By Dr. Becker
Today, I’m filming a video at Natural Pet (my animal hospital) on the topic of bathing cats.
Now, I’m sure some of you are watching this video strictly for its entertainment value! After all, most kitties don’t enjoy baths and the whole ordeal can be hugely stressful for everyone involved.
But there are some cats – some Maine Coons, for example – that don’t mind the water. But even kitties who don’t mind water don’t necessarily like baths. This is similar to dogs that love to swim but don’t like bath time.
Anyway, I’m doing this video by popular demand. I get a lot of requests from my clients and Mercola Healthy Pets readers to demonstrate the best way to bathe a cat.
Introducing Enzo the Cat, aka ‘Squishy’
It’s important to take a few precautions before trying to bathe your cat. Keep in mind that when a kitty gets angry or stressed -- no matter how docile or sweet she may be normally – bad things can happen. So I recommend you ask someone to help you with this project. I’ve asked Ashley, the best vet tech in the world, to be my assistant.
Today, we’re going to bathe one of our rescues. His name is Enzo, but we often call him Squishy because, well, he’s squishy! He came to us through our trap-neuter-release program. You'll see he has a notched ear – that’s how we mark feral cats at the same time we neuter them, so we know when we see them out and about that they’re feral and have already been neutered. If a cat with a notched ear winds up in one of our traps, we just release him.
Enzo arrived around Halloween last year. The women who trapped him realized he was quite young – only about six months old at the time. Since the area he was found in has a coyote population, the women were nervous he would become coyote prey. Since he was not fully feral, we opted to keep him here for several months to try to domesticate him, and he domesticated beautifully.
Enzo was at the clinic for several months. Then on New Year’s Eve, my husband decided no kitty should spend the holiday alone. So he came into the clinic, collected Enzo, and he’s been at my house ever since. (We call these scenarios “foster failures!”)
