Personal grooming

Grooming (also called preening) is the art and practice of cleaning and maintaining parts of the body. It is a species-typical behavior. Individual animals regularly clean themselves and put their fur, feathers or other skin coverings in good order. This activity is known as personal grooming, a form of hygiene. Extracting foreign objects such as insects, leaves, dirt, twigs and parasites is a form of grooming. Among animals, birds spend considerable time preening their feathers. This is done to remove ectoparasites, keep the feathers in good aerodynamic condition, and waterproof them. To do that, they use the preen oil secreted by the uropygial gland, the dust of down feathers, or other means such as dust-bathing or anting. During oil spills, animal conservationists that rescue penguins sometimes dress them in knitted sweaters to stop them from preening and thereby ingesting the mineral oil, which is poisonous. Monkeys may also pick out nits from their fur or scratch their rears to keep themselves clean. Cats are well known for their extensive grooming. Cats groom so often that they often produce hairballs from the fur they ingest. Many mammal species also groom their genitals after copulation. Social grooming Preening (bird)#Allopreening Many social animals adapt preening and grooming behaviors for other social purposes such as bonding and the strengthening of social structures. Grooming plays a particularly important role in forming social bonds in many primate species, such as chacma baboons and wedge-capped capuchins. Social grooming#Primates In humankind, mutual grooming relates closely to social grooming, which is defined as the process by which human beings fulfill one of their basic instincts, such as socializing, cooperating and learning from each other. In research conducted by Holly Nelson (from the University of New Hampshire) and Glenn Geher (State University of New York at Paltz), individuals who chose their romantic partner reported more mutual grooming than others who focused in other types of relationships.