My very dumb long haired cat will sometimes get distracted while in the litter box by someone walking by or another cat making eye contact with him and just like…sit down in the shit he just took, so I am no stranger to frequently bathing a cat who would rather I not be doing that. My tips are:
- use the kitchen sink. You are in a better position to be in control of this stressful situation while standing upright than you are leaning hunched over a bathtub. It takes your face out of slashing range if you’re upright also. Bonus, there are presumably no shower curtains to rapidly scale surrounding your kitchen sink.
- fill the sink BEFORE you put the cat in it, ideally before you even bring the cat into the room that has the sink in it. The running water makes it infinitely more stressful and scary for a cat that doesn’t want to be bathed. Have a nice bucket of warm water on standby, with a cup in it for rinsing off any pet or flea shampoo. Even if your sink has a retractable corded faucet, the running water is STILL scary. Draining the sink or transferring the cat to the empty sink if you have a double and then gently pouring cups of warm clean water over the sudds will be less scary.
- before you bathe your cat, have EVERYTHING on hand. Cat/flea shampoo next to the sink, open, so you’re not trying to open it one-handed while you hold an upset cat with the other hand, towel for post bath burrito-ing, maybe a second towel on the floor in front of the sink to catch any splashes or spray, the aforementioned bucket of warm water with the cup already floating in it.
- if your cat is particularly prone to shredding your skin off your bones, don’t be afraid to make this a two person job. Two people is preferable. Sometimes you just need one person to hold a cat calmly with both hands while the other person washes and rinses, and then holds the towel up for burrito-ing.
- every cat is different, but I’ve had the best luck with Parsnip by holding him under his front armpits with one hand–thumb behind one armpit, pinky behind the other, and the rest of my fingers gently scooping his chest. If your hands are particularly small or your cat is particularly large, you can use both hands instead. After he’s wet and needs specific washing, I then lift him upwards so he’s standing in his back legs. This makes it easier for my spouse to shampoo his nasty ass, and makes it harder for him to rake me with his back legs. I like having my other hand free so that if he does start trying to rake, I can hook my other hand under his tummy and lift him directly upwards, and he then becomes confused about how to proceed and usually stops trying to rake and I can put him back into the standing position again.
Mostly, if we don’t take any shortcuts because he’s not like…covered in diarrhea or something and keep things slow and calm, I never have to use my other hand and he spends the whole bath making sad bellows but not really fighting. In comparison, on the odd occasion where we’ve had to unceremoniously scoop him directly into the bathrub and run the water while he was in there, he’s like a feral beast who must rip and rend his way to freedom.
It really, really makes a big difference in how the entire thing plays out if you have the time to prep the bath area, choose your battle ground and have a second pair of hands present.
Cat tax, here’s my dumb idiot who sometimes sits in his own poop:
