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Dr Kim Kendall
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 Cats can voluntarily vomit (you always suspected that, didn’t you?). It is a very useful thing to be able to do to get rid of the bits of mouse that just won’t ‘carry on through’. However, vomiting furballs is not always benign.
Cats these days live very differently to their evolutionary niche. They started as shorthaired cats in the dry savanna with no contact with humans (humans evolved after cats remember!) on a strictly rodent and small mammal diet.
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Dietary intolerance and furballs
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Now many cats have more hair than they need, and they eat a wide variety of meats - mostly from tins and packages. The combined result of this is that some cats develop a ‘dietary intolerance’ to different meats and additives, which causes irritation of the lining of the stomach and intestine. When something irritant like fur (which can be pretty scratchy, even if it is your own!) gets into the already inflamed stomach, the cat feels sick and brings it back up. Voila, furball on your carpet (even if it is the only piece of carpet in the whole house!).
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Longhaired cats
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Longhaired cats have an even bigger problem. Cat’s tongues have nifty little barbs on them, especially for cleaning and mouse swallowing. The difficulty is that all the barbs point backwards, so once something stringy gets in a cats mouth, the cat can't spit it out and is pretty much obliged to swallow it (hence the warnings about kittens, string and major surgery).
The same happens with hair when they groom – and in fact cats seem to seek out their own hair to eat it if you do comb it off (they have sort of a trance-like ‘I have to do this’ look on their faces!). So they swallow huge amounts of hair in the moulting season, and for the longhaired cats, there just isn’t enough room to send it all ‘out the back way’ so they vomit it up.
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Furball solutions
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Regular combing (rather than brushing) right down to the skin removes a majority of the problem for long and shorthaired cats. Use of cat laxatives lubricates the remainder so it passes more easily. There is now a palatable high fibre food, Hills Feline Hairball Adult Dry Food, which keeps the hair moving along and not balling up into a furball and being re-presented to your carpet.
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Eating grass
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Some cats like to eat grass and then vomit. I haven’t heard any real reason for it, and as the cats who do it seem to have no other problems, I can only assume it is normal. Some cats do it when they have tonsillitis or a sore throat – I presume they are trying to vomit up their enlarged tonsils (cats have six tonsils to our two, so when they are swollen they really irritate the back of cats’ throats!) and these ones stop after a course of antibiotics.
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When to seek help
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Furballs are a normal part of most cats’ lives. However, if the frequency increases (from monthly to twice weekly), or there is a dry cough rather than a furball produced (early sign of asthma), or if bile, food or foam is brought up – then it’s off to the vet for you!
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Author: Dr Kim Kendall BVSc MACVSc (Feline Medicine) graduated from the University of Sydney in 1982 and established the East Chatswood Cat Clinic in 1994, a dedicated cat-only Veterinary Clinic. The practice does everything for cats and is a full service veterinary clinic.
http://www.catclinic.com.au
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