due to the irritation the fleas cause. This leads to a lot of hair ingestion. The spot-on type flea control agents seem to work best for cats.  See the range of these here

3.   Inhibit the hair in the intestine from matting together and allow it to pass through with out doing any harm. This can be done with lubricant gels based on paraffin oil, such as Cat Lax, or using the new hairball control diets made by Science Diet and Eukanuba which use a combination of vegetable fibres to stop hair accumulating. A new supplement (Walthams Feline Tabs – Hairball Control) containing fibre, glutamine and slippery elm is also proving to be useful to reduce the symptoms of hairballs . There is also a combination hairball control / breath freshener paste for cats (Healthy Breath Hairball Remedy).  

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