The Charing Cross Cat Clinic is a full service veterinary clinic designed for and dedicated to cats.  We offer Brantford and area cat owners an alternative choice for veterinary care in a unique, peaceful, cats-only environment. Our focus is on your cat.

Mission statement:

We believe that healthcare for cats should include care of the whole cat, including physical and mental health. We work with clients to examine and improve the whole aspect of each cat’s care so that the cat can live a pain-free, enriched life. We seek to strengthen the human-cat bond by helping clients understand and meet their cat’s needs, both physical and emotional.

Being handled in a professional setting is usually a stressful situation for a cat. A cat’s coping mechanism in a stressful situation is to avoid or retreat from the source of stress. Therefore, cats will cope much better when they feel that they have the option of retreat open to them, and as such, like to maintain a sense of being in control. The act of scruffing entirely removes the option of retreat and sense of control for a cat. Therefore, it serves to escalate their feeling of stress, leading to distress, anxiety and fear.

There are many different ways of handling and restraining cats that do not involve scruffing or heavy restraint, and International Cat Care advocates the use of these. These cat-friendly methods take a ‘less is more’ approach, and enable a cat to maintain some sense of control over the situation, which will not only improve the cat’s wellbeing, but also achieve better results for the personnel wishing to restrain the cat.

Learn more about CAT FRIENDLY, Scruff-free handling:

https://icatcare.org/scruffing