FUR FIGHTER: EVOLUTIONARY PERFECTION MEETS MODERN CLEANING NEED

I love the commercials for this product. All the happy, playful animals rolling around on the couch. It’s great. It’s fun. It makes me smile. Having two cats and two dogs myself, I love watching animals do their animal thing. It makes the crappiness of a bad day go away and it makes me think (if even for a second) that I really am the kind of person that I want to be. After all I have four rescued animals. I must be filled with something like ,compassion.

Despite all of the compassion oozing out of my pores, a clear and present fur issue permeates the house, the furniture and of course most of the clothes. I have short-haired dogs, but moderately-haired cats, and although I keep the closet doors closed, somehow or other, the cats manage to set up camp in there, and the fur just ends up everywhere. I am still not certain how this occurs, but it does. In fact I’m still finding fur from the cat that died 6 months ago on my sweaters. And this is not from lack of washing them. It’s just the way it is with fur. There is no getting away from it once it has taken hold of your life. The many and varied rolls of packing tape and lint removers scattered hither and yon throughout the house not withstanding, there is a constant fur problem.

All this said, of course upon seeing the happy, playful commercial with the happy, playful animals rolling all over the couch followed by the Scotch Fur Fighter (made my 3M) erasing the presence of the fur with ease, I felt I needed to give it a whirl. After all no harm, no foul. If the Fur Fighter did not in fact fight fur, then I would be in no worse shape than I was when I started. Less a few dollars perhaps, but nothing I couldn’t handle. We’re not talking about hermetically sealing the house or any sort of craziness like that. Since the $800 vacuum doesn’t quite fix the problem, and all the packing tape in the world wouldn’t be quite enough, I thought the little handheld job with the little removable “fur magnet” of sorts (3M calls them “Microtrap™ Grippers”) would do the trick.

I was unclear as to what the “fur magnet” actually was until I opened the package and discovered that it was a removable, flexible, clothy-rubbery item with cat-tongue-like-prongs. After a moment’s consideration, I thought this made perfect sense, after all, the feline is a perfectly designed animal. It has remained relatively unchanged for somewhere around 6 million years. Since millions of years of evolutions didn’t bother to change the cat tongue, why not use it for what it’s good for, removing fur.

The Fur Fighter is an ingenious device which fits perfectly in the palm of the hand of what I imagine to be an average sized American female. Since the ads never show an average sized American male using it, perhaps the fit just isn’t right?

The instructions claim that you can use the Fur Fighter in all directions. Meaning that you can move it back and forth over the material you are trying to fight the fur from and all will be well. This is in fact not the case. The reality is that if the fur goes into the Microtrap™ Grippers in one direction, it comes out of the Microtrap™ Grippers in the other direction, thus if you push the Fur Fighter forward on a fur covered pillow it will remove the fur and if you pull the Fur Fighter backward over that same fur covered pillow, it will put the fur right back where it started. Actually it will take all of the fur that you removed from all over said pillow and deposit it in one place back on the pillow. This makes it easier to remove for the second time, but, given that the instructions say that such an activity shouldn’t be necessary, one must not be thrilled about the fact that a second removal is easier than the first. Although in defense of the instruction writers, I suppose you probably can use the Fur Fighter in all directions only you must choose a single direction for each usage. Forward on Mondays and backward on Fridays, or something like that.

The upshot is that for the most part the Fur Fighter does actually work. It does not work quite as well as I hoped it would, but it definitely works. It says it gets “embedded pet hair that vacuums leave behind” and it also says it “picks up 3 times more pet hair than a lint roller.” Since I didn’t vacuum the burgundy duvet cover (seen below) before using the Fur Fighter, I can’t say one way or another whether the first statement is true. I can however, with absolute certainty say that it does remove 3 times more pet hair than a lint roller. This however isn’t saying much and if I were the 3M Scotch Fur Fighter Marketing Team, I would up that number significantly. Since the simple dimensions of the lint roller makes it fall short to the capacity of the Fur Fighter.

So all the happy, playful animals can continue to happily and playfully roll around on the couch, the bed, the chairs, the carpet or any other piece of furniture you may have. And the best part is that with only a few strokes in any direction (but not all directions) you too can be mostly fur free.