Adult cats occasionally groom one another, but the most common form of social grooming is the licking of kittens by their mother.

For other uses, see social grooming.

Like many rodents, guinea pigs sometimes participate in social grooming, and they regularly self-groom.

Dunbar (1994) argues that gossip is the equivalent of social grooming often observed in other primate species.

Instead, what's going on is something like the social grooming we see apes enjoying at the zoo.

Males may meet with females during the night for foraging and social grooming.

A related term, allogrooming, indicates social grooming between members of the same species.

Items removed during social grooming are identical to those removed by personal grooming.

A few empirical studies of human social grooming exist.

There is also some aspect of social grooming in the medical fields of dentistry, dermatology, and plastic surgery.