Press Releases > April 2005 Vol. 13 No. 4

CATNIP The Newsletter for Caring Cat Owners
April 2005 Vol. 13 No. 4

In the April 2005 issue of CATNIP, the article, "Help for Hairballs", ranked the FURminator deShedding™ tool among the best in preventing hairballs in cats.

Your cat may be the only self-cleaning thing in your house, but there is a nasty result of that convenience: when your cat ingests the loose hair it licks off itself and vomits it back up as a hairball in a typically inconvenient place in your home.

Cats spend a lot of time licking loose hair from their coats. And unfortunately your cat lacks the ability to spit out this fur, so he swallows it. The hair gradually makes its way through the digestive tract, winding into a tight little tube. If it is too large to fit through the pyloric sphincter (the passage way into the small intestine from the stomach), the cat has to puck it up onto the floor.

Your first inclination, after stepping onto a wet, nasty hairball, might be to give your cat a hairball remedy. However, ingestable hairball treatments have not received any scientific evaluation, none have been proven to work. Veterinarians will tell you that the best way to control hairballs is to prevent your cat from ingesting the hair in the first place.