Photograph by Whitney Curtis
They don’t call her “the cat whisperer”—not yet, anyway. But maybe they should.
Stephaney Kemper, a pet groomer at Dogs in Suds Grooming in St. Charles, has a way with the felines. And her natural skills for looking deep into Fluffy’s eyes and intuiting the hidden world of cat emotions are more than just a rumor.
Kemper is Missouri’s only graduate of the nation’s only cat-grooming academy, the National Cat Groomers Institute of America. That makes Kemper a certified feline master groomer—though some might take issue with the idea that cats need professional grooming at all.
“I think a lot of the misconceptions about cat grooming are very similar to the way people thought about dog grooming decades ago,” Kemper says. “Before, dogs were working animals and not considered companion pets. Eventually, they came more into the home, and grooming became an industry. So now, we’re in that early stage with cats.”
She demonstrated an aptitude for working with cats right away. “I started bathing cats early on, and I kind of didn’t like the way I saw other groomers were doing things as far as handling the cats,” says Kemper. “It didn’t seem very considerate of how the cats were feeling; it was like, ‘Get in, get out.’ And when I started doing hands-on grooming, I found that I understood cats maybe even better than dogs, and I could get good results.”
And so Kemper found her way to the National Cat Groomers School in Greenville, S.C. “The No. 1 thing that I learned at school, besides the technicalities of grooming, is confidence in handling the cats—and now the cats have confidence in me,” she says. “I’m totally focused on them.”
Why are many pet groomers hesitant to take cats? “Cats are a little more unpredictable than dogs,” Kemper explains. “Their mood can change very quickly, and they may not give much physical warning about feeling agitated. So you’ve got to know what to watch for; you’ve got to know the nuances of their behavior to work with them. You have to introduce them to the grooming process slowly, and be calm with them. They’re so sensitive to stress. I keep dogs and other cats away from them and try to groom them when the shop is quiet.
“People are afraid of cat bites, which can get infected very easily,” she says. “A lot of groomers don’t know how to handle that fear, so it’s a very specialized skill. A lot of groomers won’t even touch cats.”
Kemper’s affinity for felines is such that she can and does provide what are known as “creative cuts,” if the client is interested. “A lot of the creative things that you see done on poodles can be done on cats,” she says. “We can do different lengths, stripes, and the ‘lion cut,’ for instance.” In fact, she says, “I recently gave my own cat, Martini, some puffballs along her tail.”
