grooming.

Remember waking up as an adolescent to yet another annoying pimple? Your cat can commiserate. According to the Herald News, felines suffer from acne problems, just like human teens. Feline acne is common annoyance. The kitty zits can happen to any breed of cat at any age. Unlike with humans, puberty isn't the typical acne trigger for felines. Instead, many cats break out due to bacteria picked up from things like their food bowls. The affliction pops up as small bumps that can be hard to spot because of fur and dark skin. Veterinarians warn that feline acne often looks worse than it is, but treatment is simple. All your kitty needs is a regular application of apple cider vinegar or ...

Ahhh, the feeling of a slimy wad of hair between the toes first thing in the morning. Does cat ownership get any better than that? Despite how common hairballs are, they really are not normal. Cats are not owls; they're not supposed to bring up pellets of indigestible material. Yes, cats ingest hair in the process of self-grooming, but it should move through the digestive system and come out the other end. When this process goes awry, the hair can clump together in the stomach and not pass into the intestinal tract. It causes enough irritation that a cat will usually vomit up the wad, and voila ... you have a hairball on your carpet or in your shoe. In the worst case scenario, however, ...

For today's Daily Vet, we're revisiting an April 2011 column from Dr. Jennifer Coates - who can now be found on Fully Vetted - on the topic of cat declawing. Certainly controversial and yet cat declawing continues today. What's you take on it? Would you suggest it to you friends? I can't think of any one topic that is more controversial in the feline world than declawing. The arguments that fly back and forth remind me of the debate surrounding abortion. Two sides with extremely strong opinions that seem completely unwilling to look for a middle ground. On the one hand (or should we say "paw"), we have the anti-declaw zealots. They say declawing is uniformly cruel, citing pain, ...