How do Animals Wash Themselves?
We’ve all seen it, a dog biting itself with a strange intensity, a cat treating its hindquarters like a child treats an ice cream cone, a row of monkeys looking like a bizarre cross between a conga line and an all-you-can-pluck buffet.
We humans clean ourselves in a myriad of ways: showers, baths, combs, toothbrushes, and so on. Take a walk through any pharmacy and think about all of the soaps, creams, and scrubbing apparatuses we’ve created to perfect that long sought-after feeling of pristine freshness.
Aside from our pets and a few of their compatriots in the wild, most animals don’t have a wide variety of cleaning options aside from the ones with which they were born.
Big cats use their tongues to keep clean just like your precious Mr. Whiskers... or Snugglepaws…or Mittens. Bobcats go the extra mile by using their paws like a luffa (aka loofah). They lick them, then scrub their faces and behind their ears to cleanse those hard to reach spots. Evolution gave bats a bit more of a deluxe experience. They use their tongues to give themselves wing massages.
Your canine companions, along with coyotes and wolves, lick themselves clean but they also employ biting, scratching, and shaking to remove unwanted visitors (i.e. fleas), loose hairs, dirt, and anything else they may have gotten into.
Everyone knows that elephants have a built-in power washer. The Beaver’s double-clawed toenail, which they use as a hairbrush, is a slightly less well known (but no less useful) inherited trait.
Our furry friends are not the only creatures who love to stay clean. Birds stay insect free by flapping around in dust and using their beaks to preen. Insects, for whom staying clean is crucial for being able to fly, utilize body hair (surprising, right?), antibiotic secretions, shaking, licking, and wiping off to stay pristine.
The luckiest members of the Animal Kingdom are those who have all of their work done for them. Ostriches, hippos, certain types of fish and some eels manage to stay clean by serving as a restaurant for egrets, oxpeckers, wrasse fish, and scarlet cleaner shrimp respectively. All these animals have to do is stand around or, in some cases, open their mouths and the smaller creatures pick their teeth, fur or feathers clean as their next meal.
Despite a lack of advanced combs and manufactured chemical compounds, animals seem to have figured out how to keep themselves presentable. They may not smell like Mint +Hibiscus or Rose Petals +Cardamom but they manage to get the job done. So the next time you get mad at Fido for spraying you when he shakes himself clean, remember that at least you can just go hop into the shower. Or even better, a Nebia.
