Little Kitty Cat TMI Moment

[silverthorne]

So lately, people in the cat comms I watch have had problems with their cats needing their anal glands expressed.

What I'm trying to figure out is why this seems like an epidemic of care gone wrong.
Because I've never had any of my cats need to get their anal glands expressed.

WTF? Is this more common than I thought? Did I just miss the signs on my own cats? (Although scooting and dingleberries are pretty hard to miss...and when my cats have had it, it was due to other things, like worms (ew) or having found and ingested one of my own Hairs of Doom, thereby making the wonderful 'poo on a string'...

So, guys, did you ever have to squeeze foul-smelling marking musk out of your own cats' arses?

Comments

[silverthorne.livejournal.com]

Okay, so it's not as common as it seems, then. I was beginning to worry, because I've seen a lot of posts on it lately in the cat comms, and I was beginning to wonder if I was doing something wrong as a cat mom and somehow not noticing when it needed to be done. (Basically, it's been posted about enough that I was starting to wonder if this was some vital part of cat care I'd managed to miss in the 39 years of living with cats I have).

[janewt.livejournal.com]

Heck, now you're making me wonder too... Maybe everyone on the comms has started anxiously staring at their cats' bums?

[silverthorne.livejournal.com]

I'll be honest--I was starting to think I needed to have a good look at mine.

...And then I decided that surely, if it needed to be done, my cats would find a way to tell me that didn't involve feeling up their butts.

I do wonder though, if with the advent of all the 'natural' foods out there, if that didn't make a difference and made the problem more common. In the 70's, before the Science Diet and stuff was available to the public, our cats were fed the Purina foods...and then switched when Science Diet became available. And I'll be honest, my cats always seemed to have more stomach upset (and stinky poo) when I'd try to upgrade them to things like the Blue Buffalo and stuff that a lot of owners rave about now.