With some of these, honestly, very little, but sun exposure in cats and people can lead to types of skin cancer. So keep your cat out of the sun as best you can. During the hours of 10 to four, keep them out of a window where the sun's beating in. For outdoor kitties, there's not a whole lot you can do. Just make sure they have some shade to be able to hide in if they like and protect the coats. Believe it or not, they make cat sunscreens. They are non-zinc oxide sunscreens. You have to be careful with what you put on a cat because they're going to groom it off anyway. And the zinc side can cause problems if they lick it down over any period of time. So if you want to use sunscreen on your cat, maybe on the ears where the hair is thin on the nose, you can do that.

Cats get very similar skin cancers to what you and I can get. They can get melanomas, squamous cell carcinomas, mast cell tumors, and multiple different types of skin cancers.

The big thing is trying to keep the cat groomed, keeping them combed out, keeping them from getting matted, and then looking for lumps and bumps. It's the perfect opportunity to look for lumps and bumps as you're keeping your cat groomed. If you can bathe your cat, good for you. That's great. I have an almost 18-year-old cat. I've never bathed him and probably never will at this point. Cats tend to groom so well that they really don't need bathing nearly as much as dogs.

Grooming products possibly can. A lot of people don't use grooming products on their cats. If you're using an aloe and oatmeal type shampoo, we don't tend to see problems, but some of the other products, sure. We can. If you're using some type of a scented spray on your cat, something along that line, then sure. We can see sensitivity and contact dermatitis from that.

It can. Cats are very temperamental, and they tend to be, as we have said, great groomers, but over-grooming can cause hair loss and secondary skin irritation, and secondary skin infection. One of the reasons that cats tend to overgrow is they're stressed. What stresses a cat, and what doesn't stress a cat? Everything. You name it. You change your furniture, the litter, there's a stray cat outside, there's a new dog in the neighborhood, and your mother-in-law comes over for the day. I mean, you name it; it can stress out a cat and cause them to lick. We definitely will see some of those cases, and then it's a matter of trying to determine what's causing the anxiety and then relieving it in some way or the other. Pheromones might be a help there. There are some diet changes we can do there. There are several things we can do to help.

Yes. The allergies issue in cats is honestly not as bad as it is in dogs. We do see allergies and cats. We see more food allergies in cats than we do anything else, and that's a difficult syndrome to work through. It requires putting your cat on a special diet for an extended period of time, which can frequently be difficult because cats tend to be finicky eaters and don't want to eat it, and they won't eat it. And then what do you do?