A Michael Broad Blog
You will see quite a lot of this: domestic cats grooming their human caregiver not only on their hand or their arm but also on their head. It is clearly impractical because the hair on a human’s head is far too long for a domestic cat to groom. The hair gets stuck in their …
When your cat licks your hair, she is allogrooming you. From her perspective your hair is unnaturally long. It makes the allogrooming process almost impossible which is why she struggles. However, she is licking you as another cat with normal-length hair. It’s just unfortunate that the hair on your head is much longer than …
We don’t know everything that there is to know about domestic cat behaviour. That is the first point to make. Please don’t expect clean, definitive answers to every question about cat behaviour. This is one of those instances in my opinion. But the question is relevant to a study that I’ve just bumped into …
Why do domestic cats lick each other? The answer is the one you’re thinking about! It is a social exchange that can follow the friendly tail-up greeting. Mutual licking between cats is called allogrooming. Incidentally, the word, as you might imagine, is a combination of ‘allo’ and ‘grooming’. You know what grooming means. The …
Yes, it’s almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. A gentle flea comb around the head and on the back of the head and shoulders is something every cat owner could do at least once daily. It’ll take about five minutes. Five minutes of calm for both of you. I would wager that …
I have my own answer on this but before I put pen to paper I decided to do a bit of research but couldn’t find a decent answer. Lots of words written but no clarity and really no definitive answer. These are my thoughts, for right or for wrong. The first and perhaps fundamental …
Cat grooming not only cleans the coat, and deposits saliva, but it is also a form of parasite control. In other words, domestic cats do lick fleas off their bodies but they then ingest them and in doing so they ingest the larval tapeworm which once inside the cat develops into an adult tapeworm …
The best way to communicate with domestic cats is through your entire body language coupled with touch. Body language and gentle petting (stroking normally) is a language which domestic cats understand very well. Speaking to cats can also help but the sounds we make are only an adjunct to the more important body language …
