How To Give Your Cat An MOT – Health Check For My Cat

So cats can be quite solitary animals but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to be checking them and doing our own little health check. So today I’m gonna do a little cat MOT for you. Hi I’m Hayley, I’m an animal care assistant at the RSPCA Leybourne and here we have Buzz who’s going to help us do the cat MOT today. So whenever I do a health check on an animal I always start around their face area and then I’ll work my way down. It just helps you not getting a bit lost and confused. So I’m going to start with little Buzz’s face. Can you look at the camera? So we want to check their eyes are nice and clear, that there’s no discharge or no pink redness or soreness there. If they have got a bit sleep in their eye you can always just damp a bit of water and give it a little bit of a bathe. That will help give you an indication on whether that keeps occurring and coming back and if it does then you may want to get them checked out by the vet. Then I’m gonna go and check their nose. Again I wanna check that there’s no discharge, it’s nice and moist and there’s no scars or sores on your nose and it looks good. Then I’m gonna go and work my way up to the ears. Cats can pick up all sorts of things so they can get ear mites things like that or ear infections so you want to check if it’s quite a lot of black dirt in there or they’re shaking their heads a lot you may want to get that checked out. You’ve got lovely clean ears. If you can’t see in the ears it always helps to get a bit of soft cotton wool, also if they are a bit mucky then you can just give them a little bit of a wipe over with the cotton wool. Depending on how nervous your cat is you might want to do the teeth now or you might want to do that last because sometimes that’s where they’re gonna get really wriggly. Should we do it now? So you think you’ll be alright Buzz? So it’s just sort of holding him back a little bit, there we go gives you a nice side view there. You want to make sure that he hasn’t got too much tar at the back, there’s no red gums on there and he’s got nice like salmon pink gums. So again I’m gonna work my way down the cat, I just want to make sure they feel a good weight, they don’t feel too ribby. I’m gonna check the coat as I go down as well and I check that I can’t see any flea dirt or any other parasites there. You can also use a flea comb it is sometimes hard especially on the darker cats to see anything like that and that will give you an indication if anything comes out there if they’ve got fleas or not. So next we want to be checking the claws, so Buzz here’s only a little kitten so hopefully they look okay. With older cats it can be quite common that they will get longer claws because they won’t venture out as much. It can get to the point where they can grow into their pads so it is important especially with the older cats to regularly check those. So if you do find that they have got really long claws, if you’re comfortable enough to do it there’s different variations of your clippers that you can get obviously this one being a kitten you’d want to use the small ones but then you have got slightly bigger ones as well there. You want to check the back of the pads make sure they aren’t sore or dry. Are you a littel wriggly? Perfect. Then the not not so nice end but we do want to make sure that’s clean you know doesn’t look sore, looks all good down there. You should be flea treating your cats every month so it’d be a good idea to get in a regular habit of doing your cat MOT just before you flea treat them. This way you will be able to see if there are any changes or any concerns that then you’ll know when to see the vet. If there’s any special health checks you do of your cats let us know in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe and click on the bell to get notified of new videos.