Tackling Toxins: Creating a Safe and Healthy Home | Thrive: The Feline Wellness Summit With the Two Crazy Cat Ladies

 Welcome back to the cat dad show. My name is Scott Colby. This is a clip of the interview I did with Jay and Adrian, also known as the two crazy cat ladies. This was for my feline wellness summit. Uh, Jane Adrian have built an amazing community around cat health and happiness. And in this clip I had to ask them, what is the one thing that they wished more cat parents knew about helping their indoor cats right now.

Uh, and it led into them chatting about, uh, toxicity in your home that might be harmful for your cat. So hope you enjoy this clip. If you want to hear the entire interview, as well as interviews with 20 other feline wellness experts, grab a free ticket to the feline wellness summit at feline wellness summit com right now.

Enjoy that clip.

Um, one thing it's really hard. It's really hard to pick one thing, but, um, but I will say right now we're super passionate about something that's fairly new that we have learned. Um, and that's the, uh, the toxicity within our homes.

That, um, that's affecting our cats. So there was a, a recent study that showed that indoor cats. Have 23 times higher, uh, household chemicals in their bloodstream than the humans in the same home and over twice as much as the dogs in the same home. So we really wanna get the word out there that, you know, we're trying, you know, there's so many of us are trying to feed a good food and we're trying to, you know, do better.

provide enrichment and all of these things for our cats in our homes. Um, but we might, yeah, but we might not understand that the things that we're using in our homes, the air fresheners and the, and the candles and the chemical floor cleaners and counter cleaners, and even detergents, you know, are like a, like slowly.

creating these intricate diseases that our, um, that our cats inevitably, it seems, end up with in their older stages.

Yeah, and I know I said one thing I was hoping you would say toxicity because that's a big, broad thing. And now we can kind of fine tune it and get into more specifics here. But I admit when I had Mia and Nomar, who are my two cats that have passed away, I didn't give any thought to the toxins in the environment.

Um, and really I didn't give much, as much thought as possibly I should have to even their food. I just was buying what was available in the, in the grocery stores of the pet food stores. Now I'm learning about, uh, feline nutrition. And now we're going to learn more about, uh, toxins in our environment for indoor cats.

My cats are indoor cats. Um, My two current ones and my two past ones and I'm excited because I'm kind of selfishly doing this interview because I have two one year old cats now, Nico and Milo, and if I learn from you and apply what I learned, they could perhaps live a What our mission is, right? A longer, healthier, and happier life.

So I definitely want to do better for them. Can you maybe walk me through what you mean by, I know you gave a little bit of a brief overview, but toxicity of indoor cats, and where should we start? As cat parents,

I would think, you know, I think a lot of humans are coming to this realization as well. I saw an interview for human health about what is the most toxic thing in your home and people are, you know, rattling off different chemicals or cleaners or even insect repellents or things like that.

And the answer was actually fragrance. These fragrances, these V. O. C. S. You know that the things that we think are in our home to help Make it fresh and make it, make it clean. And I think that's the, the number one thing that you could start with and just kind of take that inventory of your household of what smells good and why does it, why does it smell good?

You know, and that, you know, to Jay's point that, that, that includes, you know, these little plugins that we put in for fragrance, uh, aerosol sprays that we use where those particles go into the air, they land on our cat's coat. They land on the floor. Um, and why that's significant is because cats spend 40% of their waking hours grooming themselves, like the hide little cleaners that they are.

And it's so cute to watch them groom, but what are they, what are they ingesting while they're doing that? When they're walking on the floor where these particles land, their, their paw pads are very, uh, vascular. So they're absorbing directly into their bloodstream these chemicals. So taking an inventory of what you've got going on in your house, whether it's floor cleaners, aerosol sprays, plug ins, detergents.

Um, you know, washing your cat's bed or blankets and putting them back out that they're laying on, uh, candles. That was a devastating moment in our household.

It was a really devastating, but for me specifically, because I am, I was one of those that just. Love the smell. I still love the smells, but now like I bake bread or something.

Um, but

yeah,

or a simmer pot or something like that. But, uh, but I was like Yankee candles every, you know, Christmas, every Thanksgiving I had, you know, plugins in almost every room. Um, we use aerosol sprays right before somebody came in because we just want it to smell so fresh and have this like scent when you come into your home and I didn't know.

And. At that, at that time, my soul cat was actually had asthma and, um, and I had no idea that the, these things that we use so like all the time, I mean, the Swiffer wet jets, you know, like anything that smelled clean to me, clean, um, was what I would use all around the house. And I had no idea how much that affected, um, him.

And he didn't, he didn't live a very long life. Um, but he was one of our greatest teachers.

That's for

sure. Um, but getting rid of those things is sometimes, you know, difficult. We can't all go just chemical free in our home overnight, right? Like that's a massive change, but making small, small changes. Once we know better, we can do better.

And if we make a small change, like for me, I was like, okay, well, now that I know that plugins are toxic to our cats, I just can't buy them anymore. I'll use up what I got. And then I just can't buy them anymore because I can't bring myself. to, to purchase something that I know is toxic to my cats. Right.

Then, you know, went to floor cleaners and those, you know, the little steps make a big difference and soon you'll see yourself making, you know, bigger steps and bigger steps into, into, um, helping your. You know, understanding that this also affect us. It's not just our cats. Our home environment. Yeah, it helps.

It affects us as well. But, um, for many of us, you know, our cats are number one in our home.