Five signs your cat is in pain

A cat in pain does not cry. It goes quiet. That is not stubbornness or personality, it is biology: cats are both predator and prey, and an animal that advertises weakness in the wild pays for it. The result is that your cat can live with chronic pain for months without anyone in the house noticing, and the first sign is almost never a noise. It is a change in habit.

So the only rule that really works is this one: the change is the sign. Not "a cat who hides" but a cat who never used to hide and now does. Not "a cat who eats little" but a cat who ate the same way for two years and suddenly eats differently. You know your own cat's normal better than anyone, and that is exactly the information a vet cannot collect in a consulting room.

The first sign is disappearing. A cat in pain picks new places: under the bed, inside a wardrobe, behind the sofa, low and enclosed instead of high and open. A cat who always met you at the door stops. A sociable cat stops getting on your lap, or the opposite happens and an independent cat suddenly will not leave your side. Sudden aggression belongs here too. A cat who growls or bites when you stroke one particular area, or lift them, has not turned nasty. They are guarding something that hurts.

The second sign is grooming, and it is the most readable of the five because the coat keeps a record. There are two opposite directions and both count. A cat who has stopped grooming looks greasy, with dandruff and a coat that stands away from the body, and the mats show up first in the places that are hardest to reach: the base of the tail, behind the elbows, the flanks and the trousers. That is precisely where a cat with sore joints or a sore belly can no longer twist round to reach. The other direction is over-grooming one spot down to bare skin or an angry pink patch, usually the lower belly, the inner thighs, or straight over a single joint. A cat licks what hurts.

In long-haired cats this cuts both ways. On a Persian or a Maine Coon, knots and a neglected coat get written off almost automatically as the coat's fault, so a cat who has stopped grooming is noticed later, and weight loss hides under the volume as well. On the other hand, anyone who already combs a cat like that is holding the best pain detector there is, because their hands go over the whole body every few days and feel soreness before anyone sees it. And on a Persian, whose face is flat, the expression is harder to read than on a long-nosed cat, which makes the body, the coat and the habits the things to lean on.

The third sign is food, and mostly how they eat rather than how much. A cat with tooth or gum pain walks up to the bowl, sniffs, and walks away. They chew on one side, drop food out of their mouth, lift their head mid-bite, shake their head, paw at their mouth, or suddenly want only wet food after years of dry. There may be bad breath and drooling. One thing that matters: a cat who stops eating altogether is not making a point. A cat who has eaten nothing for two days or more is genuinely at risk, especially a chubby one, and that is not a situation to watch and see.

The fourth sign is the litter box, and it is the one cats pay for with their reputation. A cat who pees next to the box instead of in it, who starts using a rug or a bed, who goes in and out without covering, who cries in the box or sits in it for a long time, is not being spiteful. Three explanations deserve equal attention: pain while passing urine or stool, pain climbing into the box in a cat with stiff joints, or an association the cat has built between the box and a painful experience. And here is the hardest line in this article: a cat, especially a male, who goes into the box again and again, strains, and produces no urine, is an emergency. A urinary blockage becomes life-threatening within hours. Drive to a vet now, not tomorrow morning.

The fifth sign is posture and movement, and it is the one most often hidden behind the word "ageing". Cats do not usually limp. They simply stop doing things. They no longer jump to the windowsill or the counter, or they break one jump into two via a chair. They hesitate for half a second before going up, land heavily, avoid stairs, circle several times before lying down, and prefer to sit hunched on their paws instead of stretching out on their side. The face changes too, and it is worth looking at: eyes half closed, ears rotating slightly outwards and flattening, tension across the muzzle and the bridge of the nose, whiskers pulled to the side or pushed forward. A comfortable cat's face looks soft. A cat in pain looks tightened.

What to do with all of it. Two things change a veterinary appointment more than any description: video and numbers. Film the moment your cat hesitates before a jump, the walk down the hallway, the way they get into the box. A cat frozen with fear in a consulting room will do none of it. Weigh them once a week on a kitchen scale, same day and same time, and write the number down; weight loss in a cat starts long before the eye can see it. And write dates: when they stopped jumping onto the counter, which week the peeing left the box, when the first mat appeared. A vet given three points in time is given a picture. A vet given "something in the last month" is given a guess.

And one thing you must not do: never give a cat a human painkiller. Paracetamol is lethal to cats at very small doses, and common anti-inflammatories are dangerous to them too. A painkiller prescribed for the dog in the same house, or for another cat last time, is not safe either. This pain is treatable, but only by someone who can examine and weigh.

If there is one thing to take from this, it is that your memory is not a measuring instrument. What sounds like "he just got calmer this year" reads completely differently next to a list of dates. Write it somewhere that does not get lost, in your phone or in your pet's health diary, and bring it with you. Most chronic pain in cats is not caught late because it is invisible. It is caught late because nobody wrote down when it started.