When Vets Scratch Their Heads: Hair Gone
Wooper (inside, on the catio) communicates with Nellie, a neighbor's cat, on the outside. Wooper is our gatekeeper cat, always checking up on anyone outside who might try to come in. Our Wooper , quite a character on a regular day, some years ago took to licking off all her hair. Concerned, when both her sides were showing a lot of skin -- we wondered how she could not be cold -- we took her to the vet for help. The vet scratched his head. He had never seen anything like this. (That is Not what a pet owner wants to hear from a vet.) He suggested that maybe she was itchy and gave us some anti-itch crean. We applied it faithfully even though it turned her skin and our hands black. But she continued licking, and the hairlessness of both her sides grew. We read everything we could find online. Nothing seemed to fit among the few pieces of information we came across. After a while, she had no hair on either side of her body. For some reason -- happenstance, for sure -- she had grown