Can anyone suggest why a cat might like to lick paint off walls?

This is (one of) Milly's most annoying bad habits. She hadn't done it since we changed her over to good quality food, and she was looking healthy and starting to gain weight. In the last couple of days, she's been dashing into the garage at every opportunity to lick the walls where the paint has peeled slightly, and then she sicked up her Animonda Carny this morning. She hasn't been sick since (her lunch has stayed down for an hour so far), but she's looking very sorry for herself.

It's so frustrating. I've always associated licking the walls with being sick, but I thought she did it because she felt sick. I didn't realise it was what made her sick.

I can stop her doing it. Banning her from the garage is a pain, but not impossible to do. I just figure there must be something wrong that makes her want to do it in the first place.

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Proud Mummy to:

Sam (born June 1999, found August 1999)
Milly (born May 1999, adopted September 1999)
Eva (born 2010, adopted us August 2011)

How old is Milly? Have any bloodtests ever showed any low values?

Not heard of a specific reason for paint licking but know that licking concrete can point to calcium imbalances and litter eating anaemia. Indeed pica ( licking or eating inappropriate substances ) can point in some instances to mineral deficiencies which sounds likely in Milly's case if it ceased when diet was switched.

Thanks for the reply.

She's 12. The wall licking started when we came to Spain. I'm not sure whether it's because there's something different about her environment here that's causing it, or whether the paint's more desirable (in whatever way paint can be desirable to eat!) because we've never had paint flaking off the walls before. It happens where there are patches of damp in the winter.

It's been suggested to me by someone else that it could be sodium deficiency, which is a very real danger to humans in the high temperatures here, but I'm not sure if cats sweat the way humans do, seeing as they wouldn't get much benefit from it? I know their coats tend to stand up when they're very hot, and they leave damp paw prints, so I assume they sweat through their paws, but I don't think that would be enough to cause low sodium levels.

She's never had any blood tests (aside from the rabies toxicology report when she got her passport). Every time we've asked a vet about her vomiting habit, which has got worse over the last 2 or 3 years, we've just been told she eats too fast. I wasn't really happy with that answer, but had given up on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc opinions, so I changed her diet when I found the commercial food diet wasn't very good, and I thought I'd solved the problem. She used to be sick at least once or twice a week, and sometimes we'd go a whole day or more without her keeping anything down. In the last 6-8 weeks, since changing her diet, she'd only been sick 2 or 3 times, and I was starting to make associations with certain food ingredients.

The good news is, she seems to have kept tea down as well, so hopefully it was a one off. I'll start keeping a detailed record of her meals and other behaviour, and see if I can see any patterns there. I don't really want to take her back to the vet because she finds it so stressful, and she's still a lot better overall now than she was a few months ago.

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Proud Mummy to:

Sam (born June 1999, found August 1999)
Milly (born May 1999, adopted September 1999)
Eva (born 2010, adopted us August 2011)

what is she fed?

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She now has Animonda Carny, Grau Grain free, Bozita pate tetrapacks, Terra Felis fish flavours and a little bit of Orijen. (She's also had some Smilla, but didn't like it very much so we haven't given it to her again, although she wasn't sick on it.)

Before I started coming here, it was the usual Whiskas, Gourmet Gold, etc, single portions. (We stopped giving her Felix, Gourmet Perle and anything else that wasn't a pate consistency because we thought at first that it was the consistency that was making her sick because the vets all said she ate too fast, and pate seemed easier to digest. She'd been on just pate type foods for about a year and a half, which had improved things a bit, but we didn't notice the huge improvement until we put her on better quality food.)

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Proud Mummy to:

Sam (born June 1999, found August 1999)
Milly (born May 1999, adopted September 1999)
Eva (born 2010, adopted us August 2011)

interesting thread.
one of my cats(ginger) licks our kitchen chair cushions. its the only thing he licks but he does it a lot and with so much energy that its impossible to lift him up or pull him away from it. he even crawls under the cushion sometimes to lick the bottom
my other cat kitty does it too sometimes but rarely.
they eat the same food (mainly grau and some orijen, sometimes animonda carny, bozita or applaws wet)
ginger likes to be left alone most of the day except in the morning when he pushes everything and everybody out of the way to get his cuddles, and thats when he's drooling a lot too.
i asked the vet about the licking before but was told not to worry about it as long as he is healthy(never had bloods checked though)

"Cats with liver problems tend to lick bricks and walls. Iron deficiency anemia and mal-digestion/mal-absorption secondary to pancreas failure are other diseases known to cause pica. Many animals with some degree of indigestion or even normal animals will eat grass (all healthy felines will ingest grass if it is available to them)."

PICA

Thanks for that quote, WaveRider, but I don't think it's the walls as such that are so interesting to her, but the paint. She doesn't lick brick, or bare concrete, or terracotta floor tiles, or anything like that. It's just the patches of wall where the paint is starting to peel and coming away in flakes. She also licks the flakes up off the floor if we haven't swept them yet.

I do suspect a deficiency, and I wonder if it's related to her getting too hot. My OH has just started giving her a blanket at night in case she gets too cold - the temperature in the house is dropping below 25C at night now - and it's since having the blanket that she's started licking the walls again.

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Proud Mummy to:

Sam (born June 1999, found August 1999)
Milly (born May 1999, adopted September 1999)
Eva (born 2010, adopted us August 2011)

I doubt if it's related to temperature though. However, considering paint is essentially a chemical I would be concerned about her ingesting it over a long period, regardless of the underlying cause.

The only reason for me thinking this is based on the fact that humans can suffer from sodium deficiency in high temperatures if they don't get extra sodium through their food. But, as I said earlier, I'm not sure if cats are susceptible to this because I don't think they have the same cooling systems as humans. (When I say high temperatures, I mean mid-30s, by the way, so it is pretty hot.)

Yes, that's a concern for me, and is why she's now shut out of the garage. It was a bigger problem in our old house because it was all open plan, and we had damp problems in the house itself, but here we can keep her away from it.

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Proud Mummy to:

Sam (born June 1999, found August 1999)
Milly (born May 1999, adopted September 1999)
Eva (born 2010, adopted us August 2011)