Edit ArticleHow to Remove Pet Hair Four Methods:MoistureGripping surfacesMagnetic attractionPreventing hair build-upCommunity Q&A Hair from a beloved animal can be very frustrating when it finds its way into your clothes, carpeting, furniture and upholstery. It doesn't mean you have to start avoiding your cuddly pets, though. Simply remove the unwanted pet hair instead! There are several ways you can remove pet hair, but some of the easiest options involve the use of moisture, gripping surfaces, and static attraction. Preventing pet hair from building up will also tackle the problem long-term. Soak the palm of your hand in a bowl of water. Barely dampen a clean, regular kitchen sponge. Use a sponge mop if you're removing pet hair from a low-pile carpet, in which case the floor should be thoroughly vacuumed first. Rub the fabric, upholstery, or carpet with the sponge. The fur should roll up into clumps that you can pick off by hand. Rub Velcro curlers on the surface to catch the hair.
Use sellotape to peel off some fur. Put on a latex glove. Use a rubber broom. Rolling, sticky lint removers work, as does a piece of duct tape wrapped around your hand with the sticky side out. However, you must move onto the next piece after one swipe, which is more wasteful than the above methods.It's relatively cheap and you can tear off a piece, tape the ends together, and then rotate the tape while removing pet hair from clothing or other surfaces. Try using the sole of a trainer shoe. Just brush the area with the trainer and watch the fur come away! Those red and black lint brushes work great on most types of dog and cat hair. In the office, the sticky sided clear label holders shipping companies provide make an excellent hair removal glove. Clothing can be put in a washing machine and into the dryer with a static sheet. Once it's cleaned, hang it up. Be careful because dark solid colors tend to spot (almost looks like grease spots) when they're the only clothes in the dryer with a dryer sheet.
{Sometimes this may not work due to the sheet not getting to every spot on every part of the cloth, so try the other methods and there is absolutely something that will work} A good diet and proper grooming will significantly reduce your pet's shedding and help prevent flaking skin and hair loss related to improper nutrition. Never bathe a dog more than once a month (less often for some breeds) or it will become dry and shed/dander more. Daily brushing and feeding a skin and coat supplement can do wonders for shedding. Dogs with untreated allergies often leave more hair and dander on furniture. Use a squeegee which is a scraping implement with a rubber-edged blade set on a handle, typically used for cleaning windows on furniture and carpets.. Some people are allergic to pet dander, which flakes off along with their hair. If you are one of these people, use caution and limit contact with both pets and items covered in pet hair.Brushing a dog helps remove loose fur.
Whether you allow the dog on the bed or not, some of his fur is bound to end up on the sheets and comforter, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. Washing the bedding may help temporarily, but as long as the dog is allowed in the bedroom, fur happens -- everywhere. Managing the fur as you find it helps keep the bedding as fur-free as possible every day. A Sticky Solution A lint roller -- the type with sticky paper sheets that peel away and are typically used on clothing -- works wonders on dog fur stuck on your favorite comforter or blanket. Rub the roller over the bedding to remove fur in a pinch. If you don't have a lint roller, packing tape wrapped around your hand, sticky-side out, serves the same purpose. Rubber Glove Remedy A rubber glove also removes dog hair from blankets and comforters. Put on a rubber glove and rub it across the fur-laden bedding. The rubber makes the fur ball up, which makes it easier to grab and discard. A rubber squeegee or rubber pet hair removal tool works in much the same manner.
Manage With Moisture Shake a comforter outdoors to release as much of the hair as possible, or vacuum it and the sheets with a brush attachment. Wipe a damp sponge over the comforter to bunch up any fur that still remains. Wipe the sponge over the sheet afterwards. When your comforter is freshly washed and fur-free, place another pet-friendly blanket at the foot of the bed over it if the dog enjoys curling up on the bed when you're not around. Encourage the dog to stay on his blanket rather than on the comforter. Preventive Maintenance Brushing your dog's coat every day removes loose hairs that might otherwise end up on the bedding. Less loose hair means less fur to clean up off the sheets and comforter. If your dog can tolerate the sound of the vacuum cleaner, vacuuming him is another way to significantly cut back on the amount of shed fur. References How to Get Rid of Things: Get Rid of Cat HairCanadian Living: 7 Products to Get Rid of Pet HairPartnership for Animal Welfare: Cleaning TipsHow to Clean Stuff: How to Remove Pet Hair Photo Credits Apple Tree House/Photodisc/Getty Images Suggest a Correction
This morning I had to take the tweezers to a single, scratchy cat hair that had become embedded inside one of my bra cups. I’m not sure how the hair got inside my bra, but after living with two cats for the last six years, I’ve more or less stopped being surprised when I find cat hair in strange places. And since most cats shed prodigious quantities of it, there’s ample opportunity for cat hair to find its way into nostrils and soup pots when it gets bored with clinging to pant legs, expensive shirts, and gathering under the furniture. Most cat lovers manage to overlook their pets’ furry deposits up to a point, which is fortunate for cats, since it’s impossible to completely eliminate cat hair from a house with a cat in it. But assuming you have a healthy awareness of hygiene and social mores, you undoubtedly want to minimize the amount of cat hair in your home, on your clothes, your own hair, and, yes, in your nose. That much, at least, is pretty easy to accomplish by adding a few simple steps to your normal pet care routines.
The most important step in getting rid of cat hair in your home is to keep it from getting loose there in the first place. If you brush your cat on a regular basis—anywhere from daily to once every two weeks, depending on how much your cat sheds—she’ll have less hair to shed on her own. The picture to the right shows how much hair I brushed from Nina’s coat last week—which is also exactly how much less hair I’ll have to sweep up from the floor (or discover in hairball form) this week. She loved every minute of it, too; in fact, most cats enjoy being brushed as long as you use gentle pressure with a brush that isn’t scratchy. I use, and would recommend, a curry brush with soft rubber bristles that naturally attract hair. A cat’s skin and coat are easily affected by the animal’s diet, so a high quality cat food can make your cat’s skin less dry and therefore less prone to excess shedding. Earlier this year, after upgrading Nina’s food a little in the hopes that she would lose some weight, we noticed a difference in the feel of her fur: it became softer and sleeker and less of it came off on our hands when she was pet.
She hasn’t lost any weight, and she still sheds like crazy when we brush her, but the extra money we spend on cat food is repaid in time we don’t have to spend chasing after cat hair tumbleweeds on the hardwood floors. Once the hair leaves the cat, the best way to rid yourself of it is with a vacuum cleaner, a broom, and a dust rag. Floors and furniture should be vacuumed, swept, or dusted on a regular basis to keep pet hair from accumulating. I do this once a week, and I’m always a little bit impressed with how much the cats manage to shed in just one week…and yet never go bald. Some people vacuum as often as every day, and while cats can certainly produce enough hair to justify that, I’m actually more bothered by vacuuming than by cat hair. However often you choose to vacuum, make sure you get out the hose and attachments, so you can suck hair out of sneaky places like the edges of carpets, under and behind furniture, and in crevices like the ones between radiator coils.
Whenever you wash your clothes or blankets, put them in the dryer if the care instructions permit it. Wet hair tends to clump up and stick to things, but the hot, dry air flowing through the dryer will remove it, especially if you throw in a fabric softener sheet to break the static cling bond that could otherwise keep the hair stuck to the fabric. Whenever I wash my blankets or bedsheets, I remove an almost embarrassing amount of cat hair from the dryer’s lint filter, and all of that would be on my supposedly clean bedding every week if I were to hang it up to dry instead. Between laundry days and vacuuming days, you can spot-remove cat hair from clothes and furniture using either a specially-designed tool or a household object adapted to remove hair. Sticky lint rollers are the most efficient and fabric-friendly option, but if you don’t have one, a piece of masking tape wrapped around your hand will work almost as well. Wiping a damp rubber glove across a hairy surface is another way to harvest quite a bit of pet hair, but unless you’re using a reusable glove, it’s a bit wasteful.
In fact, none of these methods is as environmentally-friendly as a reusable lint brush (which you can get at Amazon), but the grabby cloth on a lint brush can be hard on delicate fabrics, so I reserve mine for couches and Christmas tree skirts. Your cat’s shedding habit may be a major inconvenience for you, but it actually evolved as a central mechanism for the cat’s survival. Outdoor and feral cats shed a little throughout the year to rid themselves of dead, irritating hair and then shed massive amounts of hair twice a year, in the spring and fall, to change the structure of their fur coats in preparation for warm or cold weather. Without the ability to shed an inappropriate coat and build a new one, a cat would never survive major temperature changes in its habitat. Of course, when we bring cats inside to live with us (which is safer for both them and the native songbird population), they no longer need to change their coats with the seasons, but that doesn’t mean they stop trying.
In fact, since an outdoor cat’s shed cycle is based on how much or little sunlight the cat is exposed to, indoor cats exposed to artificial light tend to shed constantly instead of seasonally. And that’s just awesome. Although I would never recommend that you actually replace your cat with one that won’t shed so much, I can empathize if you’re really perplexed by the cat hair issue and want your next cat to leave a little less of itself around the house. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a non-shedding cat, but some cats have less hair than others, and that’s less hair to lose on the couch. For instance, shorthaired cats will generally shed less than longhaired ones. It’s also worth noting that while dark-haired cats may shed just as much as white cats, their hairs will probably be less noticeable. I have a tortoiseshell cat as well as a Siamese, but I always seem to be brushing white hairs off my clothes and furniture. Aside from these basic guidelines, here are a few breeds that have very short, curly, or sparse fur that makes them seem practically shedless: