The Brush-Then-Comb Trick That's Kept My Patient Hairball-Free for Three and a Half Years

Hey there, Dr. T here. I want to walk you through something I actually do at home, because it answers a question I get a lot: how do you stop hairballs before they start? The cat in this video is three and a half years old, and in that whole time, he has never had a hairball. It’s not luck. It’s two tools, used in a specific order.

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The first tool is a brush, the kind that mounts to the corner of a wall so the cat can rub against it on his own terms. I start with that, brushing through the coat to loosen and lift the bulk of the loose hair. That’s the part most owners already do, and it matters, but it’s not the whole job.

The second tool is a comb, and this is the step people skip. After brushing, I go back over the coat with the comb to catch the fine, undercoat hairs that the brush leaves behind. Those are the hairs a cat’s tongue is very good at picking up during self-grooming, and they’re a meaningful part of what ends up swallowed. Brushing alone gets the obvious stuff. Combing gets what’s left.

Why does this sequence matter? A cat’s own grooming is essentially a built-in hairball generator. The barbs on a cat’s tongue are shaped to pull loose hair free as they groom, and that hair gets swallowed. Most of it passes through the digestive tract without issue. The trouble starts when hair accumulates in the stomach faster than it can move through — that’s when you get a true hairball, or what’s clinically called a trichobezoar. The mechanism is straightforward: less loose hair on the coat means less hair available for the tongue to collect and swallow in the first place. Regular brushing is considered the single most effective way to prevent hairballs, according to the Cornell Feline Health Center, because it removes loose hair before the cat’s tongue does the job for you.

I’ll add one caveat, because I don’t want this to sound like a cure-all: grooming reduces the amount of hair a cat ingests, but it isn’t the only variable. VCA Animal Hospitals notes that anything affecting normal gastrointestinal motility, or underlying skin disease that increases shedding or over-grooming, can make a cat more prone to hairballs even with good coat care. So if a cat is grooming and combing regularly and is still bringing up hairballs frequently, that’s a conversation for an exam, not just a grooming adjustment.

A few practical notes from doing this routine myself: go slowly the first few times, especially with the comb, since it can catch on mats or tangles if the coat hasn’t been maintained. And don’t let the cat treat the comb as a toy — mine tries to bite it every time, which is why I keep the pace calm and end the session the same way I start it, without rushing. A relaxed cat tolerates the process better, and a better-tolerated process means you’ll actually keep doing it daily, which is where the real benefit comes from. One session a week won’t do much. Daily, or close to it, is what keeps the loose hair from building up between grooming sessions.

If you’re newer to preventive routines like this, or you’re weighing how much of pet care comes down to consistency versus intervention, it’s worth remembering that a lot of veterinary work is really about the small habits that prevent bigger problems later. I’ve written elsewhere about what vet school does not teach you about the emotional swings of veterinary life, and grooming routines are a good example of the quieter, steadier side of the job — the stuff that doesn’t feel dramatic in the moment but adds up.