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Is Your Cat Showing One of These 25 Signs of Pain?

One evening, I was sitting on the couch watching TV with my cat Sam on my lap when he suddenly fainted and nearly fell to the floor. Horrified, I rushed him to the emergency vet, only to find that he had a congenital heart defect, which, even with treatment, would prove fatal within 18 months. “Cats are notorious for masking pain,” the heart specialist told me sympathetically when I reacted with stunned disbelief to the news that my seemingly healthy cat probably had been seriously ill for months without my noticing it.

A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE confirms what the vet told me: Cats are silent sufferers. But that doesn’t mean they can’t let us know they are in distress. The researchers surveyed more than a dozen experts to identify these 25 signs that your cat may not be feeling 100 percent:

Overall behavior and mood:

  • General mood change
  • Decreased appetite
  • Decreased activity level
  • Playing less
  • Acting withdrawn/hiding
  • Ill temper/irritability
  • Less rubbing against people
  • Absence of grooming

Specific behaviors:

  • Adverse reaction to palpation
  • Repeated licking of a particular body region
  • Frequent tail twitching
  • Blepharospasm (involuntary, forcible blinking)
  • Straining to urinate

Mobility and posture:

  • Reluctance to move
  • Abnormal gait
  • Difficulty jumping
  • Lameness
  • Hunched-up posture
  • Lowered head
  • Shifting of weight

Any of the above symptoms may accompany high levels of pain, but the following ones are more often associated with them, according to the experts:

  • Avoiding brightly lit areas
  • Change in feeding behavior
  • Eyes closed
  • Groaning/yowling
  • Growling

Often, cats in pain may exhibit several of the symptoms listed above simultaneously. For example, a hunched-up posture, reluctance to move, licking a particular body region, straining to urinate, and groaning can all point to a urinary tract infection, an extremely painful (and common) condition that can be fatal, especially in male cats, and that requires immediate veterinary treatment.

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Please be more alert than I was with my poor Sam, whose only symptom that I can recall before he fainted was that he was playing less. Pay attention to your cat’s subtle cues, and visit the vet if you suspect something is amiss. Your early intervention could spare your cat a lot of suffering and might even save his or her life.