The (Un)Welcome Matte
As it warms up, pets go through the spring and summer ritual of shedding their winter hair and leaving it all over the furniture! Though shedding is a natural process, if your pet is starting to look really “clumpy,” his matted hair can either lead to or be a sign of serious health problems.
Clumps of hair don’t “breathe” very well, and they trap a lot of moisture against the skin. Over time, the skin will become inflamed. As your pet accumulates more mattes, he may actually become sick from skin infections. At the very least, mattes are uncomfortable. Would you like to have your hair pulled all the time and every day? Of course not!
Long-haired dogs are particularly prone to having their mattes become a home for maggots! Yuck!! Flies love to lay their eggs in the warm, moist environment that lies beneath the surface of a matte. Guess who the maggots are eating when they hatch? Poor Fido! If your pet is hairy and clumpy, it is best to get him groomed or even shaved right now—before fly season reaches its peak.
In the veterinary clinic, when I see a patient with lots of matted hair, the first thing I look at is the pet’s body weight. Some animals would love to groom out all of the clumpy hair, but they can’t because they’ve gotten too fat to reach around and do the work! How humiliating. Help your fat pet out by combing out any tangled hair, and putting him on a diet.
If a pet has lots of mattes but isn’t overweight, it often means that their teeth hurt! Sore teeth make it very uncomfortable for pets to do a lot of grooming. So they just stop doing it. However, pets don’t stop eating when their teeth hurt, so don’t wait for them to turn away from the food bowl before you act. Look inside your pet’s mouth. If the gums are reddened or seem swollen around any particular teeth, that is the warning sign that your pet’s teeth are hurting him.
Matted hair is a tangled mess of old hair trapped along with new hair—that’s why it doesn’t fall out by itself. Sometimes pets can have metabolic problems—such as allergies, low hormone levels, or poor nutrition—and this can lead to excessive shedding. You can imagine that an excessively shedding pet is more likely to get hair mattes than one that doesn’t shed too much.
Of course, cats that shed a lot are more likely to get hairballs. All pets shed, so we can’t stop this natural process altogether. But feeding a high quality food has been shown to decrease inflammation in the skin that causes increased shedding. Furthermore, high quality foods make your pet’s hair nice and shiny! (But don’t believe a food that says it stops shedding, because it’s very unlikely.)
If you want to groom the mattes out by yourself—be careful. Groomers use special tools that help them to clip and trim your pet safely and quickly. I have often put stitches in a pet that was being groomed at home because he zigged while the scissors zagged. Ouch!! Unfortunately, the scissors got a little bit more than just hair.
In summary, I think we can all agree that clumpy hair is no laughing matte(r).
