A Cat People question...

[jehannamama]

We seem to be dealing with some mild hairballs, here. I've fed the Actipet tablets, but they don't seem to do enough, and Dexter was hacking a bit. Paws won't touch the tablets, either, so I figure it's time to do something else. We got some of the paste in a tube that they are supposed to like well enough to lick off one's finger, but they don't,

Comments

[themis1]

Nothing, and never have! Cats will normally cough up the furballs all by themselves, eventually. It may take a day or two and it's painful to listen to, though.

[jehannamama]

Yes, I suppose they will. It just sounds so miserable and it's messy.

[inlaterdays]

We used to use cooking oil. (On the vet's recommendation.) Our cat would lick it right off a finger and it seemed to help.

[jehannamama]

I've tried olive oil, which is what we use, along with coconut oil. I don't have any other oils here. They hate the olive oil. I'm glad your cat will eat it. I may just start rubbing it in their fur.

[zen_kitty]

Coconut Oil was recommended by my vet. One cat likes it another doesn't. What I've found has worked though for multiple things is opening up a fish oil capsule and putting it on a paw. That helps with Presto's dandruff and hairballs and all kinds of other things. ;)

[jehannamama]

I did look online. I found mention of giving the oil from sardines, and chopping one of them up in it, and mixing that into their food. I did that, today.
I like the idea of the coconut oil, because it's bacteriostatic, but I'm not sure if they will eat it. I tried butter last night, and they both refused to even lick it.
The fish oil sounds healthy, too.

[belle_marmotte]

We use that lube that come in a tube from the vet, we don't bother to get him to lick it from our fingers because that is NEVER going to happen. Hubs puts a blob onto his finger and scrapes it off inside his front teeth (the cat's not the husband's!) so that it sticks to the roof of his mouth peanut butter style! It helps a lot but it is a real hassle so often doesn't get done.
The only real solution which I used on my Norwegian long haired (who passed last October) and whose fur was so thick in the wintertime you couldn't get a comb or a brush through it, was to give him daily brushing during the moult seasons. Hard work as he hated it, so I would wait until he jumped on me and went to sleep before carefully getting out the comb which I usually had to hide before hand, and tackling a bit of him at a time. I could usually get a a flank or a back done before he started hissing at me and flew off.

[jehannamama]

I hate to think of what would happen if I tried that with Paws, the poor stray. He's got PTSD and he freaks out all the time, and his first thing to do when he freaks is rip open the nearest warm body. I don't blame him. It's quite obvious that he's terrified out of his mind when he does that... and he's way better than he was, thankfully... but I'm wary. Any little thing that seems invasive sets him off. He was abandoned somehow, and was not socialized properly in the first place. He acts like he spent a lot of his life in a cage, which attracted him to our tiny yard with it's tall privacy fence. And it seems coyotes or a dog got him, and he came into the yard to escape them, and I nursed him back to health.
He tries hard to be a house cat. Neutering helped.
We can try this with Dexter, though. Might work well.
I'm also going to just try rubbing some nice coconut oil into their fur occasionally.
I do brush Dexter but I haven't gotten Paws to tolerate it, yet. Thankfully, he's not a longhair.

[belle_marmotte]

Does Paws agree to any petting at all? When my cat Diego first chose to live with me (he was a stray) he wouldn't tolerate brushing, but he would sit on me and be petted for a little bit. I found that if I stroked him with my hand dampened in a bit of water that would also take off a lot of loose fur when all else failed. If Paws is that traumatized it sounds like even that would bother him though.

[jehannamama]

I can pet him, pretty well, now, (it's been a while), but not so much on my lap. Just once in a while he'll venture up here. Not very often. And if my hand was damp he'd be mad at me for days! Sometimes when I pet him he still goes nuts with mouthing me, but he's not actually biting anymore, thank goodness! Not unless he is startled or something, then it is not controllable.