I’ve got 3 loveable furballs here at my place. I’m also allergic to cats :smack: (in my defense, I had previously lived with a long-haired cat and thought I was less allergic to them, so I started off with a long-haired. Turns out my mother’s neurotic need to clean combined with the fact that my sister’s Himalayan never hung out in the same room as me was the reason I didn’t have allergies living at home).
My allergies are bad today, so I’m scrubbing the whole apartment and bathing and brushing all the cats.
The long-haired guy, Seamus, is used to it. He and his buddy Bridget were indoor/outdoor cats (because of these allergies) until he decided he liked laying in the middle of the road and got hit by a car (he’s totally fine, but that scared me enough that they’re no longer allowed outside). I always thought outdoor long-haired cats that weren’t bathed regularly looked pretty gross- little bits of nature stuck to them, dingy-looking fur. So he got a bath about once a month for quite a while, and submits to it well. Bridget also occasionally got a bath, though she’s not as happy about it.
The new kitten, Molly, is probably not going to take it too well. Her only “bath” occurred when she was hanging out in the bathroom while my BF soaked in the tub, and she accidentally fell in.
So this afternoon should be fun. :dubious: But regular bathing, brushing, and cleaning the apartment (and changing the filters in my air purifiers!) is the only way I can live with these guys without a runny nose and breathing problems (oh yeah, turns out I’ve got allergy-induced asthma, and I’m all out of albuterol yay!).
Any fellow cat-bathers out there? And I can’t be the only idiot who owns cats but is allergic to them, right?
Including kittens, I’ve probably had somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred cats over my lifetime and every one that I had longterm had at least one or two baths and most submitted to it pretty readily. There were a few that absolutely hated it but all it took was a strong, firm hand at their scruff and they would sit still, though they would growl through the whole process and make a bolt for the door the instant I let go.
We’re going on 1 year of having a very clean, fresh smelling longhair kitty. She basically just needs brushing and licking (she does the latter). We tried a waterless cat shampoo on her tail as a test; it didn’t make much difference except her tail smelled mildly of shampoo.
Lucy (on the right) is our long haired Maine Coon. My husband finds he has to bathe her once a month or so or her hair just gets too messy. She submits very reluctantly. We’ve been bathing her since she was a kitten.
Her companion, Scout, is a domestic short hair. He’s been bathed a few times in the four years we’ve had him because he’s gotten filthy. The last time I bathed him it was because he got out after a rainstorm and then rolled around in the mud after I tried to chase him back in the house.
If you can find a way to keep cats even though you’re allergic I say good for you.
my cat’s a moggy, but quite large and long haired. he does get matted lumps every now and then, and he spends most of his time outside, so he drags leaves and twigs and general dirt back inside but I’ve never even though about giving him a bath.
I found him, abandoned, in an underground car-park, one evening when I was leaving work. He was about 6 weeks old at the time, and obviously feral. I brush him with a de-matting comb a few times a week, as the vet told me his coat is too much to look after by himself. Even this he doesn’t like. He’s a grumpy sod, so he is. Says a lot about me, I suppose!
We have a relationship based on mutual respect for each other’s boundaries.
I do make sure his coat’s in good nick, but I don’t pamper him. He no like!
I’ve given my cat baths, usually once a year or so, since she was a kitten. When she was small enough to swim around in the tub, she seemed to enjoy it.
After last year’s bath, she wouldn’t tolerate the blow dryer. She licked herself dry instead. She smelled like bad cat-breath for weeks*. I think, from here on out, if she needs a bath I’ll take her to the grooming station at Petsmart so I can have her teeth cleaned at the same time. Maybe then I’d get to enjoy a minty-fresh cat.
*Yes, I briefly considered re-bathing her. However, since she’s middle aged (and I coddle her :p), I didn’t want to force her to endure the stress of the blow dryer. So, I made a conscious decision not to start that particular circle-of-hell of bathing and licking, rinse and repeat.
Advice that I got from one pet groomer was to get a very short leash and hitch kitty to the faucet so she can’t run away. Then put an old towel in the sink so she has something to sink her claws into rather than slipping all over the place (or going for your flesh). Use a pitcher of warm (not hot) water, speak soothing kitty words and go to it.
Your cat may come to enjoy the experience. My 18 year old cat did put up with it. Until that happens I’d suggest having a good supply of Neosporin, bandaids and a bottle of rum handy.
Turkish Vans apparently like the water so that might be a good bet for your next cat if you have to bathe them.
I’ve learned that the younger they are when you start bathing them, the happier they are about the ordeal, but even adult cats will cope if you insist CALMLY and consistantly. Very warm but not hot water, one calm but firm two-legs, one wet cat a time, lots of towels, no escape route. Blow dryers are apparently Evil-with-a-capital-E, so turn the furnace up a bit beforehand.
Talk to your Vet about putting a few drops of acepromazine on their food every day. At a very low dose, it may somehow reduce the allergens in some cats dander. No cite – Five or ten years ago, my cat loving, dander allergic GP talked to our fresh-out-of-vet-school Vet about a promising study then underway, and we both tried it. It helps for our cats (or us – never underestimate the power of placebo), and is not dangerous for the cats, so we’ve continued, without bothering to check on the conclusion. 3 drops per cat per day, of ?? I smeared the label. 5 mg suspension? Anyway, 3 drops of the lowest normal dose liquid, per 10 lb cat per day.
Good luck with the bathing. It isn’t that bad, if you’re patient.
I had one cat I bathed regularly, and she needed it, as she was white and was always getting a grease spot on her back from sitting under the car. She was also deaf, therefore she thought the blow-dryer was great stuff–so she didn’t mind having a bath.
We had another cat that we bathed once as a kitten, when he got chased into a tree by some bigger cats and beshat himself. Once was enough. We’re lucky our neighbors didn’t report us to somebody, based on the screams coming out of our kitchen.
In general the cats I’ve owned have not needed regular baths, and this is probably a good thing. I’ve found you can order a dog into the tub, and the dog wil give you one of those “You don’t really mean that? Oh, you do? Okay, but I’m sad, I’m really, really sad” looks, but they will get into the tub. Whereas with cats you practically have to purify your mind of all thoughts of kitty baths, and find and immobilize the cat before you get the water & shampoo & multiple towels ready. (The cat mentioned in paragraph #2 above would leave the room at the mere sight of a towel for about a year after The Bath.)
But here’s a related question. I have cats, and I have a good sense of smell, yet I cannot smell my cats. I keep their litter boxes pretty clean, and I have had people who say they’re sensitive to the cat smell say they’re surprised when a cat appears in my house because they can’t smell it.
I don’t have one now but I’ve also had dogs, and every dog I’ve had has smelled like a dog and I could always smell it. I really liked my dogs, but they smelled like dogs. I gave them baths pretty often (and then they smelled like WET dogs). So just having an animal and liking it doesn’t mean you can’t smell it. So why can’t I smell my cats?
I have to wonder if bathing the cat is really going to help in the long run. I would think that using detergents on them and blowing them dry would make their skin dry out, causing more dander to go into the air. No?
Found a cite that says that washing the cat has transient positive effects on allergens and dubious effects on long-term allergen reductions. Of course, there are plenty of cites that say that you should bathe your cat weekly if you’re allergic, so what do I know?
As an aside, according to this site, dark furred cats produce up to four times the allergic reaction that light furred or white cats do. I had no idea. However, most of my cats have dark fur, so allergic people would be screwed at my house.
I think I may have a mild allergy to cats, but still live with two of them. The older one, a 17th year battle axe, is a dusty old relic with dry skin and a tendency to get kinda gritty, probably due to the lack of natural oils in her hair being an old cat. I take her into the shower with me about every month or two, particularly around this time of year as her skin gets much dryer. It does make her a lot softer and her dander is quite reduced. I have a special oversize showerhead with a detachable sprayer that is a tremendous asset for cat-bathing. I don’t use a special cleanser on her, just whatever human shampoo and conditioner I have on hand. She hates shower day, but has come to reluctantly accept it and put up with the process. She’s very vocal about getting out of the shower and yowls in complaint the entire time, though.
The other cat doesn’t require any bathing mostly because, at six years, she’s still young enough that I don’t see the need, although the real reason is because she’s deathly afraid of the bathroom. She knows that the bathroom is the place where all the water-shooting stuff is. As a result, she will lacerate anyone in fifty places if they even attempt to bring her into the bathroom, and will probably dismember them if they try to put her in a sink or shower, not so much because she’s mean but because she’s so completely neurotic that her pupils dilate like onyx stones and she does whatever necessary to escape from sources of water. I don’t think I could bathe her if I had four people to hold her down.
I do the bath, brush and acepromazine routine and it works great. My cats are an old crabby barn cat and a perky light buff cat we picked up starving on the street. I am a dog person, so I used the “calm and very very firm” approach. It worked fine, I get tragic looks and some vocalizing, but no trouble. I just towel them dry and put them in sunbeams. Later on, I found that I had apparently been taking my life into my hands. I have learned on the Dope that Ceecee and Barbara are “probably stuffed animals, or cushions from the couch”.
I lived with a guy who was allergic to my cats. I, vacuumed the cats every week with a handheld vacuum cleaner. They got used to it pretty quickly.
Our vet said wiping the cats down with a damp microfiber cloth would work as well as a bath, but they were used to being vacuumed by then and didn’t mind.
We’re cat bathers. We had to give all four of our beasts several baths this summer while we were combatting fleas. We just bathed Midnight this weekend because she’s got an inoperative tail and an incontinence problem witrh failing kidneys, which is a poor combination.
I am allergic to cats and when I got my cat Kitnix I thought I had made a bad mistake as my allergies started acting up right away…
At first I used a supposedly anti-allergenic liquid that I bought at the pet store specifically for the purpose. I washed my cat with it, using a wash cloth, about every two weeks. That worked! On a whim I switched to just using water on a wash cloth. Lo and behold, that worked just as well.
These days I wash my cat with a wet wash cloth once ever 2-4 weeks and give him a real bath (submerge him in water) once every few months. I also vacuum a lot. I don’t have allergy problems with him anymore, but I think that others do (mild) when they come over so YMMV.
My cats are indoor-only so there is really no need to bathe for “dirtiness.” If I were allergic though, I’d probably do regular wipe-downs with a somewhat heavily dampened towel. (I probably am allergic, actually, but not enough to want to go through the additional work.) I’ve read these wipe-downs are practically as good as a full bath for removing dander and saliva residue (that’s what most people are allergic to - not the fur), and theyd be a lot easier on both me and the cat.
One of my longhairs sometimes gets a poopy butt so I do have to bathe the back end of her. She doesn’t like it much but her protest consists mostly of meowing piteously and trying to run away as opposed to making a real fight. She’s too soft and sweet to really get mad about it.
Some years back I had three kittens who all got ringworm. The cure entailed bathing them all with anti-fungal shampoo every.single.day for several weeks. Aside from it taking 2 hours a day out of my TV/sleep time, it wasn’t as bad as you’d imagine. I put a towel down in the tub so they’d have something to grip; I didn’t leave them standing in water; the water I used on them was warm; and the bathroom was very warm; so they really didn’t mind it so much.
I bathed a cat. Once. We had a Siamese/Persian mix who managed to get so fat he couldn’t wash his own tail. (Side note: We couldn’t figure out how he did it without vacuuming up all of the kibble in their food bowl constantly, until one of our neighbors told us he was hopping the fence, smacking said neighbor’s cats around, and waltzing in through the cat door to eat out of their food bowl, too.) My mother walked around the house for a couple of weeks remarking that someone should maybe wash the cat before I gave in and did it myself.
So I had a 20lb furball and a random bottle of someone’s shampoo that had been in the cabinet for years, at that point, and I was going to bathe a cat. I hit upon the most useful part of the plan quite by accident: I decided I was going to bathe the cat in the tub that normally had a bath mat stuck down in it, because it was entirely enamel and didn’t have any non-skid texture on the bottom.
It turns out that cats, even 20lb cats with all their claws intact, have absolutely no traction on enamel. I kept one hand splayed across the cat’s breastbone and the other one busy squirting the whirling kitty dervish with shampoo and sudsing him up. Whenever he tried to scramble out of the tub, I’d just give him a push and he slid right back in. Escape attempt, escape attempt thwarted. Whenever I needed to rinse him off, I just changed my angle of attack and shoved him towards the end of the tub I could reach with the bendy showerhead.
About halfway through this process, it dawned on the cat that being shampooed involved being rubbed. All over. Once he worked this out, he actually plopped down in the middle of the tub and submitted, as graciously as a cat can submit, to being washed on the grounds that it was like getting pet, only with fruit-scented goo. He did make a flying leap for it when I turned the water off, but the bathroom we were in was tiny, and I caught him in a big bath towel and dried him off as best I could before releasing him into the wild.
After that, the worst trauma he had to endure was being sniffed incessantly by two dogs who were intrigued by the novelty of a cat that smelled like strawberry Suave.
ahhhh, the kitty bidet! what fun that is. malenka the miraculous will run,(even though the last bidet action was 5 years ago) at the sound of the faucet flowing in the bathroom sink. the kitchen sink doesn’t faze her.
My old Maine Coon cat looooved being vacuumed. She loved it so much that she would not let our cleaning lady do anything else until she had been vacuumed. She also tried to rope anyone who went into the closet where the vacuum was stored into vacuuming her (but usually people were going into that closet for other things).
It started when she w as a kitten, and as an experiment. I had long hair and thought it was a neat feeling to vacuum my hair. So I thought my kittycat might like it on her tail. And, it turned out, she did. In fact, all over. Since she had very long hair, this was a good thing. (We did send her to be groomed once a year, though, to combat snarles of hairballs under her front legs, or would you call them arms?)
