Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  Which is why it hurt so fucking much the first time I had an “intellectual discussion” about euthanasia with someone at a party. He wasn’t a shelter worker but, as he phrased it, “an animal welfare advocate.” The discussion took a turn when he said, “In all of my experience, I’ve never met an animal who had to die in a shelter.” Now, I’d had experience with someone calling me a Nazi; friends in other shelters had been called “robots,” “heartless,” “murderers,” and obviously the list goes on. But here, it was as if something had been slipped into my drink when I wasn’t looking. This was the most cruel of insults, one that was disguised in banter. I was dizzy and wordless. And in that stuttering moment, a grudge was born.

  My good friend Lily, who was a volunteer at the shelter, heard about and became enamored with Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in the late nineties. She began donating a good deal of her money and telling people who were thinking of surrendering their animals to HSBV to perhaps instead consider taking the drive out to Utah to Best Friends, where all animals live their lives in the massive canyon that belongs to the organization, without the specter of euthanasia ever hanging over their heads. I was deeply… resentful? Jealous? Both, I’m sure. In my deep, dark psychic cave, I really wanted to work there. But a world where no-kill sanctuaries are the only models of sheltering animals was—and still is—a goal, not a reality. Somebody has to deal with the present victims of our throwaway society.

  We’re moving in the right direction. The number of animals killed in shelters every year is down from twelve million back then to four million today. But the fact is, as much as it saddens and sickens me to say this, the answer is yes, many of the animals in the shelter system that die every year do have to die like this, because there are still too many of them and too few homes.

  I’m not, of course, talking about the population we refer to as community cats. They are our wild companions. We trap them, neuter them, and return them to their colonies. Their lives are decidedly shorter than others, but we don’t make the decision to just round them up and kill them. They belong, just not in our homes. No, I’m talking about animals that are discarded, left to fend for themselves, those who perhaps escaped and were never relocated to their homes. Many of these animals wound up in our care incredibly fearful, unsocialized, and aggressive. We didn’t have anything close to the space or resources to try to rehab these cases. The only choice is whether they die with shelter workers there who try to find a way to love them, or on the streets, diseased, injured, starved, uncared for, unloved, and alone. Even if the love we gave was fleeting, it was real.

  When all great movements are in their infancy, they are nourished basically on the mother’s milk of righteous indignation. It is a time of red-faced screaming and finger pointing. That’s a good thing—we need to be angry to move toward any systemic change. But ultimately the fingers have to stop pointing and the hand has to get down to work—and that work is always messy. Now the no-kill movement has grown up, and organizations like Best Friends have a plan to change the status quo, not just rage at convenient targets. But there are still those who gather just enough information to make themselves dangerous and then froth at the mouth about what they deem the inherent negligence, incompetence, and, worst of all, apathy at kill shelters. These are the people who hurled epithets like “Nazi” at me and who do so to others in the field every day. Excuse me? Really? You’re blaming all shelter administrators and workers for killing because they’re, what, heartless and lazy? Sorry. Naiveté is one thing, but naiveté cloaked in righteousness is something else. So to all the people, then and (thankfully, fewer) now, who vilify workers in the kill-shelter system, screaming about no-kill while doing nothing about the actual problem: fuck you. To the shelters who say you’re no-kill so you can get the donations but then turn away blind cats or twelve-year-old dogs so that they don’t mess up your numbers and you don’t have to be the ones who euthanize them when nobody adopts them: fuck you. To the people who sneer at the euthanasia shelters for doing your dirty work for you so you can keep your hands clean: fuck you. Twice.

  The animal lovers who are our potential advocates need not to be coddled and made to believe that their hard-earned donations are making the problem go away. I’m not, by nature, a finger-wagger. But throwing around the term “no-kill” as the obvious and only answer was then, and still is, an insult to the animals stuck in and the workers staffing a broken system. Be angry at the system and do something to change it. We worked with animals because we loved them as much as, if not more than, most people. And every one of us longed desperately to see a day when we didn’t have to do what we were doing. And if you doubt that one, well, fuck you too.

  Performing euthanasia was one thing; hearing the reasons people surrendered these soon-to-be-dead animals to us, though, was a wake-up call of mind-bending volume. Seriously. A fourteen-year-old cat surrendered because a baby was on the way. Dogs with cancer given up because… they had cancer. It pushed our last buttons on bad days.

  This guy brought in an adorable Rhodesian Ridgeback one day and my friend Martha did the intake.

  “I’m really sad to have to give him up,” said the guy.

  Martha slipped the shelter lead over the dog and knelt down to rub his chin. “Why can’t you keep him?” she asked, standing up to lead him back into the kennel.

  “I’m moving.” Martha froze.

  “Where the hell are you moving to, China?”

  She didn’t last much longer at the shelter.

  On these days we reminded ourselves—indoctrinated thinking from early on—that at the very least, these people brought their animals to us, instead of just turning them loose in the street or abandoning them in an empty apartment. This happened and happens with astounding regularity. I have to say, my education in how the world at large sees and treats animals was far more depressing than the act of killing the unfortunates. I was just the messenger. The message came from a place that had decided not to value any sentient beings that didn’t speak and walk on two legs. How could this not inform the choices I made regarding what I considered my new sense of purpose? Holding a stray dog, being his guardian for those last minutes, cradling him, and letting him know he was loved, trying to will him into dying knowing nothing but a life full of love. I knew I was doing the upside-down world more good than bad.

  There was no such thing as an average day at the shelter; I could never afford myself the luxury of leaving home and thinking, “Okay, my day is going to look like this.” I had come from a job where I was putting a toothbrush to an audiobook rental box for eight hours a day. At HSBV I was more engaged, more in the moment—anything could and often did happen. One day, after Pope of the Circus Gods played a late-night house party gig on the Hill, the epicenter of college life in Boulder, I slept through my alarm. This was a relatively easy thing to do living in a warehouse—there were no windows, just the massive bay door. The things that woke your ass up if the alarm didn’t were your bladder and the mountain sun beginning to beat its oppressive song on that metal. When you woke up having to pee and with no running water, you either grabbed a bottle or made a dash for a hidden outdoor location, stopping on your way for sunglasses so the adjustment wouldn’t make you grab your head in pain. This was before cell phones, but we had no landline anyhow. I was absolutely isolated from the world. When I realized what had happened I just tore ass into work, because for once, I really cared if I got fired. It was only when I got inside that I realized that I had managed to run from the warehouse to my car, drive to the shelter, and run across the dirt-and-rock driveway with no shoes on. Going back home would have put everybody’s morning routine behind, so I just worked the whole day in the huge, one-size-fits-all rubber boots we wore over our shoes when we were washing kennels, making slapsticky fart sounds every time I took an increasingly sweaty step. Commitment to something outside of myself, my immediate needs—who got fed, who saw my face, who got their meds and attention from me, and who I could finally send
to a home—was a very new feeling.

  It wasn’t as if I knew I’d discovered my true calling in taking care of cats. I never, not one time in my life, identified myself as a “cat guy.” Let’s just get that out there. I grew up with a dog, got my first cat in college, but managed never to be owned by one until grad school. Even then, it wasn’t like I felt this calling, this “aha” moment of life-purpose recognition. That dance ticket had already been punched by music very early in my life.

  I did, however, recognize a distinctly dogcentric culture pervasive in our shelter and others that I visited. Not that it was an intentional feline snub, it wasn’t as if we loved cats any less; dogs were just so much more understood, and thus more “reformable.” We had dog training for volunteers aimed at socialization for faster adoption. We had volunteers taking dogs for long walks on the winding trails behind the shelter. The shelter was full of dog-enrichment opportunities.

  The cats, not so much. They were in single stainless steel cages, surrounded by potential threats in the forms of fleeting fingers, feet, and scents. The volunteers who loved cats had nowhere like a winding trail to bring them, so they were mostly brushed in their cages or brought into a spare meeting room. This did little to relieve the anxiety the cats felt at the sensory overload. Unlike most of the dogs I’ve observed, kennel-crazy cats retreat: turning their backs to the bars of the cage, hunkering down in litter boxes, digging into blankets, trying to hide in hiding places that aren’t there. The potential adopters, who spent an average of four seconds in front of a cage, would interpret their behavior as sad—and who wants to adopt a sad cat? Every cat who refused to look at visiting potential pet guardians became a cat who was euthanized needlessly.

  That “sadness” was the impetus toward a new path for me. I began to see my “in” as affecting cat behavior, sure, but also in the momentary human projections that could signal “my cat” versus “not mine.” One look, one step toward the front of the cage, a paw reaching between the bars to make contact. I began reading everything about cat behavior I could get my hands on. I ate up every word. And I’m telling you, for a guy who doesn’t like to read anything without pictures in it, this was a hell of an accomplishment. And when I read something about cats, I could immediately walk into the back and observe that behavior. My earliest experiments with play therapy and positive reinforcement came by working with cats who had been going so kennel crazy that they were on the euthanasia list. I just took them after hours and experimented with what kind of play worked best for them, or how to get them through the theories of operant conditioning, using clicker training, to give me that high five through the bars that made them stand apart so well in adoptions, or at least walk to the front of the cage. And upon getting an answer with one, I experimented with another. Everybody won. Even Cheeks, the shelter mascot, became a test case, though it meant I started getting into arguments with some of my coworkers. Chasing the vast horde of mice who lived in the shelter’s walls and, yes, eating them would help his diabetes, I insisted every time somebody tried to get him to stop by prying mouse parts from his clamped jaw. I began to enthusiastically turn that attitude around, insisting that coworkers, volunteers, and, really, anyone within earshot watch Cheeks transcend his illness and enjoy life as the raw cat that he was.

  Cat Mojo 101

  Environmental enrichment is crucial for the well-being of your cats. Let this be your initiation into the world of cat mojo, or how to see the world through cat-colored glasses:

  Cats need to hunt. Play and prey is the same thing. If your cats don’t hunt, they don’t own their space; so play with your cats in an interactive way. Take them through the process of “hunt, catch, kill, eat.” EVERY DAY.

  Cats need to own territory. They do this by scent and visual marking. Make sure they have plenty of soft beds, blankets, scratching posts, and the like and put them in territorially significant places—i.e., places that smell of you!

  Cats see every room in 3D: It’s not just about the floor. It’s the floor, the couch, the barstool level, the sink, the bookcases. Having access to all aspects of this world creates another level of territorial security.

  Cats CAN Be Trained!

  Clicker training is a training system based on positive reinforcement and has been used on animal species from whales and dolphins to chickens, pigeons, cats, and dogs to great effect (see Clicker Training for Cats by Karen Pryor). While I’m not a fan of using this great tool to teach tricks that seem humiliating to animals (i.e., jumping through hoops or riding bicycles), clicker training can be used to

  achieve a desired result to help you get along better with your cat, e.g., perform a sit while you prepare dinner;

  emotionally connect with your cat by having a structured activity;

  combine the two in cat agility training, which exercises a cat’s mind and body, while strengthening the bond between the two of you.

  That was when I found a deeper level of cat recognition than I had ever seen in myself before. I knew not only that they were sad, for lack of a less-anthropomorphic word, but I knew why. The dogs in our care threw those feelings out toward the shallow end of the psychic pool. No offense to the dogs; in fact, just the opposite—dogs know how to make humans respond. Dogs have socially coevolved during their trip with humans much the same way humans have with other humans. This, of course, is a fancy way of saying that they know how to push our buttons. This was never, during the evolutionary timeline of the domestic cat, a concern, so it was never a talent they cultivated. But I began to feel that when I looked at any cat in my care, a conversation began.

  Let me explain before another word is written: I have never once asked a cat, “So tell me what’s up, Charlie?” and Charlie says, “Jeez, Jackson, thanks for asking. A little annoyed by the fluorescent lights, and will you please check out this tiny piece-of-junk pan I have to crap in but, hey, I still got my legs, you know? Can’t complain, pal.”

  What is an animal communicator anyway? The definition of communication is: The imparting or exchanging of information or news; the successful conveying or sharing of feelings or ideas. So, do I communicate? Of course I do. It’s the only thing I have, save the performer-to-audience nirvana, that reminds me of the holy, the stillness that others have described to me in respect to their meditative practices. With every blink, every exchanged subtle nod, widened or constricted pupils, we feel each other vibrate. You hold your breath, I hold mine. If the hair is standing up on my arms, so is it on your body thirty feet away. I raise my chin three inches, you relax and know me. You plaster yourself against the wall under the headboard, I find myself starting to cry. Neither of us is more or less than the other. Communication is understanding, slowing time and space down to the common denominator that is the spiderweb strand connecting being to being. And that has nothing to do with language as we know it. English, as it pertains to this, is not only ridiculously beside the point, it’s our enemy.

  So with that, the one splinter in my side in terms of my relationship with my clients is the pressure I feel from them to explain what their cats are feeling, and when I can’t, they often get disappointed and frustrated. I can interpret motions, changes in energetic temperature—but the rest simply can’t be outsourced. I’m not trying to withhold from you, to gloat over knowing your cat better than you; I just can’t tell you in English what your cat is saying in Cat. I want you to meet me in these cool dreams. They are in no way exclusive. If I am anything, it’s maybe the kite that introduces lightning to skin. I can’t—nobody can—breathe life into the animal experience with air from the human one, and maybe that’s where the two-legged companions get impatient and look for a shortcut. So when I spend alone time with a cat, upon reentering the human atmosphere I never know how to answer the question, “What’s Ralphie thinking?”

  At the time, of course, I hadn’t really thought any of this through; I just knew I wanted to be the advocate, the steward that I knew I could be and I pushed so many others to be. And I k
new I couldn’t communicate “cat” to humans without being armed with human-type vocabulary, studies, and such. I could have screamed to the hills that I had some sort of deal struck with the cat world, but with my name and the tattoos and beard I seemed crazy enough already. I knew I needed to be balanced with a degree of legitimacy if I wanted to make a difference.