Excessive grooming can be a response to changes in your cat’s environment they’re struggling to come to terms with. These are some of the most common causes for cat overgrooming.
Your cat is naturally on a mission to keep their coat clean, at times spending up to 50% of their waking time self-grooming. But sometimes their behaviour can take a turn into excessive cat grooming. Find out why this happens and what you can do to help your cat.
What is cat overgrooming?
Cat overgrooming occurs when your kitty starts grooming excessively – licking their fur so much that it causes skin inflammation, sores or hair loss. In extreme cases a cat might even start to bite areas of skin. Sometimes you will notice your cat overgrooming, or damage to the skin, or a patchy coat, but in other cases you may simply find the evidence of overgrooming such as clumps of hair behind the sofa.
What causes excessive cat grooming?
The two main causes for overgrooming are behavioural, when the cat starts licking excessively as a form of stress-relief (also known as psychogenic alopecia), and medical, when skin allergies or skin parasites are the main culprit.
Excessive cat grooming as a stress-relief mechanism
It might not be obvious to you, but the home environment can become very stressful for your cat. The particular stressors for a feline psyche don’t always register on our human scale, but they can cause just as much havoc as one of our work disputes or an urgent last-minute job.
The biggest cause of stress for cats is other cats – a multicat household or other cats in the neighbourhood. By nature, cats are solitary creatures and they can find living with other cats very stressful. Often this does not manifest as aggression towards other cats and they may happily snuggle up together at home, but your cat may struggle with the stress and turn to overgrooming.
