(Apologies up front for the lack of pictures. You would all agree that I have the prettiest, cutest, most gorgeous kittehs on teh whole planet, if you could see them. Alas, am at work and cannot link now.)
Background: our two cats are complete yin and yang from each other. **Al **is a male, big (Main Coon) at 17 lbs. without much fat at all on him at all, smart, and vocal with a huge vocabulary of highly specific sounds. **Nikki **is female, small (street mutt) at about 5 lbs. and turning into quite the round little fatty, dumb as a hammer, and can make exactly one sound: “mew.”
We’ve had them both since Nikki was itsy-bitsy (she just turned 3 this month, and Al is about 10 or so) and they get along well. They play together in a funny way - like wresting, but Al lifts his head up and down so much that it looks like he’s bobbing for kittens - and never fight. Yay. But sometimes, Al starts to groom Nikki, and within a few minutes, we sometimes catch him chewing off her whiskers. She likes it when he grooms her (I guess) and never moves away when he starts doing this.
We fuss at him when we catch him at it (unfortunately, she clearly thinks she’s the one getting in trouble - see above: “hammer”) but she’s gotten a lot of her whiskers chewed cleanly off.
We’d like to discourage him from it entirely, if for nothing else than she has long and lovely whiskers! Googling turned up little, except references to mother cats sometimes doing this to small kittens in an attempt to keep them from wandering too boldly. I suspect it’s some type of dominance thing on his part, but she’s never made any moves that I can tell to be anything other than his little sidekick. Honestly, she’s too dumb to try to be an alpha - bless her furry little heart, she reminds me of Ralph off The Simpsons. Besides, he positively towers over her.
My usual go-to for animal-chewing issues is Tobasco sauce, and for obvious reasons I’m not putting hot sauce on my cat’s face. So … any other ideas? Anyone else have a cat that does this?
