This is a specific type of chili pepper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_piri.

I’m not sure about that, but it does have motion blur in the background, so unless it’s a fancy setup that tracks the movement of the subject, it was not an automatically triggered shot.

That makes sense, it’s usually not the hairs that people are allergic to. It’s a protein in their saliva, urine and skin flakes. Hairs could be covered with saliva and/or skin flakes, so in that sense I guess people might still react to the hairs, but a naked cat can trigger an allergic reaction too.