Examine skin and coat during grooming sessions. Checking for hair loss, redness, bumps, fleas or other parasites will be a quick way to determine if your pets need to go to the vet. [Photo provided to Shanghai Star]

Living indoors as pets means dogs and cats can shed their coats throughout the year.Wang Zhenghua finds out how to minimize the household headache.

Many pet owners are familiar with the nuisances related to cats and dogs' shedding season: a large amount of dead hair clings to clothing; a thick layer of flotsam covers the ground where vacuum cleaners cannot reach and from time to time, a hair or two drifts into the food served on the table.

Shedding is an animal's natural process of losing dead hair.

In nature, dogs and cats molt twice a year to allow a new coat to come in. In the early autumn, the fine summer coat is lost and is replaced by a dense, warm winter coat. Then in the late spring, the winter fur falls out and the lighter summer coat grows.

If this was the pattern followed by pets, owners could focus their attention on frequent grooming during the shedding season and then they would not need to worry about it until six months later.

Unfortunately, domesticated animals rarely have a standard molting schedule. Our modern brightly lit, warm, centrally heated homes give pets signals to start molting as their bodies are no longer subjected to the natural temperature and light changes of the seasons.

As a result, molting happens on a continual basis.

Regularly grooming your pets and vacuuming hair from your house can minimize the inconvenience of shedding.

The more hair the owners remove the less they will see it all over the house. Brushing your pet once a day will greatly reduce the unwanted hair on clothes, carpet and furniture, especially during molting season.