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Has it gotten hairy again at home? Many dogs, cats, and horses are already shedding their thick winter coat and letting the summer coat sprout. You can not only accompany this process with a broom and vacuum cleaner but also ensure a beautiful, shiny summer coat with the right nutrition and care.
Why Does Diet Play a Role in Molting?
In contrast to us humans, our four-legged friends usually have seasonal hair growth: in spring and autumn new hair sprouts and the old one falls out, the rest of the year there is less hair growth.
Renewing a complete coat of fur in a relatively short time is a task for which the organism needs a lot of energy and, above all, the right building blocks. An example:
During the change of coat, the protein requirement of your animal increases, but also the requirement for various other nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, e.g. biotin or zinc.
If the organism is not optimally supplied during this time, this can later be seen in a dull, lackluster, possibly sparse coat.
What Can I Do to Help My Animal Change its Coat?
You can use either dog, cat, or horse during the molt
- give a suitable dietary supplement to the usual food, or
- switch to a special dog or cat food that contains all the building blocks necessary for skin and coat regeneration in optimal quantities.
The advantage of a special “skin and coat food” is that it has an optimal protein composition (only highly digestible proteins with a favorable amino acid pattern) and that all ingredients are optimally tailored to the coat metabolism so that there are no imbalances in the nutrient composition.
In addition, you and your four-legged friend can make it easier for yourself and your four-legged friend to be haunted by flying fur fluff with a few care measures:
- Brush or comb your dog, horse, and, if possible, cat every day during the molting period. Although cats groom their fur themselves, they swallow a lot of hair when they change their coat, which they often have to vomit up again as hairballs. You can counteract this by brushing.
- A lot of hair also comes off when you shampoo your dog or horse, which is only recommended in exceptional cases for cats. Please make sure that you use a mild dog shampoo for dogs and no baby shampoo or similar. For dogs, we recommend e.g. AniMedica Benidorm
- Shampoo or Virbac Allercalm Shampoo; for horses Virbac Equimyl Shampoo.
If your dog or cat has dry skin and tends to scratch during the molt, spot-on lipid complexes can bring relief quickly (provided there are no parasites or skin diseases behind it).