This morning I had to take the tweezers to a single, scratchy cat hair that had become embedded inside one of my bra cups. I'm not sure how the hair got inside my bra, but after living with two cats for the last six years, I've more or less stopped being surprised when I find cat hair in strange places. It's wily stuff. And since most cats shed prodigious quantities of it, there's ample opportunity for cat hair to find its way into nostrils and soup pots when it gets bored with clinging to pant legs and gathering under the furniture.
Most cat lovers manage to overlook their pets' furry deposits up to a point, which is fortunate for cats, since it's impossible to completely eliminate cat hair from a house with a cat in it. But assuming you have a healthy awareness of hygiene and social mores, you undoubtedly want to minimize the amount of cat hair in your home, on your clothes, and, yes, in your nose. That much, at least, is pretty easy to accomplish by adding a few simple steps to your normal cleaning and pet care routines.
Getting Rid of Cat Hair
The most important step in getting rid of cat hair in your home is to keep it from getting loose there in the first place. If you brush your cat on a regular basis—anywhere from daily to once every two weeks, depending on how much your cat sheds—she'll have less hair to shed on her own. The picture to the right shows how much hair I brushed from Nina's coat last week—which is also exactly how much less hair I'll have to sweep up from the floor (or discover in hairball form) this week. She loved every minute of it, too; in fact, most cats enjoy being brushed as long as you use gentle pressure with a brush that isn't scratchy. I use, and would recommend, a curry brush with soft rubber bristles that naturally attract hair.
A cat's skin and coat are easily affected by the animal's diet, so a high quality cat food can make your cat's skin less dry and therefore less prone to excess shedding. Earlier this year, after upgrading Nina's food a little in the hopes that she would lose some weight, we noticed a difference in the feel of her fur: it became softer and sleeker and less of it came off on our hands when we petted her. She hasn't lost any weight, and she still sheds like crazy when we brush her, but the extra money we spend on cat food is repaid in time we don't have to spend chasing after cat hair tumbleweeds on the hardwood floors.
Once the hair leaves the cat, the best way to rid yourself of it is with a vacuum cleaner, a broom, and a dust rag. Floors and furniture should be vacuumed, swept, or dusted on a regular basis to keep pet hair from accumulating. I do this once a week, and I'm always a little bit impressed with how much the cats manage to shed in just one week. Some people vacuum as often as every day, and while cats can certainly produce enough hair to justify that, I'm actually more bothered by vacuuming than by cat hair. However often you choose to vacuum, make sure you get out the hose and attachments, so you can suck hair out of sneaky places like the edges of carpets, under and behind furniture, and in crevices like the ones between radiator coils.
Whenever you wash your clothes or blankets, put them in the dryer if the care instructions permit it. Wet hair tends to clump up and stick to things, but the hot, dry air flowing through the dryer will remove it, especially if you throw in a fabric softener sheet to break the static cling bond that could otherwise keep the hair stuck to the fabric. Whenever I wash my blankets or bedsheets, I remove an almost embarrassing amount of cat hair from the dryer's lint filter, and all of that would be on my supposedly clean bedding every week if I were to hang it up to dry instead.
Between laundry days and vacuuming days, you can spot-remove cat hair from clothes and furniture using either a specially-designed tool or a household object adapted to remove hair. Sticky lint rollers are the most efficient and fabric-friendly option, but if you don't have one, a piece of masking tape wrapped around your hand will work almost as well. Wiping a damp rubber glove across a hairy surface is another way to harvest quite a bit of pet hair, but unless you're using a reusable glove, it's a bit wasteful. In fact, none of these methods is as environmentally-friendly as a reusable lint brush, but the grabby cloth on a lint brush can be hard on delicate fabrics, so I reserve mine for couches and Christmas tree skirts.
Why Do Cats Shed?
Your cat's shedding habit may be a major inconvenience for you, but it actually evolved as a central mechanism for the cat's survival. Outdoor and feral cats shed a little throughout the year to rid themselves of dead, irritating hair and then shed massive amounts of hair twice a year, in the spring and fall, to change the structure of their fur coats in preparation for warm or cold weather. Without the ability to shed an inappropriate coat and build a new one, a cat would never survive major temperature changes in its habitat. Of course, when we bring cats inside to live with us (which is safer for both them and the native songbird population), they no longer need to change their coats with the seasons, but that doesn't mean they stop trying. In fact, since an outdoor cat's shed cycle is based on how much or little sunlight the cat is exposed to, indoor cats exposed to artificial light tend to shed constantly instead of seasonally. And that's just awesome.
