quick cat grooming tip!

Back from a bit of a holiday hiatus with a short post today containing a cat grooming tip! I have some fun post ideas that I just didn’t quite have the steam to tackle over the holidays, but hopefully I’ll take them on soon. But in the meantime, I thought I’d post about an inexepnsive, neat little grooming tool that many cat owners probably haven’t run across!

This is a tool I used regularly on my horses, but have found to be equally (or even more!) useful for the cats. It’s a Slick ‘N Easy grooming block (amazon link). It’s basically like a super lightweight pumice stone that captures loose hair when you brush the stone along the cat’s coat.

The result: lots of removed hair!

The best part about this tool (for me) is that Tycho doesn’t mind it nearly as much as a brush! I wrote about how Tycho *hates* being brushed in the post about his haircuts. When I try to use any sort of cat brush or shedding blade (metal tools like this one that are great for getting fur out of cooperative cats like Gus!) on Tycho, he gets angry very fast! I usually only get like one or two short passes over a single part of his coat before he starts trying to bite me. But he will let me groom him with this slicker for several minutes before getting annoyed! Although he did still (fairly gently) lay teeth on me right after the above grooming session to let me know he was done:

It doesn’t help with de-tangling longer hair (so he still has to have his haircuts!), but it does help remove some of his undercoat! And it’s gentler that many of the brushes because it doesn’t make contact with his skin, it just slides over the surface, dragging out hair. It works well on Gus too, I usually finish his grooming session with the slicker stone. I do recommend wiping the cat down with a slightly damp cloth afterwards to remove any little particles from the stone that come loose. The stone is designed to kind of disintegrate with continued use as the surface gets less abrasive. When the surface gets dirty, you just rub it on concrete to remove the outer layer and it’s good as new! It’s a tiny but messy, so we usually do our grooming sessions outside on the catio. But it’s super useful, so try it out if you aren’t happy with your current cat grooming tools!