The Compulsive Cat

FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS, SOME OF THEM SIMILAR TO THOSE that afflict people, cats and other animals can develop behaviors that we categorize as compulsive. The main cause of compulsive behaviors in cats is stress, especially the kind of stress that cats experience when they feel conflicted between two opposing courses of action. For example, your cat may simultaneously feel an urge to greet you and an urge to avoid you for fear of punishment. Or she may both want to run away from another cat and want to confront him. Similarly, if you call a dog and he wants to come but can’t tell if you’re angry, his brain may short-circuit and his response may be to start spinning around.

One form of compulsive behavior that results from these cognitive conflicts is what we call wool sucking or wool chewing—sucking or chewing on nonfood items, including not just wool but cotton, synthetics, paper, and even more surprising materials, as you will discover later in this chapter. Another more common compulsive behavior in cats is grooming excessively or even pulling out their own fur, which is called overgrooming (psychogenic alopecia). Or they may attack their own tails or paw at their own faces (as part of Rolling-Skin Syndrome, or feline hyperesthesia).

Besides cognitive conflict, other reasons for compulsive behaviors include genetic causes, in which the tendency appears to be passed on from parent to kitten. Compulsive behaviors may also develop because a cat was weaned too early, or because he’s experiencing stress in the form of general anxiety, frustration, boredom, or separation anxiety—especially if these stressors recur frequently or persist over an extended period of time.

A cat gets frustrated for the same reasons you do. He wants to do or have something and he can’t. Maybe he’s indoors, looking out a window, and he wants to attack the cat walking across his territory. Maybe he wants to play, hunt, stalk, kill, or eat, but he has nobody to play with, no toys, or he’s unable to get to the food. Cats with separation anxiety may grow upset when their owners leave home, and if left alone for too long may overgroom themselves.

In short, one cat may develop compulsive behaviors because she’s been weaned too early, another because she’s conflicted, anxious, bored, or frustrated, and another because of a genetic propensity for, say, chewing on nonfood items.

All animals have their characteristic ways of responding to boredom, frustration, conflict, and other forms of stress. In zoo environments, big cats pace; wolves, foxes, and polar bears may repetitively pace, crib (which consists of chewing wood or air as air is inhaled), and self-mutilate; while giraffes sway. Gus, the famously neurotic polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, compulsively swims back and forth. Horses may chew repeatedly or weave as they walk, and pigs will bite the bars of their pens.

Compulsive behaviors in cats, including overgrooming and wool sucking, are based on behaviors that are already part of the cat’s natural repertoire, but have now become something abnormal because they’re performed repetitively, out of context, with no apparent goal, and sometimes in ways that are destructive, not just to the environment they live in (yours!) but to the cats themselves. If you allow the stressor leading to the compulsive behavior to continue, then totally unrelated stressors may also end up triggering repeated episodes of the behavior. Over time, the compulsive behaviors may be performed even when no stress is present.

Some compulsive behaviors may be harmful to your cat, others may damage your property, while watching or listening to still others—lick, lick, pause … lick, lick, pause—may simply feel to you like Chinese water torture. All such behaviors should be dealt with, preferably sooner rather than later.

I’ll discuss here the most common compulsive behaviors, which are the overgrooming that you saw in Nada in the Introduction, and wool sucking. But please keep in mind as you read my C.A.T. Plans for compulsive disorders that these are some of the most difficult behavior issues to diagnose and treat, because they can be or act like addictions. A veterinary visit and even medication may be a necessary addition to the behavior modifications I recommend. As you know if you’ve read this far, I don’t believe in automatically resorting to drugging your cat for behavior problems, but if it’s genuinely necessary, especially if you need to do it to prevent the cat from self-harm, then I’m all for it.

OVERGROOMING

Let’s say your cat is outside, trying to decide whether to run away from the stray cat that’s entered your yard or to stand his ground. He may momentarily groom himself as a way of displacing his anxiety elsewhere. Grooming is a perfectly normal self-soothing behavior in cats. You’ll see them doing it on the way to the vet’s office, or when meeting another cat, or after a tumble from a high place. But if the stressor is constant or repetitive, the cat may continue to lick himself beyond what would be considered normal, creating bald patches in his fur and abrading his own skin. Some cats will go as far as to chew at their fur, or pluck it out with their teeth, sometimes by the mouthful. In extreme cases, cats will excavate wounds so deeply that they can become infected.

Overgrooming is seen in cats with anxious temperaments, predominantly in purebred cats of oriental breeding. It affects females more than males. But I’ve seen it occur in virtually every breed and color of cat and in both sexes, and for a wide range of reasons. Let’s look at a few.

First, look at the situation of Nada, whom you met in the Introduction. She’d been in conflict with a new cat in her territory, and they were maintaining a tense standoff, each cat from its respective floor of Susan’s house. Nada’s environment was also utterly barren, devoid of opportunities for play or stimuli of any kind. Sterile environments with no outlets for normal digging, play activities, or (in the case of unaltered animals) sexual expression can result not just in overgrooming but in masturbation, compulsive digging around the outside of the food bowl or litter box, and aggressive extremes in play behavior.¹

Another cat I met who had an overgrooming problem was Caramello, an orange tabby whose owners originally came to me for a simple litter box issue. But as we talked, the owner, Patrice, mentioned to me that while the family was on vacation in Hawaii for three weeks, Caramello, who had not been invited to Hawaii and was being cared for by a pet sitter back home, had licked all the hair off his stomach. Patrice hadn’t noticed right away. “He seemed fine when we got home,” she told me.

But later that first night, Patrice was reading her newspaper in bed. “I remember hearing him lick, lick, lick. I’d put the paper down and the licking would stop. But as soon as I started reading again, he’d start up with the licking. Finally, my husband gathered him up in his arms like a baby—the way they both loved—and just gasped. All the thick fur on Mello’s stomach was gone, and all he had left was peach fuzz.”

I often uncover overgrooming during a behavior consultation for a completely different issue. When I ask a client if her cat is missing any fur on his body or has just a thin layer of fuzz on his stomach, I hear “Yes” more often than you might think, but often the owners are not concerned because they think grooming is just what cats do. They don’t have a standard against which to compare what they see. Some owners have even told me they didn’t realize that cats are supposed to have any fur at all on their tummies. Once I explain that the reason for the lack of fur is overgrooming, and that this is a sign of stress, many owners are shocked and find it hard to believe, since they have no idea that their cat is under any kind of stress.

Patrice, for example, was adamant that Caramello was not stressed now and had no reason to be when the family had been away. The pet sitter had stayed the night each night, she said, had played with him, and had given him everything he needed. As I probed more, however, I learned that the pet sitter had brought along her new puppy, a German shorthaired pointer who could well have been the source of stress for Caramello. The stress might have been exacerbated by feeling a conflict between two opposing urges—both to chase the puppy out of his favorite spot on the couch, and to avoid the spot himself out of fear of the puppy.

The plan I gave Patrice is the one I recommend for all overgrooming cats. For Caramello it worked very quickly, probably because his stress had been relatively short-lived and his overgrooming behavior had been going on for only a brief period of time, so the behavior hadn’t become as fixed as it does in cases of longer duration. For other cats, however, it may take longer to go into effect.

WOOL SUCKING AND WOOL CHEWING

It should come as no surprise that kittens develop a powerful drive to suck, since they nurse actively up to about the age of seven weeks. At that age their mother begins rebuffing their efforts during the gradual process of weaning. They may continue to seek out comfort nursing until they’re as old as six months. Under normal circumstances the suckling drive should fade after that. But if the weaning is abrupt or occurs too early, the kitten may displace its nursing drive onto nonfood surrogates that look or feel like her mother. A kitten without a queen’s nipple to nurse is like a human infant lacking mom, bottle, and pacifier, and for a kitten, at least, various compulsive behaviors, mainly oral in nature, may be the result. Later, as an adult, she may try to chew or eat items similar to those she sucked on as a kitten, which, while not surprising, is not normal, either.

Undernourished kittens may also develop compulsive oral behaviors, including one called prolonged sucking, a maladaptive reaction to stress and lack of nutrition that redirects the kittens’ innate need to suck onto such inappropriate targets as the bodies of their littermates, owners, dogs, or other animals—or even parts of their own bodies, such as their tails, the folds of skin on their flanks, or their vulvas or scrotums. Prolonged sucking may eventually turn into wool sucking, another compulsive and misdirected form of a kitten’s natural nursing behavior.

As discussed above, both wool sucking and wool chewing in adult cats may be caused by stress, separation anxiety, boredom, internal conflict, or frustration. Wool sucking (as I’ll now refer to both wool sucking and wool chewing) may also have a genetic component. A majority of the cats that develop this behavior issue are pure or mixed Oriental breeds like Siamese or Burmese.³ However, I’ve seen it in almost every breed of cat.

Wool sucking behavior may not be a problem unless it results in damage to things you value, such as your clothing or your furniture; or involves sucking or teething on something that could be dangerous to the kitten or cat, such as plastics or electrical cords; or graduates to actual ingestion of nonfood items, which can result in intestinal obstructions, leading to surgery or death. When things get that bad, you have a problem. As Dr. Nicholas Dodman has put it, “Living with a wool sucker of this degree is like living with a ten-pound moth.”⁴

Wool-sucking behavior usually fades over time, but it may reappear in times of stress—just as oral fixations do in people. Next time you’re stuck in rush hour traffic, observe the people in the cars next to you. Wanting to move forward, but frustrated that they can’t, many of them will chew their fingernails and twirl their hair.

PICA

You’ll be glad to hear that most wool-sucking kittens do not go on to chew and ingest nonfood items (but just in case, it’s still a good idea to try to divert the kitten into other activities, by using elements of the plan described below). When wool sucking does progress to chewing and eating of nonfood items, it is known as pica, and the reasons for it are similar to those for the other oral fixations.

To remedy any of these oral fixation issues, it’s important to try to isolate the reasons for your particular cat’s problem. In addition to the many possible causes described earlier, some cats may just be hungry—hungry enough to feel an urge to eat holes in your sofa! Sometimes you may not be able to figure out the exact reasons, but the C.A.T. Plan in this chapter will still help you to manage the problem, even if you can’t entirely eliminate it.

FELINE HYPERESTHESIA SYNDROME

Eek! Your cat may seem to see things you can’t, dash around the room for no reason, and even morph from calm to fierce in an instant. Maybe the skin along his spine suddenly ripples, he starts pulling at his own tail, or biting his own leg. Is he possessed? Schizoid? It’s more likely that he suffers from Feline Hyperesthesia Syndrome (FHS), also known as Rolling-Skin Disease. No one knows for sure what causes it, but it can manifest in seizurelike behaviors that may have a neurological basis, or in behaviors similar to the compulsive activities described earlier in this chapter, or in both. Hyperesthesia means, essentially, hypersensitivity—to any sensory stimuli. I’ve included a discussion of it in this chapter because it is often mistaken for compulsive behaviors, even though its causes, insofar as we understand them, are different.

Here’s what hyperesthesia looks like: One moment a cat will be resting peacefully, when suddenly his skin starts to twitch or ripple. His eyes may become dilated, he may twist himself around to frantically groom or chew at his hindquarters or even attack a region of the lower half of his body, or he may suddenly take off running, as if to get away from himself. Because this condition involves a high degree of skin sensitivity, the excessive self-grooming and -chewing that some cats do in an attempt to find relief can cause hair loss, which is why FHS is sometimes mistaken for overgrooming. A cat with this disorder may appear restless and vocalize excessively or pace back and forth. These cats can also be very sensitive to touch along the back; FHS episodes may actually be triggered by petting a cat in this region. Another way this syndrome presents is as unprovoked aggression, which can disappear as quickly as it appeared. Any kind of stress or upset may trigger an episode of hyperesthesia in a cat who has a predisposition to it.

Treatment

If you think your cat may be exhibiting signs of FHS, please be sure to visit your vet for thorough diagnostic testing to rule out other health issues, and then get the help of a behavior specialist. This is one syndrome that’s definitely too difficult for you to deal with on your own, which is why I’m not presenting a C.A.T. Plan for it. The one general piece of advice I can give you is that while FHS is not caused by stress, it can be triggered or exacerbated by it. It’s important to remove stressors and tension from your cat’s life, and to provide playtimes with wand toys and other interactive toys. Do adhere to the environmental guidelines in Chapter 5.

Of all the behavior problems for which medication is prescribed, compulsive behaviors like those described in this chapter are among those that will most benefit from it. In fact, medication may be not only useful but necessary. For serious cases of overgrooming, wool sucking and its variants, and for FHS, you should consult with a veterinarian about using psychoactive medication to help disrupt the psychological trigger for your cat’s behavior cycle. But medication will be much more effective when used in conjunction with the behavioral plans outlined in this chapter.