Retrospective: Bathing Felines

Through no intention or fault of my own, I have ended up bathing every cat I've been owned by, with the exception of Max (who would have gotten a bath had he lived with me long enough).

There aren't any bathing pictures. I feel quite strongly that while I can tell tales of my kitties' bathtimes, no cat should have to have his or her picture taken when they are so much at a disadvantage. Cats do have dignity as we all know, and while it's not like they would know I was posting pictures on the internet, (all of them having passed away as of this point), it's the principle of the thing.

It all started back when Pizza and Tiger (siblings) were 10 years old. Up until that point, neither one of them had ever had a bath. Like all (or almost all) cats, they did a great job of keeping themselves clean, and what one cat couldn't reach (like the spot on the back of his neck) the other cat could.

Tiger quite enjoyed washing Pizza and would pin him down with one steely paw if he objected. The problem, from her viewpoint, was that Pizza was slightly bigger and definitely stronger than she was. He would put up with the washing for a while. He'd even make a move to "escape" only to allow himself to be pinned. But when he really got tired of it, and wasn't in the mood to indulge her anymore, he'd simply stand up and walk off, leaving her fuming in his wake.

Sometimes it was very hard not to laugh at them. I had to go in another room to giggle. Both of them were rather much on maintaining dignity.

It wasn't pleasant when we discovered, with a vet's assistance, that Pizza, at 10 years old, had developed a flea allergy. Most cats do itch a little when a flea bites them. Pizza would get the cat equivalent of a rash (which you couldn't see, due to the fur). He would scratch and scratch and was well on his way to developing bald patches (which then lead to ripping skin).

At the time, there weren't all these handy medications that can kill adult fleas the first bite they take of your kitty. All there was were the liquid on the back of the neck which made the fleas sterile so there wouldn't be a next generation of fleas. This helps when you're trying to get rid of fleas but it won't help the flea allergy.

The only recourse was a full immersion bath. And because the fleas could simply hang out on Tiger and then come bite Pizza, both cats had to have a bath.

Ever tried to give a cat a bath when he's a full adult and never experienced it before? The internet's full of not so funny jokes about it.

But Pizza, dear sweet cat that he was, didn't make us any trouble. Mom and I geared up -- long sleeves, gloves, the whole nine yards -- and used empty laundry soap buckets (one to wash, one to rinse) in the tub. He didn't offer to claw us. He didn't offer to bite us.

He made his displeasure clear, however, by yelling at the top of his lungs the entire process. He was loud. He echoed in the tile-lined bathroom.

He was so loud that my father, mowing the lawn in the back of the lot heard him (through a closed bathroom window, yet) and came rushing in, demanding outside the closed bathroom door, "What are you doing to that cat?!"

At this point I was a little giddy in relief that neither my mother nor I had been shredded or otherwise injured, and that the worst Pizza was doing was complaining about it vocally. So I chirped cheerfully back at my worried dad, "Washing him. Want to help?"

There were mutters only in response, but I bet they were something like, "um, no, no really, glad to know he's okay, gotta finish the lawn."

Tiger was a dignified queen. Not in the sense of a cat female who can have kittens; she'd been spayed long ago. But she carried queen in her bones. She was not about to complain about this horrid process. She was going to be dignified and keep a stiff upper lip. I swear Tiger would have expatriated to Britain if she could have; she was such a stereotype of British dignity and aplomb.

She'd be horrified if she knew I was telling you this, but the thing of the matter was, she kind of enjoyed having her bath. I would hold her in the rinse bucket while Mom dumped the soapy bucket and put fresh water in it. (We would actually do two rinses to make sure all the soap got out, plus we'd put conditioner on them after the soap rinse, so we had to get that out, too.)

And Tiger would sit there, with me barely holding her--mostly just holding her head above water. And she'd paddle idly at the surface of the water, playing with it. She'd deny it, of course. No self-respecting cat enjoys having a bath.

Once she was trying to stand up in the bucket. Not necessarily to get out, just to stand on her own two feet (the bucket wasn't wide enough for it to be all four). So she was pushing up, and I was pushing down, to keep her in the bucket up to her shoulders so she wouldn't get chilled (this was during another waiting moment for buckets to be exchanged).

She gave up and didn't warn me. So it was like a tug of war where the other person quits pulling. I shoved her most unceremoniously under the water. Completely. Even the tip of her nose. Of course I hauled her back up again immediately, and tried desperately to apologize, but I'm afraid I was laughing too hard to make it a very useful apology. She ignored me regally, both the dunking and the laughing.

Well, for the rest of their lives they had to have a bath at a point in flea season where enough fleas had ridden in on our coat-tails (so to speak) that Pizza's allergy flared up again. (That's how fleas get into your house, you know. They jump on your shoes and pants legs. That's how a completely indoor cat can get fleas. Most annoying. I wish nature would stay outside where it belongs.)

Okay, now I knew that there was a great possibility of a cat developing a flea allergy late in life. And although I was still living with my parents when Pippin came into my life, I knew there was a great possibility I'd move out of my parents' house before Pippin passed away (and this did happen) which meant that I had to be able to give him a bath by myself.

It's easier with two people. That way one person holds the cat while the other person does the soaping and rinsing.

Pippin, coming as he did from a breeder (however irresponsible that breeder was) had already had a bath before I got him. All the kittens did. Show cats get bathed and primped and all kinds of grooming, and they have to at least be able to put up with it without being unduly stressed.

So, even though Pippin didn't have a flea allergy, and neither did Tiger, I set out to make sure that Pippin wouldn't be a problem to bathe if I had to bathe him. This meant that he got a bath about once a year. In addition to the potential of a bath being medically necessary at some point in his future, there was also the fact that he became a one-cat household fairly soon.

(Pippin came home with me in the fall. Tiger passed away the next spring.)

And only one cat can't keep himself completely clean. There are bits that he just couldn't reach on his own. So when the back of his neck and behind his ears started looking greasy, that was about the time he was due for a bath.

Pippin didn't like immersion. It scared him. The first time I tried it by myself, it quite literally scared the poop out of him. (It's a bathtub. It's easy to clean up and sanitize. Not a big deal.) But it was a big deal that I'd scared him that much.

So I tried using one of those shower thingies with the flexible tube that you attach to the faucet of the tub. And that he didn't mind at all. I also tried the leaning over the edge of the tub to wash him, but that was incredibly hard on my back. Since Pippin never used his claws and was quite calm and okay with baths (now that a lake wasn't slowly eating him alive from the paws up), I gave up and got in the tub with him.

It's hard to get a Maine Coon wet all the way to the skin. You have to soap and rinse twice. And you'd better make sure you get every single bit of the soap off him, because if some gets trapped down next to his skin under all that hair, it creates a pocket of irritation that can make sores and really just get bad. I never experienced this first-hand, because I always rinsed and rinsed and rinsed some more.

Pippin would stand there calmly, letting me hold the shower head thingy over him. And after a while he'd notice he was getting wet, and he'd be a bit indignant before concluding, well, he was already wet so there was no point in protesting. (I believe he favored fatalism as a life philosophy.)

What he minded wasn't so much the bath itself. He didn't mind water, although he'd rather have been not-wet, and having the soap rubbed in and then rubbed off, and same with the conditioner, was a nice massage. What he minded was the drying process.

It took forever, even when I managed to get him to tolerate the nasty monster that roared hot air (known in human circles as a hair-dryer). And multiple towels. And hours of staying in the bathroom with the fans on. We stayed in the bathroom because it was warm in there and I didn't want him getting chilled. I stayed in there because I'd done this to him and I wasn't going to lock him in a tiny room by himself; that wouldn't have been fair.

You know how you usually don't remember the last time you do something you do often with someone? I actually do remember Pippin's last bath. I hadn't given him a bath for going on three years because of his arthritis. I knew getting chilled, even a little, made people's bones ache who had arthritis, and I didn't want to make him any more miserable than the arthritis was doing on its own.

But he started itching. Itching like Pizza had done all those many years before. I gave him the new-fangled flea medication that kills the adult fleas, and he tolerated it well (he never tolerated the back of the neck liquid--I only tried it twice, years apart, when he was much younger, and knew it made him feel ill). It didn't stop the itching. So after talking about it with the vet, I finally gave him a bath, the last one I ever gave him. I made sure he was warm and dry and fluffy before I let us out of the bathroom.

And even though it had been many years since he'd had a bath, he remembered all the details, and didn't even flinch. He had, however, perfected a kind of exasperated eye roll that he did at me whenever I did something that was so obviously dumb (by cat standards) that he couldn't quite believe I didn't realize it was dumb. He did that several times during his bath.

I'm glad I never left him trapped in the bathroom to dry off by himself, even though it meant that I got awfully sore from sitting on a folded towel on the hard tile floor. And hey, I usually got a large part of a book read during the later portions of the dry-off stage, after he was toweled dry and had enough of the blow dryer as he would tolerate.