no fur left on leg

Hi,

My cat pulls his fur out of his leg - this has been going on for a while but is getting so bad that there is almost no fur left on that leg. The vet thought this was a behavior problem and actually it started when we went out of town for a week. We've tried the bitter apple stuff and someone else said vaseline with some citrus mixed in - but he licks everything off. This cat does get attention - sits on my lap at nite, there are other pets in the house, sleeps with me usually... Does anyone have an idea for something to put on his leg to get him to quit?

Thanks.

You want to examine several things, the diet for one, it could be a food allergy. It could also be a stimulus to pain, or it could be mites or some sort of skin infection. Did the vet do a scraping? Look to where the cat spends most of his time sleeping and see if that might be a problem? I would definitely ask the vet to run a blood panel and just make sure the cat isn't ill- also a skin scraping would be warranted to check for parasites.

I agree with Hissy...your boy needs a skin scraping to check for mites. One of my cats had this problem and my vet simply refused to do a skin scraping because he was so sure the problem was due to allergies. It turns out that although my cat does have allergies, the reason he was licking off his fur was because he was infested with mites. Once he was treated for mites, the skin problem went away.

If the vet is sure it is behavioral, you might consider some sort of medication to stop this obsessive-compulsive behavior.

I'll look into that - if it's mites, would the other pets be affected? I have one other cat and a dog. The one cat is the only one that is chewing his fur off.

Thanks for the info.

The type of mites my cat had primarily infest puppies. They tend to target only adult dogs and cats who have compromised immune functioning. In my cat, he was extremely malnourished and borderline diabetic when we rescued him, which made him vulnerable to this type of mite. None of my other 5 cats caught them from him!