Chapter Four

The Wild Animal in Your House

The idea of taming wild creatures to serve human uses came along very recently in our species’ history. The most important of our animal familiars—horses, pigs, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and so on, the barnyard crowd—began to be confined and bred for human uses only about twelve thousand years ago. Dogs have been around a lot longer, possibly as long as forty thousand years. Cats, as we’ve seen, are newcomers, the first fossil evidence of domestication dating only to five-thousand-odd years ago.

Then there’s the question of what “domestication” means in the case of cats. All the other domestic animals differ radically from their wild ancestors. The leading scholar of cat ancestry, Carlos A. Driscoll, and his colleagues write in a study of cat genetics that our house cats differ from their progenitors only in “behavior, tameness, and coat color diversity.”¹ Any domestic cat can interbreed with a North African wildcat and produce viable kittens.

The full genome of the domestic cat was published only in 2014.² The research found that genes for “aesthetic qualities such as hair color, texture, and pattern” showed strong differences with wildcats, but most of those had entered the genome very recently: There are now thirty to forty genetically distinct breeds, but two hundred years ago there were only five, and those had been created not so much by human intention as by historic geographical separation. Our house cat’s ancestor, on the other hand, which is to say the forebear of the African wildcat, was shown by mitochondrial DNA analysis to be 131,000 years old. There was also evidence of continuous breeding back and forth between wild and domestic populations all the way through the history of the domestic cat—which the authors refer to, in fact, as “only a semi-domesticated species.” The primary evolutionary force the geneticists found was “selection for docility, as a result of becoming accustomed to humans for food rewards.” Sounds cold, in a way, but sounds like a cat.

In another article, Driscoll and colleagues do a tidy job of summing up the likely story of how the wildcat became the domestic cat and still stayed wild at heart:

Considering that small cats do little obvious harm, people probably did not mind their company. They might have even encouraged the cats to stick around when they saw them dispatching mice and snakes. Cats may have held other appeal, too. Some experts speculate that wildcats just so happened to possess features that might have preadapted them to developing a relationship with people. In particular, these cats have “cute” features—large eyes, a snub face and a high, round forehead, among others—that are known to elicit nurturing from humans. In all likelihood, then, some people took kittens home simply because they found them adorable and tamed them, giving cats a first foothold at the human hearth.3

Given how little they’ve changed from their ancestors, it shouldn’t be surprising that cats are the only domestic animal that can survive on its own in the wild nearly anywhere. Pigs can manage, too, in some habitats—many fewer, however, than the ecotypes in which domestic cats can make a living on their own—but within a few generations the domestic swine begin to revert to a sort of wild boar appearance and behavior, and they readily interbreed with wild boar. Cats stay cats, and can live in deserts, jungles, grasslands, forests, and beaches—as well as parks, golf courses, shopping malls, back yards, alleys, and even Roman ruins. Which can be a problem.

The rapid growth of feral cat populations in recent decades is responsible for a number of ecological troubles, as we will soon see, but the other tame beasts—cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, goats, ducks, chickens—have had far more powerful effects on our world. Their influence has been felt, and growing, for twelve thousand years. They have made animal husbandry and large-scale agriculture possible, which have made it possible in turn for humanity to conquer the planet and to change its very nature. In a rather gloomier paper, Driscoll writes, “The world’s species are going extinct at a rate one hundred to one thousand times faster than the historic ‘background’ rate, primarily as a result of habitat loss, which is itself overwhelmingly driven by conversion of natural habitats to agriculture. However, to date, no domestic animal has gone extinct. The consequences for the planet (as well as for humanity and its domesticates) have been profound, and have included the complete transformation of almost every natural ecosystem on Earth.”4

So don’t blame kitty! All she’s done is kill mice in the granary and knock off some birds.

The most peculiar thing is, What’s she doing here at all? Six hundred million of her, worldwide.⁵ Of those, a few are actually trained: These precious few—after long and patient effort on the part of their trainers (more patient, obviously, than Elizabeth and I ever were with Augusta and the Spider Ball)—will sit on command, fetch, jump through hoops, go for walks like a dog. The other day I saw a cat out for a walk on a leash, in the park. This was a long way from the nearest car. A small crowd had gathered, to marvel. Then I noticed that the cat was not actually walking, he was lying down. Then I noticed that the owner had sort of hidden the cat carrier a few feet away.

They do use their litter boxes, though! Augusta used hers from day one. Here’s the thing, however. A lot of them won’t. They stand in the box and do their business just outside it on the floor. Or they stand in it but they back up against the wall vibrating their tail and squirt straight back. Or they do it on the other cat’s bed. Or the sofa in the family room. Or your pillow. When a dog does something like this, you can punish the dog and the dog will get it. If you rub a cat’s nose in her error, or swat her with a newspaper, guaranteed, you will have made the problem worse, and the cat will never forget.

Many wild cat species have their own version of the litter box—the midden—where they pee and poop over and over in the same spot. They will maintain a small network of these middens to mark territorial boundaries or crossroads. Territory is of profound importance to cats, and those violations of litter box rules can nearly always be traced to some territorial misunderstanding (not on the cat’s part).

Sometimes a cat is just nasty, or will turn nasty, and that can be dangerous. For the most part it happens only very rarely and for no apparent reason, and so the outburst will scare the daylights out of you. My cat Isabel recently woke in my lap and exploded into my face in a murderous fury. Those claws, when intended to injure, can really injure. Isabel raked four deep cuts in my forehead, two of them slicing down through my eyebrows. Luckily I was wearing my glasses. I’m still not sure what happened. I think she may have been having a nightmare and hadn’t fully awoken.

The teeth evolved for killing. The canines, needle-sharp, can slip into your skin as easily as a hypodermic needle—a dirty one, too, teeming with bacteria. You might be operating some kind of chase toy and he might just suddenly overenthusiastically overshoot it, and before you have any idea what’s going on he’s “killing” your hand. If somebody played rough with your cat when he was a kitten, rough play might not yet have been civilized out of him. You’ve heard the term “scratch your eyes out”? Its original source was cat behavior, and it’s not just a metaphor. When you and your cat are learning to play with each other, it pays to be careful till you’re certain he knows the limits. Even then it still pays to be careful because once in a while, overexcited, he may forget those limits.

Besides inflicting physical hurt on your person there are also manifold ways in which cats can wreck your peace of mind. Ripping up the upholstery is a favorite. Eating plants. Knocking things off dressers. Deciding that the food that’s been delicious for the last six months is now poison. Eating and eating and eating, with all the illnesses inevitably attendant. Cats may display all kinds of obsessive-compulsive behavior. Then there’s yowling at four in the morning. Attacking your feet at five. Vomiting at six. How about running away for three days and then just strolling back in like, What’s the matter with you? Or running away and not coming back.

You bring her a roommate (feline, that is) to alleviate her all too evident ennui, and both of them hate each other—and it doesn’t get better. You take Augusta to Montana, which she’s going to love, a drive of two and a half days which by now she understands perfectly well—she knows where she’s going—and in the car she either protests loudly from inside her carrying case or else, if released, roams the interior in search of an exit (frequently seeking it behind the pedals) and then paces the motel room all night, moaning. You invest in a hideous and expensive seven-foot cat tower that combines scratching post with hidey-house and viewing platforms and dangling catnip-scented batting balls—and Fluffy gives it one sniff, after which the thing is forever invisible to her.

The Tufts University veterinary school identifies several possible triggers for the sudden onset of irrational anxiety (the cat’s, at first, soon yours too): “thunder phobia or separation anxiety—the fear that owners who have left the house for a brief period will never return—the arrival of a new baby, the permanent departure of a family member, rearrangement of furniture, persistent and loud noise from outside… relocation of the litter box… flapping curtains…”6 Rearrangement of furniture? Flapping curtains?

There is a whole industry dealing with this stuff. The queen of it is Mieshelle Nagelschneider, who claims the title of The Cat Whisperer. There are a lot of other self-appointed cat whisperers, but Nagelschneider is the one who has published a book—titled The Cat Whisperer—and goes on television. (The whole “whisperer” thing started with the original Horse Whisperer, Buck Brannaman, who accomplishes miracles with horses—admittedly a species more amenable to influence than cats.) The king of cat whisperers is Jackson Galaxy, who has his own TV show, My Cat from Hell, and three books. Mieshelle Nagelschneider is rather glamorous—short dresses and platform sandals. She was born and raised on a farm on the high desert of central Oregon. Pierced, tattooed, and earringed to the max, Jackson Galaxy—born Richard Kirschner, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—looks like a Hell’s Angel from outer space.

One reason they have both been so successful in dealing with the behavior of problem cats is their recognition of the nature of the species. “House cats,” writes Nagelschneider, “are not fully domesticated (and some seem to retain more of their wildcat ancestors’ instincts than others). For behavioral purposes, it’s better to think of them as half wild.”7 Galaxy, on what he calls the Raw Cat: “It’s fair to say cats remain comparatively undomesticated altogether.”⁸

Nagelschneider sets forth a three-part framework for her approach to transgressive cats, cleverly labeled C-A-T. C is for ceasing the bad behavior, which she accomplishes either with an “act of God”—a noise or other disturbance that the cat can’t identify as coming from a person—or with a distraction that’s necessarily enacted before the behavior: For example, if Beastie is clearly on his way to stealing a pork chop, you toss a ball across the room that you’re pretty sure he’ll chase. A is for attracting Beastie somewhere else—say, to a scratching post—and then rewarding him with a treat. T, which she insists is crucial, is for transforming his territory. That part can be challenging.

Turning a cat’s territory into a genuinely congenial environment—especially if the cat lives strictly indoors—is something that Jackson Galaxy has put a lot of thought into. In his book Catification he has you turning your house or apartment into a cat’s paradise, with platforms, runways, hammocks, cocoons, spiral staircases, ramps, shelves up under the ceiling, even whole dead trees. You can end up making your habitat look almost as weird as him. No doubt there are people who love this kind of thing, I just don’t happen to know any. No question, though, cats think it’s great.

As we learned from Eileen Karsh, having two or more cats is a piece of cake if you adopt them from the same litter. Adopting them as unrelated kittens at the same time, and preferably of about the same age, isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good. Bringing stranger cats together in adulthood can be really problematic. Like all-hell-breaking-loose, cats-at-war problematic. With the arrival of social maturity between the ages of two and four, territoriality also arrives, as well as an instinct for social hierarchy. The difficulties that these give rise to have led a lot of people in the past to the erroneous observation that cats just aren’t social. Their wild correlates, North African wildcats, are in fact not very social, and domestic cats who grow up without human company develop a relatively exclusionary kind of society: The adult males are solitary except when in pursuit of breeding females, while closely related females look out for one another and babysit one another’s kittens; otherwise, they seem, superficially, to have little interest in one another. Yet even in their individual solitude feral cats will live together in considerable numbers—sometimes hundreds—in colonial populations, with elaborate systems of hierarchy and a delicate politeness that prevents nearly all conflict. Even the operatic wailing, hissing, and fighting of tomcats in sexual rivalry are more often rhetorical than actively threatening. Real injuries are inflicted sometimes, and deaths do occur, but both are relatively rare. In general, cats prefer peace to war, and respect good manners—which demand maintaining a certain cool distance.

But sociality with others of their own kind is complicated, and sometimes, as in the case of our own intraspecies sociality, they just don’t get along, or barely do.

When I lived in New York City, I had a husky male Chartreux named Catfish who was emotionally so needy, or should I say so affectionate, that I couldn’t keep him out of my lap. He was a great cat but he was driving me nuts, so my wife and I agreed that a close relative from the same breeder was probably the best choice for a new companion. Accordingly, we acquired Catfish’s two-years-younger half brother Bubba. When he was still a kitten Bubba looked just like Catfish at the same age, but as he matured it became evident that he wasn’t going to have his half brother’s Muhammad Ali physique. From then on Catfish spent a good part of every day bullying Bubba—chasing him up and down stairs, biting the back of his neck and pressing him to the floor, stealing his food. Finally, one day, Catfish and Bubba got into a serious fight and we had to separate them physically. Next day, another fight, even worse—they were drawing blood. We kept them apart, in separate rooms, to cool off, but every time they were released they were instantly back at it. In the end the only thing that worked was to send Bubba into exile at my wife’s office for several days, after which things were fairly peaceful, though the dominance-and-submission routine never really let up.

Nagelschneider has statistics to show how common the Catfish-Bubba situation is: “In single-cat homes, the chances of the cat being sent to a shelter for behavior problems are 28 percent. Add a second cat and it’s about 70 percent.”9

Kirsten Weir wrote a terrific piece for Salon.com¹⁰ that illustrated well what magic Nagelschneider can perform without ever even seeing your cat. Weir’s cat Thompson was very clingy and affectionate, but he also would bite the hell out of her—really really bite, to the point where she bought red sheets to hide the bloodstains. Nagelschneider’s intervention comprised one hour-long phone call and four weeks of email followup. That was it.

The first step in Thompson’s treatment consisted of Weir and her husband going cold turkey on all expressions of affection to the cat. No petting, no lap, nothing. Next came clicker training. Whenever Thompson did something good, Weir was supposed to click a little metal clicker instantaneously—so that Thompson couldn’t fail to make the association—and give Thompson a crunchy kitty treat. This kind of thing doesn’t work if there’s so much as a two-second delay. Such is the instantaneity, or distractibility, of the feline mind. That’s why the clicker instead of just the treat.

Then came a kill sequence with a toy, so that Thompson would learn where biting was appropriate. Weir used a bird toy—always a good choice—and whenever Thompson nailed it and “killed” it, she’d click him and treat him. There was to be no punishment for bad behavior, ever. The worst it could get would be Nagelschneider’s favorite “aversive technique” of rattling coins in a can—an excellent way to stop any cat from doing something you don’t want him to do.

Four weeks in, exactly as planned, Thompson was pretty much cured. Every so often, he’d get overexcited and Weir would recognize the predatory look in his eyes and the flattening of his ears, but a quick shake of the rattle would suffice to remind him that he was a good kitty now.

Nagelschneider makes her living with such individual cat-by-cat consultations, most of them conducted by phone and e-mail. It is impossible to determine what her success rate is, however. There’s no question that her book shows a thorough understanding of cats, but there is also no way to evaluate how often her remote-access methods really work. All she publishes are testimonials of admiration—no statistics. On her website and in every other communication she issues, she refers to herself as “Harvard-trained,” but she declines to specify when and in what fashion her Harvard training took place. (In fact, she declined to answer any questions for this book at all.)

Jackson Galaxy makes house calls, and in his book Cat Daddy he makes no attempt to conceal his history of failures and self-doubt. Nor is he shy about the price of his success. His television show, My Cat from Hell, almost always features totally out-of-control cats and Jackson on call to their troubled households, often getting bitten or slashed as he tries to approach the guilty party with soothing words and manner. Having introduced himself on every program as “a musician by night and a cat behaviorist by day,” he arrives in a pink convertible to a heavy-metal soundtrack and always brings his guitar case, but he rarely opens it. If you Google “My Cat from Hell guitar case,” one of the first things that come up is “Why does the ‘My Cat from Hell’ guy bring a guitar to the homes?” In fact, it carries toys, catnip, stain remover, and various other tools of the trade.

The camera usually finds the people looking dazed and confused. They’re sometimes physically scarred, too. The cats can be shockingly vicious—Galaxy gets scratched or bitten a lot, sometimes rather badly—but despite the convertible and the tatts and the piercings and the almost overwhelming impression of total bullshit, he works real, true magic on these profoundly screwed-up creatures, with solutions derived from a deep understanding of cat nature. Sometimes the answers can be as simple as relocating litter boxes, providing an elevated platform where a cat can perch above people level, or giving space to a cat who feels crowded. Teaching people to use a toy that lets the cat go through an uninterrupted hunt-catch-kill sequence often works wonders for a cat whose hunting instinct has been bottled up for years. It can be glorious to see some poor cat’s human companions absolutely light up when the cat stalks a silly little bunch of feathers on a string, pounces on it, bites it, “disembowels” it with raking back feet, and finally retires to a safe and comfortable place to groom, with eyes half-closed in calm contentment. They just never knew.

The troubles nearly always have their source in people’s ignorance. Galaxy patiently shows them that when you pet a cat repetitively from head to tail while watching TV while paying no attention whatever to the cat’s rapidly mounting overstimulation, and the cat’s tail begins to twitch and then to lash and you still don’t notice, well, if the cat jumps down and runs away you can count yourself lucky. More often, the poor little guy has been trapped in a life universally characterized by your inattention to his attempts to tell you something, and his tension level has been building and building to the point where he’s wound up so tight that all he feels he can do is hide—and then when you reach under the bed to haul him out and ask him what, please, is the matter with him, guess what? He scratches you with claws fully out and a terrifying, terrified screech. And you say this has been going on for the last three years?

Galaxy will lie on the floor next to the bed and offer a tiny dish of food. Then he gives the long, slow blink. Then he gives it again. The cat has never seen a human speaking his language, especially saying this. Galaxy just stays there on the floor, quiet and still. Another blink. Finally the cat blinks back. They exchange slow blinks. Tick by tick, the cat’s tight-wired muscles begin to unwind, and, finally he creeps to the bowl. Huge Jackson Galaxy still lies there, talking softly, cheek on the rug. The cat can’t believe it. Galaxy brings in one of the owners and demonstrates the slow blink. The cat blinks back, and stays calm. Magic.

Galaxy shows you that instead of petting the cat the way you think the cat ought to be petted, you might try just offering a finger, not touching at all. Tentatively, the cat comes, and rubs his jawline along your finger. Over the next couple of weeks, the cat shows you the places under and behind his ears, the tip of his chin, the top of his head—you can scratch there, it’s okay—his flank back to here but no farther, nope! You learn.

You learn to pay attention. This cat is far more responsive than you had ever imagined, to your gestures, to the tone of your voice, to your mood. Sometimes it seems he’s reading your mind, which he’s not, but still, when you see how he watches you, and all he seems to see, it’s remarkable. You’ve begun to feel better yourself, even when you’re not at home. The cat is teaching you—he’s so relieved! He thought for so long you were completely stupid. Mean, too. By the time of Galaxy’s third visit, the cat is sitting in your lap, purring.

Besides the TV show, Jackson Galaxy maintains a vast web presence. Part of jacksongalaxy.com is devoted to the Jackson Galaxy Foundation, which focuses on shelters—attracting volunteers, promoting better design, helping individual shelters raise money, training shelter staff in rehabilitation of injured and otherwise damaged animals. The site also offers links to Galaxy’s Public Figure Facebook page, the Instagram site thecatdaddy, Jackson Galaxy Cat Mojo on Google Plus, and Jackson Galaxy YouTube videos. There’s an endlessly rolling Jackson Galaxy Twitter feed. There are click-throughs to Galaxy’s bio, press clippings, and book reviews, signups for the Jackson Galaxy email newsletter, past personal appearances, upcoming public appearances, and even a “Where Should Jackson Go Next?” section. There’s a very good Q&A series on cat problems, some drawn from the TV show, some just funky little selfie home videos of Galaxy talking to you—e.g., “How to Keep Cats Off Counter Tops,” “How to Make Cats Let You Sleep,” “Does My Cat Have Separation Anxiety?”

And far from least, there is the Jackson Galaxy retail empire: Purple Paw t-shirts, TeamCatMojo bracelets, Jackson Galaxy Natural Bobbler, Tipsy Nip, Tickle Pickle, Jackson Galaxy hooded zip sweatshirt, Crazy Cat Lady travel mug, Rainbow of Paws flip-flops, Autism Awareness puzzle piece shoelaces… hundreds of these things. From the beauty of his work down to… flip-flops? It does seem a bit much.

Finally jacksongalaxy.com takes you to the outer edge, a place where the animal behaviorist’s sincerity and confidence begin to mingle with New Age capitalism, and the oxygen grows thin.

Galaxy’s sincerity is persuasive: “I’m not religious,” he once told an interviewer, “but I firmly have roots in the spirit world, and I’m consistently learning from cats what lies beyond the tangible.… You’ve probably seen your cat stare at a spot on the wall, just stare at it. If you’re totally, overly human about it, you’re going to be like: Dumb cat. Right? What I think is that they are locked into an energy pattern in that corner of your room. And they are observing and taking it in. If you allow yourself to see that, it makes perfect sense.”

Then comes the capitalism, in the form of Jackson Galaxy’s Spirit Essences, $23.95 per bottle, two fluid ounces each. You can put them in your cat’s food, rub them on her fur, or—“Misting the house or apartment is a great way to treat the whole household.”

To pick just one Spirit Essence: The BULLY REMEDY “reminds the ‘big cheese’ that things are fine without needing to patrol everyone else, and that it is not necessary to dominate in order to live harmoniously.” Also for sale are FERAL FLOWER FORMULA, GROUCH REMEDY, HAPPY TUMMY, OBSESSION REMEDY, SELF-ESTEEM REMEDY, SEPARATION ANXIETY REMEDY, and many, many more. And oy, the ingredients! Among the dozens: poison oak, mule deer, swallow-wort, campfire, mosquito, and, I kid you not, wind.

Yet—try to follow this—“ Please note: No actual plant, animal, or gem matter is used in our formulas, only the energetic blueprint.”

The which? Oh, never mind. The complete pharmacopoeia can be found at www.spiritessences.com/category-s/1876.htm.

And yet, and yet: Jackson Galaxy knows cats in ways and with an accuracy beyond what I’ve found anybody else to possess. He has recognized—this seems so simple, but it’s deep—that the source of a great deal of “crazy” behavior—the sudden outbursts of scratching or biting or panic that seem to come out of nowhere—is often nothing more than overstimulation, which, past a certain threshold, induces panic. It could begin with what is actually a good experience—slow, gentle petting, say—but if it’s too monotonous, or it starts as tolerable in a sensitive place but it goes on too long, then, in an instant, yeaow! comes the explosion. It can happen when you’re just playing with a toy. Too many episodes of chase, pounce, and kill may amp up a cat’s energy to the point where more than the toy starts to look like prey—your hand may all at once have turned magically into a bird. It’s not necessarily easy to learn to recognize overstimulation before it crosses the red line, but if you have a dangerously “unpredictable” cat, it can be worth the effort to keep a careful watch. Like: While you’re doing something with the cat that really needs your attention, don’t also have the TV on, or be texting your friends.

Galaxy is able to recognize in each individual cat its particular tolerance for particular stresses in part because he knows the whole repertoire of usual stresses. The principal ones are actually few. Both Jackson Galaxy and Mieshelle Nagelschneider know that you can hardly overemphasize territoriality as a determinant of cats’ behavior. And since we can’t smell the scent markers of their territorial boundaries, and we don’t have anything like the same instincts in the first place, it’s all but impossible for us to read the tension that begins to build in a cat whose territory is being invaded, distorted, or threatened. But careful observation over time, especially when you have more than one cat, can give you a sense of where—geographically, even pheromonally—each cat feels comfortable and where the zones begin to blur toward discomfort. Sometimes you can’t just draw this on a diagram. Territory can be three-dimensional. Galaxy recognizes some cats as “tree dwellers” and others as “bush dwellers”—ones that like to be up on a shelf or the fridge, others that find refuge in a blanketed cubby. Providing appropriate habitat for both can make conflict vanish.

Sometimes what Jackson Galaxy accomplishes borders on the mystical. When he was younger, working in a shelter in Boulder, Colorado, and just learning the slow-blink greeting that works so beautifully to express calm and peace to a cat, he found himself in a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot room containing forty-five cats in stainless steel cages, all screaming. It was two in the morning, the cats had just been transferred to an entirely new and strange place, and a Rocky Mountain thunderstorm was under way. He set himself the challenge of calming them one at a time with what he had begun to call “The Cat I Love You… Eyes, opened but lazy: ‘I’—slowly closed, ‘Love’—and open again, ‘You.’” The first cat wouldn’t buy it. He kept trying. At last the cat replied with the slow blink, and Galaxy moved on to the next cat. And so it went, all night, from one to the next, until the sun was coming up and the room was silent. Forty-five cats calm.11

The question naturally arises, Could you or I do this? The extent to which mysterious communication with animals has been most vividly on display in my experience is in the horsemanship “clinics” conducted by Buck Brannaman, the aforementioned original Horse Whisperer. (The term “horse whisperer” seems to have been in occasional use in equine circles for some time—some say it first denoted a sort of Roma magician with sorcerous powers over horses,¹² some say the original was a nineteenth-century Irish trainer named Daniel Sullivan¹³—but the locution was made famous as the title of a novel by Nicholas Evans published in 1995. Evans himself has written, “Others have falsely claimed to be the inspiration for Tom Booker in The Horse Whisperer. The one who truly inspired me was Buck Brannaman.”¹⁴)

I have seen Buck Brannaman at the center of a tight, small round pen whipping a handkerchief behind a terrified, out-of-control horse—never touching the horse, but psychologically pushing him up to and past his limit of panic—the horse racing blindly around and around, faster and faster, frantic, sweating and foaming, slamming against the sides as though to break his neck, until at last he softens, slows, stops, and turns toward Buck, head hung, quiet. Buck lowers the cloth, ever so subtly softens his posture, looks down at the ground, and the horse comes walking forward to have his muzzle softly stroked. By the middle of the day, the horse, who has never had a human being on his back, has blankets swung over his head, has been saddled and mounted from both sides, and is trotting, loping, walking, backing, backing in a circle with Buck aboard, all without the slightest tremor of anxiety.

Horses like this, with a colthood and youth of unfathomable fears and phobias—and probably cruelty—even once well broke, tend to be forever afraid to enter a dark horse trailer. Yet I saw this happen: At the end of the long afternoon, Buck sat in the driver’s seat of his pickup and with hand gestures alone directed that horse to walk calmly up the ramp and into the trailer, and then just stand there waiting for someone to come and close the chain behind him. I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen him do it—and the same thing again, and yet again. You can see the Horse Whisperer in action in the acclaimed documentary film Buck.

Buck Brannaman is a patient and generous teacher, willing to go over and over the often imperceptibly fleeting, almost ephemeral, gestures and responses that go into his miracles. My sense, however—and that, I think, of everybody else who participated in his clinics at our ranch in Montana—is that you can learn a hell of a lot from him, but in fifty years of study under him you can never quite do what he does. And how many of us could quiet a roomful of forty-five screaming cats?

Okay, we’ll never be able to do forty-five. But from Jackson Galaxy we can learn to calm one scared cat. From Mieshelle Nagelschneider we can learn possible ways of reconciling two cats who have decided to hate each other. The core of these behaviorists’ expertise is their understanding of the species’ wild nature—where lies its relative inflexibility, and where its relative flexibility. Varying from cat to cat. Which is why we find both Nagelschneider and Galaxy over and over, and at length, coming back to issues of… the litter box. Every cat person has to get over the ewww factor and realize that to every cat, without exception, the litter box is a very big deal. It’s at the heart of the species’ fiercely surviving, indomitable devotion to territoriality; and we must never forget that much of their experience of it has to do not only with how it smells—to them, not to you—but also with the finest points of its placement within a cat’s territory.

Galaxy tells the story of an especially eccentric and intractable cat named Benny, who hated all change. That’s a very catlike characteristic; it was just extreme in Benny. When Galaxy moved his household and cats to a much bigger apartment, Benny took one look around and started peeing in three specific places—none of them being his litter box. Jackson went out and got three new litter boxes and put them precisely in the new places where Benny had been peeing. Bingo, that worked. But Galaxy wanted an apartment that was more than just a cat latrine, so he set out to move the boxes gradually closer together until they merged into one. He moved two of them a couple of feet toward the third, and suddenly Benny was peeing all over the place again. “The trick,” he writes, “became finding his ‘challenge line’… something that became part of my toolbox from that time on—finding the place where comfort changes to challenge. Think of a child dipping his toes in the pool versus jumping into the water.” He found that he could move Benny’s litter box half a foot a day, while the crazy cat slept. “Six inches was comfort; a foot, unacceptable challenge.”15

If someone or something scares your cat while she’s using her box, she may never use it in that place again. If you change the litter—please, none of the perfumed stuff!—that may be the end of that. If you don’t keep it clean, you’re asking for trouble (though Galaxy says cleaning it too often can also be interpreted as an unfriendly act). Put a hood on it, and you’re probably going to scare the kitty. No liners, please, they hate ’em. There should always be a quick and easy avenue of escape, preferably more than one. In a multi-cat household, the rule is one litter box per cat, plus one more. And if you are even thinking about one of those auto-clean things, please stop thinking about it.

Beds, they can figure out, and as you surely know, they’ll often have more than one, and find new ones. Perches likewise. All sorts of places in their territory will have a certain mutability, according to… who knows what?—often, probably, some olfactory business that you’ll never understand. But the litter box is pretty much non-negotiable. It’s up to you to get it right—depth, type of litter, placement, everything—or, well, pay the price.

But this does not presume to be a cat-care book. The Original Cat Fancy Cat Bible is probably as good as it gets. If you really want to get serious about arranging your cat’s—or, in this case, more importantly, plural cats’—habitat, nothing can beat Galaxy’s Catification. If you’ve got real cat problems, then Nagelschneider’s The Cat Whisperer is the goods.

Unfortunately there are a lot of mediocre cat books out there. The best way to know a good one is to see how well it recognizes the essentially wild nature of the beast—how thoroughly its assertions are grounded in understanding of cats’ territoriality, their predatory instincts, the importance of scent in their perception of their world, their rich vocabulary of vocalizations and body language, the complexity of their social and antisocial qualities, their sensitivity to overstimulation, the deep sources of their fears and avoidances. There have been, recently, some books that purport to be grounded in science but make no attempt to understand the subjective experience of cats. Without that, you will never have the slightest sense of who your cat really is.

Cat whisperers seem to be everywhere, and there’s no governing authority, no medical board, no university degree, to tell you which ones are genuinely qualified and which are totally bogus. Even the good ones, like Mieshelle Nagelschneider, don’t have any sort of diploma or other certification—except for the kind you buy (see “tricks of the trade,” below)—and even she won’t tell you her success-to-failure ratio. You have to go on faith, or at least recommendations. The field is chaos.

For example, at www.thepennyhoarder.com/cat-behaviorist you can learn this: “If you like cats and are willing to learn the tricks of the trade, you can make up to $100 per hour or more as a cat behaviorist.” Why, my goodness, “This job could be a satisfying career or side hustle. You don’t need a college degree or a license,” and, the website goes on, “there don’t appear to be any laws regulating the cat therapy industry. But to boost your professional image, you can get certified by one of several organizations.

“For example, the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC) will certify you as an animal behavior consultant if you can submit evidence of sufficient experience and meet a few other basic criteria, including scoring 80 percent or higher on an application test. You’ll pay a nonrefundable application fee of $125 and annual dues of $110.

“If you lack experience to get certified, you can at least join an appropriate organization for credibility. IAABC charges just a $50 application fee to join, and then $65 for annual dues. For this you are allowed to use the IAABC logo on your marketing materials, as long as you only present yourself as a ‘member,’ and not as a certified consultant.

“Study on your own, invest a little to be a member of an animal behaviorist organization, buy a few business cards, and you’re ready to go.”

Heed the language. “Tricks.” “Hustle.” “You don’t need a college degree or a license.” “Boost your professional image.” Augh!

Yet a lot of cat owners can really use some help. Especially for households with multiple cats acquired at different times, especially when the house may not have adequate space for territorial comfort—or when the people just don’t how to arrange what territorial space they might have—advice from a professional expert can be worth real money. If you’ve experienced any of the nightmare scenarios I’ve described (and there are others), you know how bad it can get. These unmanageable cat situations can destroy a whole family’s peace of mind. The cats themselves, it hardly needs saying, are wretched as well. Fortunately, more and more often, a good veterinarian or your local SPCA can refer you to a legitimate professional. And even without books of their own or Spirit Essences, they can be remarkably successful.

Achieving real harmony with our semi-domesticated feline companions—something resembling actual domesticity—can be difficult, obviously. In the case of Augusta, we did not realize how difficult domesticity was for her (or, shall I say, how poorly we had reconciled her to it) until we recognized how happy she was in the woods and deep grass of Montana, where she could occupy her natural selfhood fully. In the gloss of her coat, in the arc of her bounds, in the brightness of her yellow-green eyes, in the fluid grace of her body in entire integration, you could not but see her delight. Certainly she could not have been here had she not been rescued from the nether side of the summer she was now taking such pleasure in, had she not been fed and loved, stroked, brushed, sung to, driven here in an automobile. With time, and care, and closer attention, she became a happy kitty in the city, too, racing upstairs, chasing a ball, attacking her rattly Anchovy Mouse, batting down the Furry Spider on its elastic string, squeezing through the door and grabbing ribbons through the windows of the Hotel Augusta that I built for her from a big cardboard box. Bathing, with the tiny white star on her belly showing. Snoozing on the loveseat while we watched a video, one ear flickering now and then, assuring herself that we were there—her family.

Imperfect, as families must be. But she was teaching us, showing us her nature. She taught me that if you want to have a wild animal in your house, you can have… a cat.

There is a crazy strain in American life, however, another of our inexplicable subcultures, that thinks you can bring the true, pure, undomesticated wild into your house and tame it. They think it’s okay to keep wild animals as pets. There are thousands of these people. I used to go to a copy shop in Livingston, Montana, where from behind the counter an enormous gray wolf would rise, with a cocked head and a friendly look. He was the real thing, Canis lupus, not a hybrid. The owner had to tell her customers over and over not to try to pet him. He probably wouldn’t have bitten anybody, really, but if he ever did, it wouldn’t have been pretty. Families will raise a wolf pup with their little kids and will tell you, truthfully, that he has never harmed a hair of their heads, nor anybody else’s. But then one day a visiting kid will smack one of the family’s kids, hard, and the wolf will kill his packmate’s assailant. Just defending the pack, y’know, doing his family duty.

It’s understandable that people seek a certain uniqueness in a pet. In the last two centuries there has been a lot of breeding for certain appearances in domestic cats, and some of that breeding has included the introduction of wild genes, most notably for a breed known as the Bengal, which was accepted as a pure breed by the guardians of American cat purity, the Cat Fancy Association, only in 2016. Elizabeth’s and my cat Isabel is a rescue mutt, but she alone in her highly various litter showed many characteristics of the Bengal, a breed descended from a cross of the Asian leopard cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, with the domestic cat, and bred through five or six successive generations toward ever greater domestic characteristics. (The original purpose was research into feline leukemia, to which the Asian leopard cat was immune. Though the hybrids didn’t inherit the immunity, they turned out, almost miraculously, to be pliable, friendly, and tame.) Mongrel Isabel may be, but she’s taller in back as Bengals are. Her voice is more often the Bengal ack-ack than the pussycat meow. She’s spotted rather than striped, and her silky, flattish pelt shimmers in sunlight as though she has been sprinkled with gold dust—a very Bengal look. She also, however, has the white feet and white belly of an old-fashioned brown tabby. Oddly, she has tufted ears (a mystery—Asian leopard cats don’t have them), which among high-class Bengal breeders are considered officially Undesirable.16 The quest for uniqueness, in strange ways, becomes a quest for conformity.

The forty-one pedigreed breeds “recognized” by the Cat Fancy Association, some much more exotic-looking than Isabel, have resulted from intense selection strictly within the domestic cat species, Felis silvestris catus. Of those forty-one, sixteen are recognized as “natural” or “foundational,” and they tend to have fairly strong genetic diversity—because they are derived from random-bred forebears¹⁷—which gives them resistance to disease and makes their offspring unlikely to be deformed or otherwise unfit. Just as in the sad case of so many drastically overbred and inbred dogs, however, recently developed breed standards for some purebred cats allow what is known as line breeding, in which direct relatives, such as father and daughter or mother and son, are mated—with the result that any genetic defects spread rapidly throughout the breed.¹⁸ “In any endeavor involving genetics,” say the C.F.A. guidelines primly, “it is advisable to be very careful.”¹⁹

In fact, breeding for uniqueness of the kind that’s rewarded in cat shows—and implicitly encouraged by the Cat Fancy Association—has produced a host of genetic nightmares. Cats bred to be blue-eyed and pure white are likely also to be stone deaf. The genetic modification that creates the floppy ears of the Scottish Fold “also causes severe abnormalities of the cartilage of bones—there will be defective bone development and severe bone and cartilage abnormalities in all cats with folded ears. These bone abnormalities lead to severe and painful arthritis.”²⁰ Maine Coons and Ragdolls are exceptionally vulnerable to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an ultimately fatal thickening of one of the two chambers of the heart.21 Abyssinians and Somalis can inherit disorders that cause them to go blind between the ages of twelve and sixteen months.²² Siamese can inherit a host of problems: crossed eyes, asthma, lymphoma, intestinal adenocarcinoma, chronic projectile vomiting, obsessive-compulsive disorder.²³, ²⁴ Good old non-fancy mutt cats, the kind that shelters overflow with, are likely to be a whole lot healthier.

The quest for uniqueness gets worse. There are not a few breeders in search of the outlandish and the downright weird. One Judy Sugden, of Covina, California, has for thirty years “spent most of her time trying to concoct a cat with the temperament of a lapdog and the appearance of a tiger.”²⁵ This kind of freelance what-the-hell experimentation has engendered God only knows how many monstrosities, moribund, crippled, racked with pain, infertile, deformed—“twisty cats,”²⁶ “munchkins,” “squittens” and “kangaroo cats” (the last two being bred to have useless front legs so that they must hop like squirrels or kangaroos²⁷). Many experimental kittens are simply born dead—to their Doctors Frankenstein a disappointment, to the decent world a mercy.

Then there are the people who think it’s a fine idea to breed F. s. catus with this or that great-looking wild species and just see what happens. The Chausie, a cross between the jungle cat of southern Asia, Felis chaus, and the domestic Abyssinian, can weigh in at thirty-five pounds. Some of them, after generations of breeding with domestic cats, will be reasonably tame, but having stubbornly maintained the short intestinal tract of their wild ancestors, they’re also, when fed cat food instead of wild prey, prone to food allergies and inflammatory bowel disease.²⁸ The Savannah is a hybrid of the African serval and a house cat, and like the Chausie is big, up to thirty pounds. The breed is illegal in a number of states, as well as New York City, and has been banned altogether in Australia, as “an extreme risk to native animals and the environment.”²⁹ Jag cats are a stew of three wild species: bobcat, jungle cat, and Asian leopard cat. “Although all Jag cats are considered large,” says the breeder Mokave, “some become gigantic! However, it is impossible to determine which kittens will become the biggest because full maturity takes four years and even tiny kittens have grown up to be giants!”30 One infers that this breed has not been around very long, and wonders what, healthwise, say, the harvest will be.

Perhaps even crazier are the people who keep pure wild cats as pets. One of the species thus honored is the caracal, which in olden days was, in fact, “kept” in India and Persia, and trained to hunt hares and birds,³¹ but in modern life is a thirty-to fifty-pound keg of feline dynamite. “They are not a pet of which a human can initiate affection at any moment,” warns a guide to their care. “When caracals do play, they are rambunctious and destructive with average household objects and furniture.”³² Ocelots, being extraordinarily beautiful, are tempting—Salvador Dalí had one, named Babou—but they also “will not pay attention to disciplinary commands and have a pungent odor.”³³ Bobcats, which look so cute in the wild, are all but impossible to tame.³⁴ The fishing cat of Southeast Asia is another that comes up in discussions of possible wild pets. Should it matter that it’s an endangered species?

An organization called Big Cat Rescue cares for abandoned and abused big cats—lions, tigers, mountain lions, and such, often veterans of circuses and ghastly roadside attractions. Recently, Big Cat Rescue has been “seeing an alarming escalation in the number of hybrid cats being abandoned by their owners,” but they have been able to take in only a fraction “because the problem is too vast.” Why are so many being abandoned? “Genetic defects… cannot properly digest their food… projectile diarrhea… they bite… spray… loud howling throughout the night.”

And what happens when they’re on the loose? Big Cat Rescue explains: “Hybrid cats are much better hunters, due to their recently wild genes, and thus can do much more damage to the ecosystem than feral cats alone. Add to that the likelihood of breeding with the feral cat population and you end up with much larger cats, capable of killing bigger and a wider array of native wildlife—including amphibious species because wild cats will readily go in the water after prey. Introducing wild cat traits into the feral cat population also imbues them with the wild cats’ enhanced ability to evade humans, avoid traps, cross rivers, and travel much farther distances, which can spread the devastation into pristine areas that do not currently have feral cat populations.”35 Yet another horror: uncontrolled hybridization of feral domestic cats and escaped wild cats.

The great wild-pet-cat disaster of all time came to pass on October 18, 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, when a man named Terry Thompson, newly released from the penitentiary and newly informed of his wife’s adultery, opened all the gates of his pets’ cages and then shot himself in the mouth with a Ruger .357 Magnum pistol. By the time the police and their helpers from the Columbus Zoo had completed the only possible solution to the problem that Thompson had unleashed, eighteen tigers, seventeen lions, eight bears, three mountain lions, two wolves, one baboon, and one macaque lay dead.³⁶

How could it have been possible for one household to have amassed such a menagerie? Wasn’t it illegal to own a lion, a tiger, a grizzly bear? In fact, no, at least not in Ohio. They weren’t even very expensive. You can buy a young lion for three hundred dollars. Adult lions and tigers “are effectively worthless,” wrote Chris Heath in an article about this catastrophe in GQ magazine, “because there are usually more people trying to unload them than wanting to purchase them.”³⁷

Among the professional volunteers helping track down the animals was the Columbus Zoo’s director emeritus John Bushnell “Jungle Jack” Hanna, who is well known as an animal expert, having appeared on a number of national television shows in his safari outfit, always accompanied by animals from the zoo. He had once maintained his own private collection of wild pets, until one of his lions tore off a three-year-old boy’s arm.

Besides the danger, consider the cruelty. It’s bad enough seeing lions and tigers in zoos. In the worst of them the poor cats pace up and down and up and down all day in a concrete box, long since out of their minds, and even in the better ones, where they live in artificial “habitats” meant to emulate their native homes, they’re not fooled. When you make a pet of a caracal or a jungle cat—or a leopard! some people own leopards!—you extinguish the light of a soul. Go online and you can find pictures of these mighty cats purring on the chests of their masters, or curled up asleep baby-peaceful on a blankie, but you won’t see pictures of their reeking wire cages or the curtains and upholstery they’ve ripped to ribbons or the twenty-two stitches up the proud owner’s arm. A horse’s or a dog’s it might, but a camera cannot photograph the broken spirit of a cat.

The noted wildlife biologist John L. Weaver had an idea for how to observe an animal in the wild with greater precision and intimacy than had ever been done before. After considering a number of species, in June 1992 he purchased from a fur farm near Flathead Lake in Montana a nineteen-day-old Canada lynx kitten. His timing was carefully chosen: She opened her eyes for the first time the next day. “I wanted her to imprint on us (Weaver, his wife Terry, and their daughter Anna), to see us immediately as her family.” At home on the outskirts of Missoula, on a suburban lane that backed up to the Rattlesnake Wilderness, they bottle-fed the kitten every two to three hours around the clock. She was almost never out of their hands, and she slept in their beds, but Chirp—so named for her friendly greeting vocalization—though gentle and never aggressive, was emphatically not becoming a house pet. By the time she was ten weeks old she was spraying every corner in sight and tearing the furniture to shreds.

Weaver built a kennel of chain-link fence panels in the back yard, thirty-two by sixteen feet horizontally and eight feet high. “I wanted to test how quickly she was developing her prey-catching ability,” he remembers, “and so one day when she was still just ten weeks, I put a live-caught snowshoe hare in the kennel. Three times her size. She caught and killed it exactly the way you expect a lynx to do—a quick bite to the back of the neck.”

A measure of the biologist’s success in raising the lynx to accept his companionship was that he could open the kennel door and stride straight in without a by-your-leave, and—adolescent now—twenty-eight-pound Chirp would fly through the air and wrap herself around his shoulders like a limp lynx-fur stole, purring loudly. He would give her full-body massages that lasted fifteen to twenty minutes (and she would reciprocate by methodically licking his face and head all over). His objective was by no means to make a pet of her but rather to habituate her to his physical proximity to a sufficient extent that when she came to adulthood he could mount a radio collar around her neck and follow her in the wild as she hunted. It would, he knew, be a punishing thrash through dense spruce-fir forest, with low needled limbs and brush raking his face as he plunged forward through the snow to keep up with her—holding a three-foot antenna aloft at the same time—but in keeping her under such close observation, he would have by far the most detailed data ever collected on this rare and notoriously elusive species.

In her second winter, he took Chirp to the mountains, and she was everything he had hoped for, tolerating his following but paying no attention to him, utterly focused on her hunt. “I had always wondered about those long tufts that lynxes have on their ears,” says Weaver. “Various people had had various theories, but none of them sounded right to me. Then one day Chirp dug out a crater in the snow and snuggled down into it so that all you could see of her were the top of her head and those two long ears. To a hare moving fast nearby they might well have looked like just another hare.” He measured her ears and a quantity of snowshoe hare ears and still more lynx ears at a fur farm, and they matched up perfectly. “She was camouflaged, lying in wait!”

Weaver and some of his colleagues were developing noninvasive genotyping techniques, using hair to identify the species, sex, age, and various other characteristics of animals drawn to scent stations. Working with Chirp, he formulated a sticky, stinky goop—“Still secret!” he insists—that could be smeared on patches of carpet and nailed to trees and would last for months without losing its potency. “When I finally hit the right mixture, Chirp just went crazy over it—rubbing and rubbing and rubbing that gland, you know, that they have along their mandibles”—hence leaving a nice DNA sample of hair to be sent in for analysis. When they were finished with their tracking or scent experiments for the day, generally Chirp would just lie down and wait for Weaver to sling her over his shoulder and carry her down the mountain to his pickup.

Chirp became so gentle that Weaver began to take her to community group meetings and schoolrooms. “I’d make sure the teacher had these first-graders all quiet and sitting on the floor at one end of the room, and then I’d let Chirp come in. She would walk right among the kids, checking them out, sniffing and looking, not making a sound. The kids were frozen. They had been told—in no uncertain terms—not to touch her. I don’t think anything would have happened, but I played it safe. Sometimes I’d hold her in my lap in such a way that I knew I could control her, and then I’d let the kids pet her a little.”

One night of Chirp’s fifth year, someone slipped into the Weavers’ back yard and, for reasons unknown, opened Chirp’s kennel. She was never seen again.

What would John Weaver say to a person thinking of raising a Canada lynx as a pet?

“Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Chirp nearly destroyed our house. All in the name of science, you know, but—well, no, a lynx? A lynx cannot be a pet.”

Just thirty-odd miles south of Chirp’s former home, a woman named Barbara Roe sells lynx kittens for $1,750 each. She advises her customers that “after nine weeks we recommend declawing all four paws.”38 This is beyond cruel, even to a house cat. The American Humane Society declares, “Declawing traditionally involves the amputation of the last bone of each toe. If performed on a human being, it would be like cutting off each finger at the last knuckle.”³⁹ In many cases the pain continues long after surgery. The cats usually lose their sense of balance and must re-learn to walk on their semi-amputated feet. Robbed of their best natural weapon, they often become much more aggressive. Claws are for defense; teeth are for killing.

Keeping—imprisoning—a wild cat for a pet is an act, actually, of alienation from the wild. Seeking that extra touch of the wild in a hybrid is the same kind of self-defeating dream. Having robbed your captive of the fundamental qualities of its wildness—its freedom to be a predator, to make its own way in the world it evolved for—you will never in fact see the wildness for which you took on the whole futile enterprise in the first place.

But when you have a domestic cat, that only half-domesticated beast, you have the opportunity to witness the wild close up, because it’s mediated, with such civil accommodation, by the pact that forms between the two of you. So it was for Augusta and me. As she grew into full adulthood, we were together almost all the time, and where some writers look out the window or pace up and down to wonder what comes next, I would contemplate Augusta. It came to feel less like mere observation than communion. I believe that in some way she was letting me in. That could never have been possible with a wild animal, in the house or in the wild.

Inside that witty furball purring on your lap is a wild beast anyway, constrained only by her advantages and the affection between you. In the next chapter we will see how very wild, once estranged from human love and care, kitty cat can be.