The lady who shaves all her seven cats every month

One of the perhaps minor irritations of living with a domestic cat is that there is normally a lot of fur around the home. It is swept into corners like tumbleweed where you hoover it up. And it's on your clothes and on your bedclothes. You know what I mean. You get used to it. You don't see it. That's the way you deal with cat fur but not everybody has the same opinion. If you have 7 cats the 'problem' is magnified times 7.

Image: MikeB

Some people are very particular and houseproud. They don't want fur lying around upsetting their beautiful vision of an immaculate home. And I sense that a lady whose name is Elida Shiry is one of those people.

She says that she is the mother of seven beautiful fur babies a.k.a. domestic cats! She said that cat hair used to be a problem until she took the drastic step of shaving them all every month.

She used to have Miracle Brushes and lint rollers behind pillows on sofas and in every room. She had her cats professionally groomed every month at great expense: $350. It seems that she had them all barbered in the style of the lion cut.

She decided that it was too expensive and it was all too much trouble so she resolved to shave them all herself. She purchased some grooming shears which I presume means cat or dog grooming parlour professional shears.

As she had never handled grooming shears before she started with her cat that had the best temperament and "slowly learned secrets".

She proudly states that "Today I can do all seven in 1.5 hours. I shave them at the beginning of every month and they love it. They purr, while I shave them. Their coats feel like velvet or chenille and there is no hair in my home."

Comment: she is the first person that I have met on the Internet (not personally) who does this in order to get rid of cat fur. It's a brave thing to do. It's an unusual thing to do. You can't guarantee that the cats will like it or accept it but after a while they probably will and in this instance they did.

A big advantage of giving your cat is a lion cut yourself is that you know what's happening. If you take them to a professional grooming parlour and leave them there while you go shopping, you don't know what is happening. 

You don't know how well or badly they are being treated. There have been some terrible stories of cat deaths at grooming parlours for various reasons one of which was when a dog attacked a Persian cat and another death occurred when the drying cage overheated the cat and killed him.

So, this woman's cats are all hairless - well sort of. I have presumed that they have a lion cut because you can't shave the hair from a cat's head and feet. And in any case, it looks quite attractive.

I guess that once you done it for the first month the next month is much easier because they can't have been much regrowth by then. They'll have a very low-lying (short) coat to shave off. I wonder how the cats feel about it?

That is a question that she appears not to have asked herself. Are the cats upset? Do they feel that they have lost their coat? And how does that affect their psyche? A cat's coat, is after all, a part of their essential anatomy. It keeps them warm.  I think they may be upset and she doesn't realise it. You know how cats hide their feelings.

And that is another problem. You are going to have to make sure that the heating is at least reasonable or possibly turned up in your home which will add to the expense of running the home particularly in the UK where because of the Ukraine war energy costs are incredibly high.

I am rambling and wandering off onto a different topic but you get my drift.