The View From Wisconsin

My little furball kitten has been having fur-biting issues over the last month and a half. I have the vet bills to prove it, too.

For some reason, she was licking/biting the fur off of her forelegs and toes, and we had no idea why. The vet treated it as if it was an allergic reaction to something, and we got her a soft Elizabethan collar for her to wear so she'd stop the biting.

It looked like she was getting better for a while, and about the third follow-up visit to the vet indicated that maybe we should consider limited time without the collar on. I was worried that she would start having psychological problems with the collar, so Sarah and I decided to let her have free reign over the weekend.

Unfortunately, she started biting her fur again. It was driving us crazy, and we really didn't want to have to go through an allergy test for her.

Last night, though, the secret as to why she was biting was revealed. We had first noticed that she had the fur loss after sneaking into our back bedroom, which we use as a storeroom. We kept her from going in there, but last night she managed to get in to the room and snuck into the closet. I found her in the closet, laying on an old pillow we had sitting in there.

The pillow no longer had the cover on it - it was that old - and she had essentially "nested" herself in to the pillow. It was apparently chewed up and scratched up, with all the fibers from the filling out and exposed. When I found her, she had her paws buried under the loose fibers - right up to the edge where her fur had been chewed up.

Care to guess what was causing her to bite her fur? Bingo - the fibers were itching her legs, and she was doing what a cat does when she's itching. She licked and bit off her fur because it itched. Hopefully, after maybe another month or so with the collar on, she'll get her fur back. The pillow, obviously, is gone and garbage.

I'm feeling a lot better, now that I know what happened. I don't like having my little kitten feeling miserable, especially now that she's nine and a half.