Old cats and long-haired feline breeds reap the benefits of pet grooming craze
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If you thought a trip to the salon for a haircut and manicure was exclusively for humans or spoiled pooches, you're wrong.
Cats with unruly manes are being treated to pet pampering days too.
Sarah Warner opened her "sedation-free" cat grooming service in Brisbane a decade ago to meet growing demand.
On a busy day she washes, dries and trims the coats of up to 10 cats and is regularly fully booked four to six weeks in advance.
She said pet owners were starting to realise the benefits of helping keep their felines clean, especially long-haired breeds like Persians, Maine Coons, Norwegian forest cats.
"There's just absolutely no way they can look after their coats on their own," Ms Warner told ABC Radio Brisbane's John Taylor.
"All they have to use is their tongue and, essentially, a cat is just covering themselves with saliva.
"This saliva creates dander and that's what a lot of people who are allergic to cats are actually allergic to."
Dander is the dead skin that can build up on a cat's coat.
The grooming process looks a lot like an average human haircut.
It starts with a shampoo and massage in a special cat-sized bath and ends with a blow dry and trim.
Ms Warner said some salons even dyed and clipped fur to fashion a mohawk or give the cat a dinosaur look.
But cats hate water, right?
Apparently not.
They do, however, prefer showers to baths.
"We find that cats don't like being dunked into water, but they absolutely love being massaged with the shower head," Ms Warner said.
"We have a grate on the bottom of our bath so the cats aren't submerged in water.
"Then we use a shower head over the top to get them nice and wet ... they tolerate it really well."
Non-sedated grooming is a method many pet owners opt for over a visit to a veterinarian to have their cat sedated and shaved.
Ms Warner used to do multiple shaves a day as a veterinary nurse prior to opening her own grooming business.
"We put them under anaesthetic, gave them a good shave off and got rid of all of the knots," she said.
"They'd wake up and go home nice and naked and come back 12 months later and we'd do it all again.
"Being able to do it without sedation on a regular basis to maintain the coat before it gets all knotty is quite new and novel."
Ideal for long-haired and senior cats
Australian Veterinary Association spokesperson Dr Jacqui Ley said most short-haired breeds did a relatively good job of keeping themselves clean.
However, she agreed long-haired breeds required extra attention to stop their coats from becoming matted and dirty.
Dr Ley said regular grooming and inspection of a pet's coat, no matter the length, could have additional advantages.
"We do need to be looking for injuries, wounds, lumps, bumps, those sorts of things," she said.
"Cats are pretty secretive so they won't really come and show you if they've got a wound or a hole or an abscess."
When it comes to controlling our allergic reactions to cats, Dr Ley recommends rinsing cats under water to remover dead skin and saliva proteins rather than scrubbing with shampoo.
Veterinarian and pet dermatologist Dr David Robson said cats with medical conditions needed extra help staying clean.
"Specifically if you have older cats that have dental disease ... or if they've got arthritis and they can't flex and bend to get to all the bits the way they used to," he said.
Over-grooming and over-washing is common in dogs, but Dr Robson said he'd never encountered a case of a cat being washed too much.
"I think the cat is going to give you hell before you get to that stage," he said.
Topics: animals, human-interest, brisbane-4000
