For the Less Well-Adjusted Cats

I've helped quite a few consistently violent or anxious cats, and these two complaints are generally what non-cat-people, and frustrated cat people will cite as the reasons for their frustration.

Violent cats are on one hand easy to deal with because there is a single method that I've found works very well and doesn't need much adaptation.  Cats are violent for two reasons: first, because they feel they're playing.  Consider when a violent cat scratches, or grabs your arm to claw at it, what is your immediate reaction?  We're creatures of instinct, too, so naturally we pull away, try to get kitty off of us.  Think about the similarities between that action and the action of, say, a cat toy being tugged about in her claws.  To them, it's just another game, and being violent by nature with their non-lethal weapons, it's a fun one.  In order to curb this behaviour, you need to make it less fun.

The process is painful, but hear me out.  If kitty is clawing at you, regrab them — not hard, just essentially to fixate them on what they're doing, and also give them the very real sensation that you are definitely bigger than they are.  An interesting thing about the cat psyche is that they don't seem to register size when considering whom they can beat up.  That having been accomplished, you're going to let them continue clawing your arm.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't vocalize your discontent; enough "ow!" and "hey!", coupled with the grabbing, will have your cat stop.  She may look up to you, confused and embarrassed, or she may just get miffed that her tactics aren't working as they usually do, but at this point you'll be able to get her claws out of your skin and you'll keep her with you for a pet and cuddle, so long as she'll tolerate it.  This is simple operant conditioning, pairing the fun they usually have with something humiliating or uncomfortable, and then rewarding them for ceasing the humiliating and uncomfortable thing while simultaneously showing them another activity to enjoy with you.  The change will not happen overnight, and may take weeks, even months of this depending on the stubbornness of your cat, past trauma, intelligence, and your own skill, but I've seen it succeed many times.

The other reason cats are violent, though, is because they're afraid.  Generally, this takes a very different form, and rather than grabbing and clawing for long periods it's a quick grab and kick, usually with some angry vocalizations, or else just lashing out.  Acutely angry or afraid cats will often jump at faces.  While some cats that are playing may employ hit and run tactics, smacking or scratching you, and running away, only to come back and try the same thing again, angry or afraid cats will avoid you if they can.  If this is the reason for your cat's violence, you need to get them into a comfortable situation in which they won't have a choice but to be with you.

This is also the treatment for anxious cats that I've found works well: Live intensely with your cat for a period of time.  That is, keep her in your room with good food, water, litter pan, cushions, catnip, and anything else that might help them feel comfortable, except for hiding places.  The reasoning behind anxiety in both cats and humans is ultimately the same: we have a stimulus that gives us anxiety and our escape from that stimulus exacerbates it, because we are conditioning ourselves to fear it more.  Cats are very, very good at escape, so they are very good at being anxious.  In this treatment, you are preventing your cat from escaping you.  It may be extremely traumatic for them; depending on their level of anxiety, usually past abuse, she may hiss and spit every time you move, search desperately for an escape route, even urinate on the floor, but you need to be consistent and give your cat as much attention as you can while still attending your basic human needs likely for several days on end.  Over time, and the key term here is graduated exposure, try to pet and cuddle her; like with the violence-for-play method, when she lashes out at you, however much you may bleed, just let her until you can scritch her ears, hold her, or find some other way of making her feel physically good, which will calm her down.  Ideally, only let her go when she seems calm, and wants to get to a different spot for her own comfort rather than because she's afraid, although you may have to try a few times to get to this level.  If you are not able to, ensure your cat is not getting away from you because she escaped; rather, be sure it's on equal terms.  For instance, you may reach out to pet her and she may jump at your hand and slash it immediately, backing away and snarling.  You want to continue advancing in this case, and just get to the point where you can gently scritch her cheek, and then move away, having succeeded in your goal.  There's a lot of sacrifice to be made here in terms of your own physical pain and scarring, but you retreating from her self-defence is just another form of letting her escape and build her anxiety further.  Throughout the entire process you want to be very verbal with your cat, using a sweet, soft tone.  This ultimately may sound borderline psychologically abusive, and you definitely need to have the heart for it, but this exposure is crucial.  Ideally, you want to keep this up until kitty can lie contentedly on your bed as you get into it, and visibly appreciate petting without any violent preamble.

Cats are an enigmatic species; we've lived with them for thousands of years and we still don't quite understand them.  And they like it that way, being the shy kid in the back of the room that no one quite gets and fewer people still will even try.  But as people who love our cats it's our duty to understand them whether they help us along or not, to develop that relationship between cat and human, and make their lives as happy as they can be.  Best of luck.

Cat Communication

In general, people don't bother with their cats too much.  It sounds very distasteful to say, but it's true: We think of our cats as rather asocial animals, who can generally take or leave us, and when they take us they may well just leave us three minutes later, until the next time we're busy enough that we're worth bothering.  Cats are assholes, we say.

I, obviously, feel very strongly against this.  Cats can be very sociable, loving, even needy as any dog you might find if they're given the attention and the respect, and their communicative needs are met.  Dogs, though they aren't anymore, originally came from pack animals, and are still naturally more gregarious than cats are.  We, as humans, can sympathize with this, and so we have an easier time communicating with them.  Cats, on the other hand, are nocturnal, less interested in consistent, close proximity, and prefer the one on one.  This doesn't mean they have fewer social needs, only that their social needs are different.  They're the introverts of the animal world, and a common misconception about introversion is that it means you simply don't like people.  Introverts don't like crowds, don't like strangers, but the few people that they do like they become very attached to, and require them in their lives more than extroverts might rely on their own friends.  Cats are like this.

So no, don't assume kitty is fine if you leave home for a week and they have no one to interact with.  You may come home and they seem to ignore you, but this is because cats have a more complex social mind in some ways in comparison to dogs: they have the capability to quietly resent, they are vengeful, they can be embarrassed.  Have you ever seen kitty do something stupid, like slip across a kitchen floor chasing a bug only to collide with a counter, and you laugh, and they stalk off to face away from you, licking themselves?  Their humiliation looks a lot like ours, and so do their feelings of being abandoned.  They haven't forgotten you when you get home after that long trip, they just aren't very happy that you left them alone in the first place.  Cats isolating themselves, whether in humiliation or sickness or other upset, is a survival mechanism.

Cats also listen very attentively to verbal communication.  Like the other forms of concealment or deceit listed above, they often know very well what we want them to do or are telling them, but ignore us intentionally.  If one develops a strong relationship with a cat, they may well tear this barrier down, as my own has, and react to your wants and needs almost implicitly.  In return, cats also have a huge range of their own verbal expressions, highlighting how important verbalization is to them.  The more you talk to your cat, the more they'll talk back!

Cats have somewhere between thirty and upwards of one hundred distinct vocalizations, depending on one's source.  This is actually far more than dogs have, which is somewhere in the teens.  For comparison, the greatest number of distinct sounds in a human language is 141 at most.  Coupled with body language, this means a cat can express an awful lot with little effort.

• A content cat will have her ears forward, her eyes almond-shaped, and her whiskers down and forward in what I like to call a 'cat smile', since like a human smile it uses muscles in the cheeks.  The tail will be relatively still, perhaps just flicking at the tip, back and forth like a pendulum.  Content cats obviously will purr, but if you're talking to them and petting them, especially if they're pacing about while you do so so that you can get to their favourite places, they may give short little chirping noises or bubbling sounds from their throat.  A very good way to see a content cat though, apart from all this, is the slow-blink.  A lot of people see this as them being snobby, and in humans this is a rather self-important expression, but in cats they're telling you that they're happy where they are and they appreciate your presence.  Cats will also rub against things when they're happy, and contrary to popular belief, this isn't them declaring your desk or your leg as their property, it's just communication like everything else.
• An excited cat will have a more rapidly flicking tail.  People usually note that an active tail in a cat generally means they're annoyed or angry, but an excited cat's tail may be all over the place as well.  She'll be moving around a lot more, and may even look agitated, but the facial expression will mirror their content state, especially in the ears and the whiskers.  She may vocalize much more, especially if you're vocalizing back to her, with loud purring and meowing.
• An annoyed cat will be making very few vocalizations at all.  She'll have her back to you, perhaps her ears back so that she can hear what you're doing.  Her whiskers will be pushed back as well, and her tail will be flicking.  In this state, it's best to just leave them alone; as humans, our natural response is to try to cheer them up, but they just want time to themselves.
• An angry cat is easy to spot.  Ears back, whiskers back, hackles raised.  They'll snarl and hiss, and generally be very unpleasant.
• A frightened cat is also easy noticed.  The facial expression will be similar to an angry one in that the ears and whiskers will be back, but the tail will be still, and the eyes will be wide.  A cat under consistent stress may actually purr, just as they do when they're injured.  Some have asked me before how one can tell between a purring happy cat or a purring, and it's all in their facial expression and their reaction to stimuli.  We all know what a cat looks like when she's enjoying being pet, curling her body against your hand; a frightened cat won't appreciate attention as overtly, although unless she bristles or moves away from you, comforting her is very advisable.

In general, the way you interact with a cat will be very different from how you interact with a dog or a person.  People often lament that they dislike cats but cats in houses always seem to like them; this is because cats enjoy being ignored.  Most cats don't enjoy intense physical attention, but even the most casual pet or ear-scritch can make them very happy; if she decides she wants to go somewhere else, do something else, don't follow her.  She'll come back on her own.  The petting may get more intense, and some cats love being brushed roughly, or having themselves underneath your body, making them feel loved and protected, but one way to almost always engage with your cat is just through verbalization.  If you observe cats in the wild, big or small, most of their interactions are very brief physical contact, along with quite a few more vocalizations, often at long distances apart.  Tell your cat her name in the right tone and you're guaranteed a cat-smile and a slow-blink.

Zoo Rights

I look around that freaky part of the internet that is filled with zoosexuals and I see a whole lot of two things: firstly, the idiots/rapists/holy-shit-crazy people that I've already torn into quite enough for one month; secondly, people who have quietly accepted who they are but are saddened by the social stigma and fear they know they must live with until they die.  I recently had a chat with one such individual, and though this week I was going to do a quick silly post, that will be put on the back-burner so that I can whisper into the ears of all the rest of you dejected zoos.  I'm going to tell you why we are the next sex rights revolution.

This isn't because of crap like COMING SOON or predictions by Bill O'Reilly, although we should certainly be inspired by the success of the LGBT and other sex rights movements.  It's because, quite simply, we are right.

And people are starting to know that we're right: today, we in the western world are encouraged to question absolutely everything.  It started with creationism, branched off into religion as a whole, later into ethnocentrism and sexism, and finally into sex: we've questioned whether it really is wrong for a woman to be lustful and kinky, or for a man to love another man, and we are so used to questioning such things by now that we are beginning to be able to question whether it really is wrong for a human to fall in love with an animal, and to express that love physically.  If you don't believe me, check my last blog post, in which Peter Singer, who is among other things a supporter of zoo rights, was given a very prestigious award by the nation of Australia.

And it only takes a quick trip around the smarter places of the internet, and a good head on your shoulders yourself so that you can support a brief argument (or links to this blog ;) ) to find that when people are made to think about these things, the forward-thinking of them, which are a surprising amount, are quick to reach the conclusion that zoophilic intercourse is no more wrong than anything they might consider doing themselves.  The days in which we could fall back to religious arguments and knee-jerk reactions and have it work in science and politics are quickly leaving us here in the first world.

We have a leg-up, too, on the LGBT movement as it first started: it wasn't until 1974, after a lot of pressure from rights groups, that homosexuality was no longer regarded by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder.  With the release of the DSM IV in 1994, though, zoophilia (as it is called there) and other paraphilias (barring some exceptions) are only regarded as mental disorders if they cause significant distress or inhibition of daily functioning to the individual.  As such, few zoos, despite their fear of social stigma, fit this disorder, and zoophilia is a rare diagnosis.  The most that could be done is to have the name changed to fit the nomenclature we have established, and to have it include an addition to make it similar to the diagnosis of Sadism, in that it may also be considered pathological if it includes harm to another.  At the moment, zoophilia is only listed in Paraphilias Not Otherwise Specified.  The Word Health Association's ICD-10 has a similar thing going on, so the insanity argument is already null and void.

So what needs to be done for this push for acceptance?  It will of course be difficult and take a long time: although zooerasty is legal in many places, it is not widely accepted anywhere.  It therefore is not legislation that we need to be pushing for, but for a change in people's  collective mindset.  It involves getting allies: people who sympathize with and understand us, even if they are not zoophilic themselves.  If you're zoo, it involves coming out, where it is safe; at the moment, the only people who often come out are the ones you don't want to be associated with: these people who don't have the brains to fear society.  We need to mediate that fear, though, even if it's only on the internet, and get out and talk to people about our orientation.  Not getting up in people's faces, but should the topic come up, or should the opportunity to arise, we must become educators.  We must be well-armed with information and we must not back down from a debate.  You have the resources.

I also feel that women who typically orient towards male animals are crucial here.  The big argument against us is that animals cannot possibly consent to human intercourse.  We of course have all sorts of data and observation that is contrary, but unfortunately, with few if any scientific studies on this and no terribly good way to show people, it remains the largest argument against us.  The sad fact is that most people are unable to read animal body language, and will invent scenarios in which what they expect to happen is happening.  You can't exactly show them pornography (and if you can, please don't), but what about your own life?  Most people have great difficulty with the idea of a female raping a male, and even more if the male is an animal, due to anatomical reasons.  It's important, though, when your arguments involve explicit content, that you know how to sound professional, and know when to stop creeping out your opponent.  Keep it short and to the point.

Here is what I think: Telling the world that, contrary to popular belief, zoos exist outside of the realms of animated comedies, they love their animals, and that the time has come for them to get the facts and seriously think about them - this will be the heart of any movement towards acceptance.  If you're zoo, so long as you're safe and smart, you need not be afraid any longer.  Your coming freedom from the hatred of society rests on you, and it rests on us working as one entity.  Here's to a liberated future.

Sex with Animals Causes Cancer?

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