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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Will she be the next TV star animal trainer? She certainly had the right diagnosis for my cat Thompson, a biter.
By Kirsten Weir
Read more: Psychology, Science, Animals, cats, Life
Mignon Khargie / Salon
March 19, 2008 | Once when my cat Thompson was a kitten, I called my sister. I was near tears. "I think I understand how shaken-baby syndrome happens," I said, my voice cracking. Luckily she talked me down from my agitated state before things got ugly.
Thompson has always been challenging. He spent his kittenhood with me in a tiny Greenwich Village studio. During that first year, he spent most nights sprinting laps around the apartment, punctuating each loop by pouncing on my face. After a few hours, usually right around the time I was easing into REM sleep, he'd jump to the top of the microwave and press the quick-start button with his little gray-and-white paw. I'd awaken to the soft whirring hum and glowing light emanating from the kitchenette; in my haze of sleep, I thought aliens had come.
Thompson grew into a wildly affectionate, completely lovable, moderately rotund adult cat. He outgrew most of his extreme behaviors, but one trait persisted. Thompson is a biter. He bites frequently and hard. As I climb into bed at night, he'll dart from a dark corner and lock his jaws around my ankle, ears back and eyes wide, like a lion taking down a wounded gazelle. But five minutes later, all is forgotten. He pads clumsily back to bed, tucks his head under my chin and stares up at me with an expression of pure, unwavering love. He purrs, so happy he drools, until we both fall asleep.
Thompson's nearly 7 now, and we've moved on from that speck-size studio to a large Maine loft that we share with my husband and our dog. Much in our lives has changed, but the biting has remained a constant -- one for which I've become adept at making excuses. Yes, Thompson has the jaw force of a puma, but he never uses his claws. So I simply stocked up on Band-Aids, bought red bedsheets that would mask the bloodstains, and resolved to suck it up and take the bad with the good.
And then I discovered the Cat Whisperer.
OK, so that's not really her title. Mieshelle Nagelschneider is a cat behaviorist who is in no way affiliated with Cesar Millan, the trainer-star of the television phenomenon "The Dog Whisperer." Nagelschneider is, however, working with a major television network to develop an upcoming cat behavior show of her own. She can't reveal too much about it yet, since the network people are still hashing out the details. Alas, it probably won't be called "The Cat Whisperer." But given that there are 13 million more pet cats than pet dogs in this country, she may very well be poised for Cesar Millan-style fame and glory.
Assuming, of course, that cats can be trained. And plenty of people, including me, were skeptical. Dogs wag and slobber and will do just about anything to please us, whether it's chasing down a tennis ball 27 times in a row, or dragging an unconscious master from the crackling flames of a burning bedroom. Cats, if you're lucky, might sit on your lap and purr. Our feline companions don't exactly have a reputation for malleability.
Think again, Nagelschneider said. "You don't use the same techniques on a cat as you do on a dog, but they're definitely trainable," she assured me the first time we spoke. "Cats are motivated by what's in it for them."
Nagelschneider, now 37, studied psychology in college but never finished her degree. She worked as a veterinary technician and cat sitter and, over time, developed a protocol for modifying cat behavior. In 1999 she officially opened her Cat Behavior Clinic, in Portland, Ore. Nagelschneider has six cats of her own, not to mention three dogs and what must be one very anxious cockatiel.
Nagelschneider has boned up on behavior theory, flying across the country to take animal behavior classes at Harvard. She estimates that over the years, she's consulted with tens of thousands of clients, mostly by phone. Nagelschneider is no pet psychic, and she doesn't necessarily need to meet a cat in person to diagnose its problem. Her goal isn't to train cats, per se, but to teach their owners to get inside the minds of their feline friends.
I started my consultation by filling out a questionnaire about Thompson's behavior and home environment. I described in detail his two main issues: the biting, of course, and also his need for attention. In the hour or so I spent filling out the form, Thompson jumped onto my desk and lap no fewer than five times. I finally shooed him away long enough to send off the questionnaire, and scheduled an hour-long phone call with Nagelschneider for later in the week.
In the meantime, I wanted to find out what scientists might say about the behavioral experiment I was about to embark upon. Could a middle-aged cat really change his stripes? I called up Stephen O'Brien and Carlos Driscoll for some insight into the feline brain.
O'Brien and Driscoll research the cat genome at the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity. Last summer, they published a report on the origin of domestic cats in the journal Science. "Cats are actually fairly well trainable," Driscoll told me.
In their study, Driscoll and O'Brien concluded that domestic cats evolved from the wildcat Felis silvestris in the Near East, probably around 10,000 years ago. The way they see it, cats domesticated themselves. Wandering humans were settling down in the Fertile Crescent and establishing agriculture. Cats were drawn to the settlements to feed on mice that had shacked up in the grain stores. Natural selection favored the tamer cats, which could take better advantage of the spoils produced by our budding society. "They chose humans at the right time and the right place," O'Brien said.
Driscoll took the comparison a step further. We artificially selected dogs to be useful to us; they guarded our homes, hauled our sleds, retrieved our dead ducks, and, in the case of poodles, allowed themselves to be pruned like hedges for our amusement. But we didn't select cats to be useful to us. They were selected by nature to use us. "It's best to think of cats like mice or cockroaches or pigeons," Driscoll said, the weed species of the animal kingdom, thriving wherever humans traipse in and muck up the environment.
OK. Listen, Driscoll. Thompson may be a pest, but that's my pet you're comparing to a cockroach. Before I could defend my poor kitten, though, Driscoll distracted me with another important difference between Felis and Canis. "Cats are a strange domesticate. They're the only domestic animal that, in the wild, is solitary," he explained. "All other domestic animals live in groups in the wild, [and] people harnessed their natural proclivity toward following along."
So now I know what I'm up against: a solitary hunter who doesn't play nicely with others, and who, for thousands of years, has been evolving a skill set designed to take advantage of me. But at least my foe is predictable. According to Nagelschneider, most cat behavior problems fall into one of a handful of predictable categories. Not surprisingly, some of her most frequent complaints involve cats that take issue with the litter box. (When Nagelschneider mentioned the cat that urinated at night on his sleeping owner's face, Thompson's problems suddenly seemed very minor indeed.) In any event, aggression is also fairly common, and Nagelschneider has turned around her fair share of violent cats. She was optimistic that Thompson could be fixed.
Next page: And then came the diagnosis
What I wouldn't do for my cat
