If you’ve ever owned a cat, you are no stranger to cleaning up hairballs in creative places around your home. Hairballs may not be our favorite thing to experience, but your cat needs to do it periodically for health reasons. Being an educated pet parent comes with a lot of responsibility. We all want our little, naughty furballs never to experience pain or sickness, and one way to stay on top of it is to watch for your cat’s hairballs.
What We Know About Hairballs
Let’s start with what a hairball is and then learn how to help your little angel. A hairball is a stringy chunk of swallowed fur that can come in all shapes and sizes, depending on how much your cat sheds. The hairball is made up of loose fur and other items that don’t belong in the cat’s stomach, so it must be coughed up to avoid any issues. The small pellets of compressed hair and debris can tell much about the cat’s health.
There are many products made to aid cats in coughing up hairballs. Many big-box pet stores carry numerous gels, pastes, treats, supplements, and food that can help. If the hairball isn’t coughed up, it remains as a round, sponge-like item in the cat’s stomach. Hairballs can be up to an inch or two wide and five inches long, with different shapes possible, though most of the time, they will be long and thin.
On some long-haired, heavy-shedding cats, the hairballs may be bigger and/or more frequent than in a cat that does not have fur and sheds very much. Another way to help your cat is to feed them highly digestible protein, not table scraps. By feeding your cat the food required in its diet, you are moving in the right direction to help your cat.
Humans may complain about cleaning up hairballs, especially if they have more than one cat! We may not lick ourselves clean after a long day at work; instead, we skip nutritious meals in exchange for fast food and alcohol, and then we wonder why we aren’t healthy. A healthy cat sheds and bathes itself numerous times during the day, as it should, but when it comes down to how healthy the cat is, it has constant issues with hairballs.
When stressed, we may find more hair in the drain than usual. When you notice your cat overgrooming and cleaning up hairballs all the time, it’s time to look at the cat’s nutrition and find out what’s going on to cause the cat to have such problems.
What Happens If a Cat Cannot Cough Up a Hairball?
If you and your cat have tried everything to get the hairball to loosen and come out, it’s still stuck somewhere, happily and not budging. Of course, this would be much worse if your cat has long hair and doesn’t like to drink water.
Without enough water, hairballs will not have the moisture they need to travel smoothly out of the cat’s mouth. Throwing up a hairball would be difficult for humans since humans are generally terrible at staying hydrated. It would be like constipation, and if things get bad enough, we might need to have a hairball blockage removed from our intestines.
The tiny pellets that make up the hairball contain hair and any foreign objects the cat may have ingested, like grass, leaves, dirt tracked inside, and tiny objects they ate that they shouldn’t have. Cats cannot digest the hairball because it contains mainly hair/fur and a tough, insoluble protein substance called keratin. The problem with keratin is that cats cannot digest it.
Many times, when a cat is trying to cough up a hairball, it finds that it is much easier to poop it out instead. So, if you see something furry in the litterbox that isn’t the furry beast herself, now you know not to get scared! If you would rather not wait around, the other option is to take them to the vet as soon as you see them struggling.
Help Your Cat Cough Up Hairballs
There are many different ways that you can help your cat get through all this hairball business with much less struggling and irritation. You won’t need to tiptoe around your home, hoping to see the mess before you step in it. It’s also very important for the cat to expel the hairball as soon as possible because it can cause other health complications.
If the hairball grows too large and cannot pass through the narrow sphincters between the esophagus and the stomach or from the stomach to the intestines, it could cause big trouble down the road. If it gets stuck in the intestines, surgery will need to be performed quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Hairball Remedies
It’s tough to know which hairball remedies work and which don’t. Waste your time on. Looking at the extensive supply of hairball remedies in the pet store aisle can be daunting and induce plenty of anxiety. Below are a few suggestions we think are winners in the fight against difficult hairballs.
- Pet Honesty Hairball Control Chicken Flavored Chews Digestive Support Supplement
- Cat Lax Cat Supplement, 2-oz tube
- Adding a teaspoon of pumpkin puree to their food when you see them struggling to cough up a hairball. That will help ease their stomach so that it can be pooped out.
- Adding the correct serving size of salmon fish oil to their food should help keep everything lubricated and running
- Offer your cat some cat grass. It aids with indigestion and can help them cough up a hairball.
