Apparently 25% of cat owners blow dry their cats hair after a bath.
This amazes me. If 25% of people who have cats blow dry their cat after a bath, what is the percentage of people who bath their cats?
I’ve never bathed any of my cats. If I did that, what would they do all day? Surely, one of the key functions of a domestic cat is self grooming? I can’t imagine they’d like it very much anyway. Apart, possibly, from Mr Stripey Pants, who likes to sit under a dripping tap to drink. But even he would draw the line, I’m sure, at submersion and suds?
Or do I just have a seriously negligent attitude to my cats’ personal hygiene?
I still remember a line from an e.mail entitled Things We Learn In Childhood:
It’s not possible to baptise a cat.
Good lord, if I ever tried to BATHE either of my cats I’d be bloodied and in the emergency room.
Although I have once wiped Nekoka down with a wet rag after he rolled around in his cat litter. He tolerated it, but I think only because he didn’t want to have to lick all that stuff off his fur himself.
They choose their battles with the precision of a Roman general…..Litter licking is one for the front-line troops to handle!
I agree – who are these people who wash their cats, and WHY??? Growing up, there was always a cat in the family. I have never known any of them to be given a bath. Now I now have my own cat, and I don’t intend to bathe her either – despite her being pure white! And she certainly would not be impressed by a hairdryer…
The only time I’ve come close to bathing a cat was when Stanley was wounded in a fight. I cleaned it with warm salty water on a cotton pad, and he seemed to really like it. But that’s more like being tongue-bathed than actually washed. He also used to love being towel dried when he’d been out in the rain.
Oh yes….Towel drying is one of the great human inventions.
CONCLUSION:
It seems that there are two kinds of people in the world:
Cat-washers and cat-watchers. And the occasional cat-toweller.
I mentioned this discussion to my housemate last night. She said they would regularly wash their family cat. Apparently he hated it, and it took three people to hold him down… I didn’t quite get to the bottom of why they bathed him in the first place. She said that they blow dried him after his bath so he wouldn’t go straight outside and roll in the dirt while wet, making himself even more dirty. Apparently he LOVED being blowdried!
How odd. I think the cat-bathers are all actually dog people that can’t admit it. That said, when I was a teen I had a cat that was either a mutt or a Korat, I’ll never know for sure, he was a foundling. In any case, I’d occasionally put him in the bathtub with me. He wasn’t terribly impressed, but was too nice of a cat to shred my legs. I’m pretty sure I didn’t attempt to blow dry him, though. Not even a dog likes those damn things, usually.