Mary Allen
A cat grooms itself for a variety of reasons. We have collected the six most common for you here.
Cleaning
Perhaps the most obvious reason cats brush constantly is to clean their fur. The furry paws remove loose hair or foreign objects from the fur with the small horn-like hooks on their tongue.
Important: When grooming, cats inevitably swallow a lot of hair, which can cause problems in the digestive tract. Here we reveal how you can get the problem under control: This really helps against hairballs.
Impregnation
When cleaning, the blood circulation in the skin is also stimulated and sebum is secreted as a result. This ensures that the cat’s fur remains particularly supple and also water-repellent. It also prevents the cat from developing dandruff.
Structure of the “business card”
There are many scents in cat saliva. They ensure that cats recognize their fellow cats from a great distance.
Unfortunately, saliva is also the reason why some people are allergic to cats. They then often assume that they cannot keep cats. But that’s not true: these four cat breeds are suitable for allergy sufferers.
Cleaning to sweat
Cats have limited ability to regulate their body temperature. They can straighten their hair and heat up the air between their layers of fur by tensing different muscles. However, cooling at high temperatures is much more difficult.
Many cats then go to places where it is cooler. Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why cats love to lie in the sink.
Cats only have a few sweat glands on their chin and paws. Therefore, they have to lick their fur to cool themselves by evaporating the moisture. For this reason, it is particularly important that your house cat drinks a lot in summer in order to be able to moisten its fur sufficiently.
Relaxation
Both cleaning and being cleaned represent a particularly great relaxation for a house cat.
You can often see a particularly hectic cleaning behavior in cats that are observing prey at the window. This is done so that the cat can react to the strong excitement again. Eventually, she wanted to hunt but couldn’t. Licking relieves some of the inner tension and the cat recovers from the stressful situation.
Order in fur
Sometimes you can also observe that cats intensively groom themselves after cuddling with a human. As a result, the little house tigers try to put their fur back in order, and they also enjoy the human smell left on their fur a little longer.
And if that isn’t a wonderful token of love, then we don’t know what is!