Our car is a very very outdoors cat and about a few months ago a lot of cats and dogs moved into our neighbourhood. As a result a lot of our cats territory was cut down and he’s been over grooming himself out of stress ever since. His belly is always bald now and in the last couple months the insides of his legs are also bald.
I have no idea what to do, there’s the generic “make his environment less stressful” but there’s nothing I can think of that we can do on that front, whenever he’s at home he’s purring and happy. I’m scared that since it’s been so long it’s become a habit and even if his environment gets less stressful he’ll keep over grooming himself anyway. I realised recently that it’s gotten really bad when I covered his belly with a towel when he was sat next to me to stop him licking it and he started licking a specific spot on his front leg repeatedly until the hair came off alongside some of the skin.
The most frustrating part is my parents don’t seem to be doing anything at all, they’ve taken him to the vets multiple times and all the vets have said is that he is stressed. The vet said to me Dad he could give him something which, as my Dad said, would’ve “basically sedated him” and he didn’t want to because while he is bald in parts of his body he didn’t seem to actually be directly injuring himself. He’s got a few scratches on his belly but it’s never started bleeding or had open wounds. I’ve suggested putting a sweater or jumper over him to directly block his skin but the problem is it’ll need to cover his entire body and since he’s a very outdoor cat it could be dangerous for him if it catches on something.
As a result my parents are incredibly laissez-faire about the situation. Whenever I raise it they just say there’s nothing that we can do and they’re strategy seems to basically do nothing and hope it goes away which is so stupid, they haven’t changed or done anything to help. My dad acts like it doesn’t bother him but to be so stressed that you’re compulsively licking the hair and in certain cases skin off your body sounds terrible.
Can someone please help. My parents genuinely do care, they’re not bad owners, they just have a laidback attitude and seem to genuinely believe that it’ll work itself out. They also seem to be influenced by the vets who really don’t seem to have offered any actual advance either, frankly I really dislike our vets as in the past they appear to be quite incompetent. Our dog had a seriously bad skin condition where his chest and arms broke out into spots and it take our vets about 4-6 months and several appointments to give us medication which actually worked, for months they kept telling us they had no idea why it was happening. I just want to get my cat sorted out, I refuse to believe that there is no way to help them. I’m going to try tell my parents that it’s getting worse to convince them to go for the sedative but could anyone suggest anything that worked for their cat in this situation and let me know if I’m wrong and it actually will sort itself out.
TLDR: cat has stress-induced alopecia due to grooming and my parents aren’t doing anything to help as they are just waiting for it to naturally stop. Vets haven’t suggested anything meaningful except some sort of drug which would apparently be like a sedative, which my dad doesn’t want to use. Please give me any advice for dealing with this so that I can give my parents some ideas for how to help the cat.