What Does Cat Lice Look Like?

Video Transcript

"What do cat lice look like? Well if you've ever seen a louse on a person or anybody other lice, they look very similar, you can't tell them apart, at least I can't unless you're a entomologist and you spent a lot of time looking at lice. But what you see and it's fortunate it's very rare, I don't know I think in the last 25 years that I've been practicing I might have seen one or two cases of cats with lice. So normally when you see a cat with a skin problem, a hair coat problem, don't immediately think of lice. Another thing you have to understand is that if you're son or daughter or your brother or sister has lice or head lice, doesn't get on the cat, and the cats can't give lice to you. So everybody has their own louse problem and cats do but they look very similar to people, they're just little specks that you'll see on the skin but mostly what you'll see is the eggs that attach to the hair and the little what we call nits and they're not microscopic but they are very, very small, poppy seed size, sometimes clear or skin color but if it's on a dark skin cat or on a white haired cat you can actually see them attached to the hair follicle itself. Fortunately they're very rare so the actual louse itself you won't probably see, it will be the little nits."