Our cat Sheldon is affectionate in many ways, including licking us, presumably to keep us nice and clean. My question is: Why the sandpaper-like tongue?

Two things we cats like to do a lot are eat and groom. The inward-facing barbs on our tongues help us in both those pursuits, as explained in this article WHY CATS' TONGUES ARE ROUGH.

Unfortunately, those same barbs also have a downside; they make it just about impossible for us to spit out string if we start to ingest it–which is why you should never leave string, yarn, or anything string-like out for us to find. There are more details about this and other aspects of our multi-purpose tongues in the article.

Fancy