How To Cure Cat Hairballs

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The elusive secret of how to cure cat hairballs may evade those of us who are burdened with the responsibility to nurse an ailing cat back to health. While cat hairballs are beseemingly innocuous, the fastidious truth is that, if left unchecked and untreated, they can render harm and wreak havoc on your cat’s health, over the course of time. This fact alone should be sufficient to prompt any pet owner to prevent themselves from being lulled into a false sense of complacency over the matter, and should do something proactive about it.

While it may appear that the mere presence of hairballs in your cat’s stomach is not really a big deal, given that it appears to be a self-healing process, anytime that your cat vomits them out, the fact of the matter is that your cat may be slowly and subtly succumbing to a ticking time bomb, unbeknownst to you. The obstructive nature of hairballs accumulated in your cat’s digestive tract will hinder the proper absorption of vital nutrients from the intestinal tract into your cat’s blood stream.

Loss of appetite, weakness, weight loss, land lethargy are just a few of the adverse symptoms that can ensure as a result of hairballs. Therefore, it would behoove us, as cat owners, to educate ourselves about what causes hairballs, and not only how to cure hairballs, but also how to prevent hairballs just as well.

The 80/20 Rule When It Comes To How To Cure Cat Hairballs

With respect to understanding the most effective ways how to cure cat hairballs, it is oftentimes beneficial to implement solutions that fall in line with what is known as the pareto principle. In other words, 80% of the results come from 20% of your efforts. There are 2 main areas of focus when it comes to finding a cure for your cat’s hairball woes:. If you focus the bulk of your efforts on this 2-pronged approach, you can expect to see a dramatic improvement in your cat’s ability to cope with hairballs. Not only will you be able to cure your cat’s bout with hairballs, but you will also a drastic reduction in future occurrences of hairball vomiting, due to proactive, preventative engagement:

Focus Area #1: Dietary Changes To Cure Hairballs

Dietary Options For Proper Hairball Control

Keeping in mind the 80/20 rule as mentioned above, we have to explore dietary options that will help keep your cat combat this problem. And how can we do that? There are three basic solutions that can work for your cat in this case:

• Consuming fiber-rich foods which promote digestive health, and avoiding “junk” foods that are devoid of nutrients. This will help to enable your cat’s digestive system to properly process the hair and pass it along through excretion.
• Consuming foods that are rich with the essential nutrients to help promote healthy fur. Cats, like many other animals, are prone to shed their fur. However, a healthy diet can help stave off some of that shedding and slow it down.
• Offering your cat smaller meals spread out at greater intervals. In other words: portion control. By feeding your cat less food, there will be less of an opportunity to trigger the vomit reflex, and there will also be less of an opportunity for your cats fur to get stuck. Giving your cat’s digestive system a bit of a rest can help to lessen the impact of swallowed furballs. This will ensure proper digestion.

Focus Area #2: Proper Grooming For Hairball Control

The second of two approaches to your cat’s hairball problem is proper grooming. Yes, we know that your naturally and instinctively grooms itself several times a day. (Studies have shown that cats can spend anywhere between 30 to 50 percent of their waking hours grooming themselves.)

The very natural act of grooming themselves, comes with unintended, and rather inconvenient and unfortunate, consequences. Your cat inadvertently ingests traces amounts of fur. While no amount of proper nutrition can effectively eliminate cat fur shedding, it can certainly serve to slow it down.

However, it is inevitable that some amount of loose fur may be ingested by your cat.

Therefore, what can you do in this situation? The best thing you can do is to develop the habit of grooming your cat a regular basis.

Say what? You might think that grooming your cat when your cat already does it to itself would be redundant. However, by proactively engaging in grooming your cat on a regular and frequent basis, what you are doing is extricating excess, loose fur, before your cat ingests it. This is a proactive exercise. Less loose fur equals less fur ingestion.

It really is as simple as that.

Grooming may seem like a tedious and messy activity. But with the right grooming brush, you need only spend a few minutes a day caring for your cat.

Proper grooming can yield significant results in terms of a reduction in your cat’s bout with hairballs.

How To Cure Cat Hairballs: The Verdict Is In…

Truth be told, the secret to how to cure cat hairballs really requires a great deal of trial and error. You have to be willing to experiment with different solutions to see what works for you. But it will require some effort on your part. It will also require some degree of monitoring and tracking of your cat’s progress. This way you will be able  to observe any trends to see what is working and what isn’t. You also have to establish a baseline for an “acceptable” tolerance for cat hairball vomiting. Once in a blue moon is OK. But frequent bouts of vomiting can be a harbinger of a much larger problem.

Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that your cat lives a healthy and comfortable lifestyle.