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National Hairball Awareness Day 2012 badgeIn 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.