September is Happy Cat Month, a designation the nonprofit CATalyst Council created back in 2009 for a specific reason: a large feline-health survey found that 81% of owners believed their cats were self-sufficient enough to need little attention. The council's whole pitch was that this is wrong. Turns out grooming is one of the clearest places to see it.
The tongue everyone points to as proof
The go-to evidence for "cats have this handled" is always the tongue, and it's a genuinely wild piece of biology. A 2018 Georgia Tech study published in PNAS found that a house cat's tongue is covered in roughly 300 hollow, scoop-shaped spines called papillae. Each one works like a tiny flexible cone, wicking saliva through capillary action deep into the fur with every lick — not just wetting the surface, but reaching down to the skin. It's the reason cat tongues feel like Velcro and the reason a determined cat can out-groom almost anything you'd expect.
The part that doesn't get mentioned
Those same papillae curve backward, toward the throat. That's great for pulling loose hair out of the coat and terrible for what happens to it next: there's nothing at the back of a cat's mouth to catch it, so a lot of what gets collected gets swallowed instead of removed. The tongue is excellent at relocating fur. It's not actually removing it from the system — which is the entire reason hairballs exist in the first place, and why a cat who grooms constantly can still end up with a coat that's shedding everywhere and matting in the spots even a flexible cat can't fully work over.
What "help" actually looks like this month
None of this means self-grooming is pointless — it's doing real work, just not the whole job. A regular brushing pass pulls out the loose undercoat before the tongue gets to it, which means less of it gets swallowed and less of it ends up matted instead of managed. That's the part CGD can actually do something about: consistent brushing at home, and a professional groomer for the deshedding and mat work that a 300-scoop tongue, however impressive, was never built to finish alone.
So this month, skip the costume and the cat-shaped cupcakes if you want — just don't skip the brush. Your cat's been doing its half of the job since the day it was born. September is a fine time to start doing yours.