Help with Kitty Fur-Prevent me from Nairing Mine

So I noticed many of you dopers have and like cats. I have two adorable white fuzzballs. I brush them whenever I can with the brush of doom. They’re both short haired. I clean my house regularly, too. But, I still have a metric ton of cat hair every day–on my bed and the hardwood floors. I sweep, but that just stirs up little fur piles that go sweeping through my house.

Help me please! There has to be some way aside from nairing, shaving or stuffing my cats and putting them on the mantelpiece. I sweep, swiffer, flip-it. I have a sponge guaranteed to remove fur (not) and those tape rollers. The fur is winning.

Thank You!

I wish there were a way to solve this problem, but I don’t know of one. I have thirteen cats, three dogs, and a husband in my house. Every time we vacuum, there is enough fur to knit a new critter.

I have heard that the use of Ionic Breeze type products can help, but I am skeptical.

What kind of brush are you using? If you can get them to lie still long enough to brush, try a flea comb or a brush designed to pull at the hair as well as just brush it.

No other advice, really, but I do love your username.

Well, I’m not sure about cats, but I know this problem is helped when you wash a dog regularly (like once a week). Washing a cat is a dangerous thing, I wish it upon no one.

I have two cats and a dog and I too live in a sea of animal hair. I wonder sometimes if brushing just stimulates them to shed more.

BTW, one of my cats, the long haired white one, takes baths pretty darn well considering he’s a cat and all. Doesn’t seem to help either.

I’ve tried a bunch of stuff. Those mitts with rubber dots on them to catch the fur don’t work. Brushing daily helps, but I’ve got one, the worst shedder of course, who hates being brushed. I’ve bought a liquid that supposedly will help loosen fur and then either comes off in your hand while applying or is brushed out easily thereafter. Ha! Can you imagine the fun of soaking your cats with the stuff on a daily basis? It didn’t work very well anyway.

Then there was a supplement my mom gave me that would make their coats so healthy shedding would be reduced. If you’d like it, I can ship the unused bottle to you. It’s an oily liquid and my cats eat dry food. There’s no way to get the quarter cup of oil, daily, down their throats.

Special rubber scrapers and sponges were not very effective. So I brush them, I brush the furniture. I vaccuum a couple of times a week. Then I keep them out of my clothes closet and dress right before leaving in the morning. I keep a sticky paper roller thing by the front door anyway. Beyond that, I just try to deal with being a little furry all the time.

Good for you for getting two cats the same color. I have a light cat and a dark one so it doesn’t matter what color the object is, it’ll always show fur. They’re lucky they’re cute!

Cat hair is a fashion statement. Wear it with pride.

I bought a new wire bristle brush and now my cat INSISTS that I brush her 10 mins a day, two to three times a day. This has greatly reduced the cat hair problem but not completly. I’m always amazed at where the hair gets. It’s like she can shoot hair 20 feet across the room.

A shedding comb gets a lot more hair off, even though it doesn’t look like much. (It’s the one that looks like a hacksaw blade bent in a circle.) But I have the same problem, even with constant brushing. I could make another cat out of one of mine about once a week, I think.

We have two cats that are primarily white, one long-haired and one short-haired. (See Kiminy’s Cats.)

We also have a teenage daughter who wears only black, given a choice. (She really isn’t Goth–she just happens to like black clothing more than other colors. But she also likes our cats.)

White fur does not go well with black clothing.

However, we have learned to live with it, without any daily or weekly attempts to reduce the amount of fur in the house, aside from the vaccuuming that we do anyway.

When we brush them (and Paka LOVES to be brushed), we use a wire-bristle brush, which was actually purchased in a dog-supply aisle rather than a cat-supply aisle. Hair comes off the cat onto the brush, but the amount of fur deposited on sofas, chairs, and beds where they normally sleep does not seem to be diminished in any way as a result of the brushing. Brushing does help cut down tangles in Paka’s fur, but we haven’t found any benefits to brushing Minou, especially since she doesn’t particularly enjoy it. Frequent brushing does seem to reduce the number of hairballs Paka has, but only in warm weather.

We do get mats of fur in places they sleep frequently, but we just encourage them to sleep in the same places regularly, which isn’t hard to do. The pillow in the picture in the link is a favorite sleeping place for Minou, and we just brush off the pillow when the fur becomes a problem. The humans in the house don’t use that pillow at all. The sofa in the picture also normally has long white fur on it. The four family members are so used to cat hair that we wear it with pride. If visitors come, we take time to vaccuum the sofa as well as the rest of the house. We have a blanket on the bed to collect Paka fur at night, but it can go into the washing machine as required.

The one place that I see accumulated fur on a regular basis is the old, padded chair that we set up in the living room window to give them a clear view of the Feline Entertainment Device (aka the front-yard bird feeder). However, since only the cats sit there (and they are strongly encouraged to sit and sleep there), the fur really doesn’t cause any problem.

Excellent question. If anyone knows of a way to get rid of ambient cat hair, I’d be all over that.l

I have had to come to the conclusion that there are just some fabrics I can’t wear, like those polar fleece jackets. They are cat hair magnets. Ditto for fine spun wools, like wool pants are made of. No way. I have 4 cats and a medium-haired dog, and there are tumbleweeds of fur in the halls on a daily basis. I have a stick broom specifically for sucking those things up, but I could vacuum twice a day and I still think I’d have a hair accummulation problem.

The odd thing is, my long-haired cat sheds the least of all the kitties. Is that because he’s the youngest and healthiest, or is it something to do with long hairs? My cat who has FIV sheds like a mofo, all the time, no matter how much I brush him. Of course,he’s the one that’s mostly white. I always associated excessive shedding (not related to seasons) to the cat’s health status. I don’t know if vitamins would help that or not. Anyone know?

I have never tried this so YMMV but while purchasing meds for my kitties (all 7 of them), I came across this product.

Even with brushing, seven cats produce a lot of hair so some of this stuff may find its way into their little kitty diets. If it works I will let you know.

None of the commercially available OTC products do much in my experience. There are some chemotherapeutic drugs that alter the follicles’ cycle, leading to a bald cat. I would advise frequent brushing, bathing if accepted by the cat (and many do), and a quality vacuum cleaner.

Thanks for the advice everyone. It seems that there may be no help. The brush I use has wire bristles and a handle. It does get rid of a bunch of hair on the cats, but doesn’t seem to improve the hair in the house.

Ashes, I appreciate the offer, but I suspect my kitties wouldn’t like it much either. It’s all about Iams dry original for them with the occasional house plant thrown in for good measure. Although would you tell me the name? I might try it out of desperation.

Seriously though, surely there is some way. I’ve been to houses with cats where there’s not a cat hair issue. It must be possible, right? I think the one thing that must unite us cat lovers (and dog too) must be our color coordination of clothes to fur and that when wearing something nice, the last minute dressing to avoid hair attachment :slight_smile:

You might try different brushes too. I have a variety of brushes because certain ones work much better on certain cats. I have one shorthair on whom the “rake” style pulls out a huge amount of loose fur, while on other shorthairs it does nothing. On another cat, a slicker brush works the best. On another, a rubber pad-style brush works the best to loosen the fur; then I use a flat comb to scoop it up. On another medium-hair, no brush seems to get out any fur but then again, this is a cat who practically never sheds. She’s some kind of mutant.

Other than that, the best thing is to learn to embrace the fur. Learn to love it. Become one with the fur. Because this is a battle that you, human, will never completely win. So resign yourself to acknowledging the Fur as King.

Well, we don’t have to spend money buying those fancy Angora sweaters, anymore. I live with 4 inside cats and 2 large, inside dogs. I wear ‘Catgora’ sweaters now. :wink:

I met a woman with Leonberger dogs who claimed to have made a sweater from their shed hair. But I didn’t see her wearing it, and she was, truth be told, something of a fanatic.

Learn to live with it. Seriously.

I have two dogs. One, mercifully, seems to shed very little, but my older dog has shed copious amounts of hair for nine years. It truly is astonishing how much hair a dog can produce.

My grandmother used to vaccuum her. (The dog comes running whenever she hears the vaccuum start up and won’t stop butting it with her head until you vaccuum her.) She’d sit the dog down with a nylon-bristle human hairbrush and hold the hose in one hand while brushing with the other. She would remove scads of hair this way, but it never seemed to make a dent in the amount we found on the floor.

I’ve tried those food supplements which are supposed to reduce shedding. The dog loves them-- I guess they must be tasty. At least they have that benefit, because they sure as hell don’t stop the shedding.

I’m convinced that brushing only makes more come out. You can try to fight it, or you can do what I did: buy a Dyson vaccuum cleaner and get one of those static-charged dusters to pick up the hair between times.

I’ve had two CATS that loved being vacuumed. They would flop themselves on whatever I was attempting to suck up. Didn’t seem to make much difference overall.

I asked the vet about what I could do about shedding last time I was there, and he gave me a supplement to put on their food. It’s some kind of omega-3 fatty acid type stuff, I don’t remember for sure, the bottle got wet and the label came off. I’m supposed to put about a tablespoon on their food per day, but they eat freely from one dish, so every time I fill it (it’s dry food) I just squirt a bunch on and mix it around. They don’t like it much, but I don’t give them people food, so they had no choice but to eat it, and they got used to it after a week or so (though they still look all disappointed when they hear me filling the dish, come running over, and sniff and find it has the icky stuff on it…but they eat it!)

I’ve noticed quite a difference after using it for a month. My mostly-white cat would leave you COVERED in cat hair if you picked him up for snuggles, but now it’s far more tolerable, and I don’t have nearly as much fur covering my furniture and floor. An occasional vacuuming takes care of it.

As for removing cat hair from fabrics and stuff, ever tried one of those rubber gloves that you use for washing dishes and stuff? It doesn’t actually pick it up, but if you put one on and slide your hand across your couch, it grabs all the hair and sort of wads it up into easy-to-pick-up hairballs.