Long haired cats can easily get matted cat fur. Use of our guide on how to remove matted cat fur from your cat and help your furry friend.
What Is Matted Cat Fur?
Ever seen rough looking long or medium haired cats? Chances are big that they have matted cat fur and need a little help.
Matted cat fur is cat fur that has hard bits in it. The mats are basically hair strains that have gone in a knot on their body. It usually only happens to long haired and medium haired cats, as they got enough length to get knotted up.
Why Help A Cat With Matted Fur?
While cats groom themselves daily, it is nearly impossible to get rid of the matted fur. It would require extreme measures such as biting the fur or scraping it against something sharp so that the fur will cut itself off. That is what big cats would do in nature with it. They would either do that or leave it be as it is.
Matted cat fur and fur that hasn’t been groomed properly in a while does however start to itch. It will itch very badly. An itchy area where the skin underneath doesn’t get a good cleanup can even get inflamed or infected, so a good cleanup every once in a while is important to your cat.
If your cat would even manage to get the matted cat fur off by grooming, it means a great deal of hair intake. All the grooming will mean they ingest a lot of hair (especially the long haired ones have problems with ingestion of hair), which can result in a painful tummy. Ingested hair can form a blockage. This blockage can then lead to constipation and as we all know, constipation over longer time can be life-threatening.
We humans can help our dear cats by grooming them. It will reduce the hair intake by grooming and it will keep both skin and hair in top condition.
Now that you know you have to start grooming your cat, you will want to know how to do so and what tools you will need, which we will cover in the next section.
Dematting & Grooming Tools
For a good dematting and grooming session you need a couple of tools. Dematting your cat cannot be done with the same brush as the general grooming brushes available. A special dematting brush is required to remove the matts safely and pain free. We personally have great experience with the brushes of Furminator, which I will link below.
For general grooming you cannot use the dematting tool, but you can use a variety of different brushes depending on the fur type and pet. Just as a side note, Furminator has brushes that can be used on both cats and dogs, the general difference is the size of the brush as some bigger dogs might need a bit more force and work area to get the job done.
We wrote a review of Furminator tools before.
How To Groom Your Cat?
In shedding season a lot of cats and dogs are going to shed a lot of hair. Grooming is then essential to both keep your house a bit cleaner from floating sheds and have a happy and healthy kitty.
Grooming and dematting your cat is going to be an easy job with a set of Furminator brushes, but with other proper tools it can also be done and the instructions are pretty well the same for either.
Preparation
First we need to prepare for a grooming session. There are a couple of things you need to make sure are in order before you start:
- Set off enough time for a grooming session, it takes time to be pretty
- Choose a room where it is easy to vacuum clean the hairs away
- Choose a time and space where your cat is calm
- Make sure your cat has dry fur
First of all it is important to set off enough time for a grooming session. It will take a bit of time to do the job properly and to remove as many sheddings as possible.
Choosing a room and time is really important. First of all your cat needs to be calm and feel comfortable in the space you are in. This also means that you should probably not do this right before their dinner or right after it either. Find a peaceful time window for it and also find a room you can easily clean up.
To be able to brush your cats fur, it needs to be entirely dry. Brushing wet hair will be very difficult and it will be painful to your cat.
Dematting & Grooming Session
First of all, make sure that the cats fur is clean. It isn’t really necessary to wash your cats fur, but it can be helpful in some cases. A clean fur is also about just removing all the big bits of dirt in it. With clean fur, the grooming session can be started.
In a grooming session it is important that the dematting is done first. Dematting should never be done with a grooming tool. Remember the time that your parents brushed your hair and yanked on a matted part of your hair? Ouch! right? Yeah if it hurts you, it will hurt your cat just as well.
So use the dematting tool first. For all tools the same principle is valid. You need to always brush from head to tail. Never from tail to back, because that hurts! You remove the mats by starting just before the start of the matted fur and then past the matted fur towards the tail.
Grooming as I said is pretty similar, but you groom the entire body of the cat. Every stroke has to go from head to tail and never in the opposite growing direction of the fur (never against the hair direction).
The Furminator brushes are designed to do what they have to do without much pressure applied to the brush. You simply let the brush do its work. You put the brush on the fur at the head side of the cat and pull it towards the tail.
Be extra careful with sensitive area’s. Brush extra slowly and softly and try to reduce the amount of strokes over the same area, to protect the skin from irritation.
Sensitive area’s for the cat are:
- (under) the face and ears
- paws
- belly
When Not To Use Furminator
There are cats that have barely any hair/fur to be brushed. The skin is very tender and can easily be hurt if you would brush it. Therefore, it is not adviced to brush the following cat breeds.
Below follows a list of breeds of cats that should not be groomed with brushes:
- Balinese
- Bombay
- Cornish rex
- Devon rex
- European Burmese
- Havana Brown
- Javanese
- Korat
- LaPerm
- Oriental
- Ragamuffin
- Singapura
- Sphynx
- Tiffany-Chantilly
- Turkish Angora
- Turkish Van
- York Chocolate
Don’t think that you don’t have to do anything with these breeds, for these breeds require a lot of skin care that needs to be applied by you.
After a good grooming session you are left with a bunch of cat hair that could easily form an entire extra cat. Unless you are thinking of creating a business of cat hair extension business, you should dispose of the hair through your garbage disposal system (or recycling separation system).
To top it off you could give your cat a proper wash to get rid of any loose hairs stuck in their fur and to get all the small dirt out too. Loose hair can itch badly on their skin and cause infections on their skin.
To give your cat a bathe, you need to use a good shampoo that is absolutely meant solely for cats. You cannot use a shampoo that is for dogs or humans.
Check out the review of the Furminator Tools
Leave a comment below for any questions regarding dematting and grooming your cat.