warm noses

when can you tell if a cat has a fever? my husband says if their noses are warm they have fever. well one minute one of my cats noses will be warm, the next cool. is this normal. my husband says he knows this for dogs and assumes cats are the same. check your cats noses. let me know. i find their noses mainly warm when they are asleep. normal or vet time????

You can't really tell by thier noses if they are running a fever. The only accurate way to tell is a rectal thermometer, or an ear thermometer. Usually if they have a high fever, thier entire head is very warm.

And it's not true for dogs either, it's just one of those things that everyone "knows" that actually isn't true. When my dog had a high fever (only knew this for sure after taking his temperature), his nose was cold, although his entire body was hot.

My vet told me that the best indicator to the untrained is to feel their ears. Ears do vary in temperature, but they will be really hot if kitty has a fever.

My vet also told me to feel the cats ears. But a cats normal body temperature is higher than ours so for me, it's still hard to tell if my cats have a fever or not. It's best to use a thermometer but I wouldn't even attempt that with my cats!

Yep, always go with the thermometer but the ears are a good indication also. My patches runs a "nervous" fever when she goes to the vet. Everytime this happens her ears get really hot and red and her paws sweat.

However, when they all got a respiratory infection and ran a fever (this was many years ago) their ears were normal.