I Thought Something Had Attacked My Cat. She'd Been Licking Herself Raw for Weeks.

Skin and coat problems are now around 1 in 5 of all cat vet visits — and most start the same silent way: one itchy patch a cat worries at in private, long before the owner ever sees bare skin. Here's the small daily habit more Australian and UK cat parents are using to break the cycle.

Updated 2 June 2026

Read time: 4 mins

Written by Kate Sullivan

Cat owner of 12 years
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If your cat keeps licking or scratching the same spot — or you've found a patch of thinning or missing fur — this is worth four minutes.

The first time I saw it, I thought something had got to her in the night.

 

Marmalade — my ginger girl, eight, indoor her whole life — was lying in the sun when I went to scratch her and found a patch on her flank where the fur just… wasn't. A bare, pink-red oval the size of a fifty-cent piece. My first thought was a possum had got in through the roof. I checked her for bite marks, panicking. There were none. Nothing had attacked her. She'd done it to herself.

Your cat isn't hiding it — they're built to mask it

Cats are hard-wired to conceal discomfort; in the wild, an animal that favours a sore spot gets picked off. So they do it quietly — in another room, while you're asleep or at work. By the time you actually see bare skin, it's usually been going for weeks. You're not catching it early. You're catching it the moment your cat couldn't hide it anymore.

What's actually happening on the skin

It starts as an itch: dry, slightly inflamed skin in one spot. The cat licks — and a cat's tongue is rough enough that licking irritates the skin further, which makes it itchier, which makes them lick more. Itch, lick, inflame, itch. A self-feeding loop.

 

Left alone it escalates: the fur thins, the skin breaks, it can get infected, and at worst becomes a thickened raw sore — a lick granuloma — that's hard to resolve and can leave fur that never regrows. Cones, steroids, repeat vet visits.

So, first: a raw, weeping or spreading patch needs a vet. Over-grooming can be driven by fleas, mites, pain, stress or a true allergy, and those must be ruled out. I took Marmalade in and we did exactly that. No fleas, no mites, skin scraping clean. Nothing acute.

 

What the vet said next reframed everything: "This isn't really a wound. It's an itch she can't get on top of. The skin's dry and inflamed — she licks because it's irritated, and licking makes it worse. What's she eating?"

What vets keep coming back to

Skin and coat are one of the first places a nutritional gap shows up, because when something runs short the body deprioritises them — dry, itchy skin, over-grooming, dull fur, heavy shedding. It's part of why skin and coat problems are roughly one in five of all cat vet visits.

The common thread is omega-3 — specifically EPA and DHA. EPA is the one that mattered for Marmalade: it has a genuine anti-inflammatory action, calming the signals behind itchy skin and helping dry skin settle from the inside out. An itchy cat licks. A comfortable cat stops.

 

The cats most likely to fall short are the ordinary ones: indoor, on mostly dry food. And here's the catch — omega-3s are fragile, and the high heat that makes kibble shelf-stable destroys a lot of them. A cat can eat a "complete" diet daily and still run short on fresh EPA and DHA.

 

So I bought few bottles of fish oil.

The problem with almost every cat fish oil

It didn't work. Here's why most don't:

 

1. Cats refuse it. The smell of oxidised fish oil is repulsive to most cats. Marmalade ate it four days, then started walking off. Once a cat refuses something, getting her back on it is nearly impossible.

 

2. It goes off the moment you open it. Omega-3 oils oxidise as soon as the bottle meets air. By week three you're feeding oil that's degrading the omega-3s you paid for — and tastes worse, which loops back to problem one.

 

3. Dosing is a nightmare. Droppers, oily hands, missed and double doses. Most owners give up within a month.

 

This is the problem one Australian brand set out to solve.

Meet Fureeze Daily Fish & Krill Oil

Fureeze didn't start in the supplement aisle. They started in 2021 with one obsession: freeze-dried, single-ingredient treats — wallaby, quail, free-range chicken, crocodile. Nothing added, nothing hidden. The same fixation on what a cat will actually eat built their next product, designed to fix everything wrong with cat fish oil.

 

It comes as single-serve, airtight 2g sachets — one per cat, per day, over food. No measuring, no fridge, no mess, no rancidity: sealed until the second you use it, so every serving is as fresh as the day it was made.

Inside each sachet:

 

🐟 Wild-caught anchovy oil — a clean, palatable source of EPA and DHA

 

🦐 Antarctic krill oil — a more bioavailable, phospholipid form of omega-3

 

🌿 Astaxanthin from red algae — an antioxidant that protects the oil and supports skin health

 

✨ Vitamin E and MOS — for skin, coat and gut (vitamin E also keeps the oil stable) 

 

❤️ Taurine — for whole-cat heart and kidney health

 

Around 160mg EPA and 118mg DHA per sachet (≈278mg omega-3 total). Marmalade — fussy enough to refuse the last lot in a week — eats it without theatrics.

 

Straight up: this isn't a treatment for an infection, allergy or wound, and no over-the-counter supplement is — anything claiming to cure a skin condition should be treated with suspicion. A raw or spreading patch is a vet's job. What Fureeze does is address one of the most common drivers of the itch-lick cycle — dry, irritation-prone skin — as a daily habit your cat will accept.

 

[→ See how Fureeze works (90-day guarantee)]

What changed with Marmalade

Nothing was overnight. For the first week, nothing. Then around the second-week mark it was undeniable: she stopped worrying at the patch. The skin went from angry pink back to pale, and the fur filled in from the edges. She got calmer overall, too — a comfortable cat is a relaxed cat.

 

I can't get back the weeks I spent thinking it was a wound. But she's better than she was, and better than she'd be if I'd kept ignoring it. For one sachet a day, I'll take that.

 

[→ See how Fureeze works (90-day guarantee)]

What Aussie and UK cat parents are saying

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The biggest difference was the over-grooming. She'd licked a patch on her leg bare — within a few weeks she'd left it alone and the fur came back." 

— Jason S., Verified Buyer

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "We tried bottled fish oil before and my cat started refusing her food. These sachets are cleaner, fresher, and she actually eats them." 

— Sarah M., Verified Buyer

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I thought the bald spot meant something was seriously wrong. Turned out to be dry, itchy skin. So glad I didn't ignore it." 

— Michelle C., Verified Buyer

 

Reviewed at 4.7/5 across 2,500+ verified Aussie and UK customers.

 

[→ See how Fureeze works (90-day guarantee)]

If your cat keeps licking the same spot, this is the time

The itch-lick cycle doesn't start at the bare patch — it starts weeks earlier, silently, and the longer it runs the harder it is to break.

You can't undo the licking that already happened. But you can absolutely change what happens next.

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Kate Sullivan is an Australian based writer and lifelong cat owner. This article includes affiliate links; Fureeze provided product for review but did not approve the final copy.

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