Our two precious girls are now getting quite senior and have decided that they are far too important to have to bother with their own grooming needs these days. That’s why we troop them off to have their claws clipped every six weeks or so. We are far too nervous to clip them ourselves, so off they go to the local vets/nail parlour!
Older cats do tend to groom themselves less as they get older and as they going outside infrequently, they are not scratching their claws on fences or pieces of wood any more so we have bought them various scratching posts and beds to encourage this in the house. They seem to enjoy these a lot, especially if we liberally scatter them with cat nip! But still those claws remain too long.
Some of the reasons cats stop grooming so much is to do with their age. They can suffer from arthritis which makes it more painful to do this, or they just lack as much mobility as they once had. The answer with our girls is probably that they are sleeping too much to bother!
So next time you have to take your cat in to have it’s pedicure, spare a thought for the poor things. You wake them up, bundle them into a box and they are not even allowed gel nails to fake it!