In honor of National Hairball Awareness Day (yes, there actually is such a thing), a slew of excellent information and downright silliness has been spreading across the cat blogosphere. It all started with a Hairball Celebrity Contest, for which I made a failtastic rendition of What Not To Wear‘s Stacy London from a Barbie doll and some cat fur. You should definitely check out the finalists here, though, because they made celebs that were actually creative and cool.
Because my cat hair celebrity making skills are so crappy, I decided I’d use my slightly less crappy video blogging skills to tell you about the Furminator, my favorite grooming tool on the planet, and give you a demonstration of how it works.
(In a reader? Watch the video here.)
In this video, I’m using the small cat (under 10 pounds) short-hair deshedding tool. They come in large-cat size, too, and the short-hair tool is for cats with fur under 2 inches in length. Furminator is also now making long-haired cat de-shedding tools in both small and large cat sizes.
If you don’t groom your cats regularly and feed them a good diet, your kitty might suffer the same fate as this British cat, who had a 5-inch-wide hairball removed from his stomach!
Hairballs are really not normal in cats, according to Dr. Jane Brunt, executive director of the CATalyst Council, who discusses what hairballs really are and when you should be concerned that hairballs might be a sign of underlying illness in this issue of the AVMA’s Animal Tracks podcast.
Huge congratulations to Stephanie Harwin of Catsparella, whose cat hair Katy Purry was the winner of the hairball celebrity contest! Furminator, the sponsor of the contest, is donating $1,000 to Stephanie’s chosen animal rescue charity, Sayreville Pet Adoption Center in Sayreville, N.J.
Disclosure: Furminator provided me with a long-hair, large cat de-shedding tool, which I donated to my local SPCA. The opinions expressed in this post and the accompanying video are my own.
JaneA Kelley is a punk rock cat mom and award-winning blogger. She is a regular columnist for Catster Magazine, and she and the Paws and Effect Gang share a home in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
What a good kitty Siouxsie was during her demonstration with mama. Those furrminators are great!
Maybe Jan should have tried her video skills instead of trying to be creative. Wait, maybe not. But you did well with yours.
Hee hee!!!!!!
Actually I was hoping for a creative fur creation afterwards:(
We love the FURminator and our household of seven highly qualified cats give it a 5 out of 5 paws up!!
Hi Janea! Thank you for your kind words! Cool video, and I loved the idea of doing Stacy London! :)
I love my FURminator! I would even pose for a video with my human if she promised to FURminate me.
I HAVE HAD THE FURMINATOR FOR QUITE SOME TIME NOW, BUT HOW DO I GET THE CATS TO COOPERATE ? THEY DO NOT LIKE BEING BRUSHED !!!!!
Furminator has a blade in it that actually cuts the cat’s hair.
Just get/use one of those $5 or less brushes with the bent metal teeth. Apply light pressure only. You will get up lots of hair and the brush itself collects the hair for easy removal latter. If you applied light enough pressure, the cat won’t mind much or at all, almost like being petted. One can let alot of hair collect on one of those brushes without it interfering with its operation since it causes the hair to clump together at the base of the teeth. (and super easy to remove those clumps)
So the furminator seems only good for those in a hot climate where you might want a animal with a thinner coat. Though a electric razer with a height attachment could work too, granted the razer would take out the outer hairs and this might cut more of the inner hairs (well depending on the animal, some animals have all the same hair) But this item is expensive, doesn’t collect hair which makes things more time consuming and difficulty, (more stress on the animal too) and has a blade which may eventually need to be replaced at near the cost of a whole new product