It was a good day after all. Go figure.
The Problem
with Letters and
the Bum Within
Meanwhile, Benny was doing his level best to make my life at home as difficult as possible.
After I had told Beth that I was getting clean, she stopped talking to me—she needed to get loaded just as much as I needed to sober up, and it pissed her off. The way using playmates see it, not only are you turning your back on them, you are implying that they are somehow broken, diseased. And that brings the fight out in people. When the first of my running buddies had found the twelve steps years before, I openly mocked him as “Jesus Freak,” even “coward.” His defection, in a backhanded way, put the rest of us up against the wall. And just like feral cats, when cornered, we struck back with a vengeance. And now so did Beth.
I knew that in order to commit to my recovery I was going to have to abandon this friendship, hopefully just until the dust settled, because living with that wreckage amid the wreckage around us was not a healthy thing to do. This meant that Beth took over most of our apartment and I, for the sake of expedience (I wanted to avoid conflict) stayed in my bedroom. After a month, I couldn’t take it anymore—neither could the cats—and I called a realtor.
“What do you think of this place?” she asked when she showed me the apartment.
It’s too big, I thought. It was a two-bedroom apartment where I had my own office, a big bedroom, a big living room, a dining room. I’m really uncomfortable here.
“Mountain view, great price,” said Jen. “He’ll take it.” I could only nod in wan agreement.
Meanwhile, I had no furniture—I was proud of the sort of Spartan lifestyle I had led, and in a nod to my Roma heritage, my life could still fit into my car. I had left my useless futon at the old place. The couch had been Beth’s. I didn’t own a TV. Nothing. But because I was clean I had more money than I had in the past, so I went on a buying spree. Trips to Target to get things I had never thought of before, like freaking silverware, a toothbrush holder, a plunger. Of course, the cats had everything they could have needed. I kept waking up trying to figure out where the frying pan was. My dad, sensing my helplessness, flew out to help. He and I went to a country auction and bought an entire set of house furniture for $400. My big splurge was a brand-new king-size bed. Even so, I didn’t put any art on the glaringly, migrainishly white walls for six months, I think because I was living with a fear of commitment—like your lover giving you a drawer in the dresser that you never put so much as a pair of socks in. I couldn’t bring myself to put my roots down and claim the place as my own.
Slowly but surely, though despite my discomfort, I adjusted to the move. Benny, on the other hand, showed no interest in adjusting to anything, because he didn’t know what to do with the world today when it looked at all different than yesterday. This is something those who live with felines know all too well: cats like stability. Once they see things arranged in an acceptable way, they tend to be unhappy with change.
But if cats are creatures of habit, Benny was a creature of absolute rigidity.
He made his discomfort clear immediately after the move, by picking three different spots and peeing on them as if they were made of litter. But it was okay, I told myself, because I knew how to deal with this.
The first thing was not to panic, because all panic does is escalate the problem. (This is the first mistake that people make in situations like this: the cats lose their pee and the humans lose their shit.) So after not panicking, I got three litter boxes and put them in the places where he’d been peeing. The idea is that once you put down multiple litter boxes, a cat who’s been peeing where you don’t want him to can now pee on something that is appropriate and say, “That’s right, I smell this, this belongs to me. Next?” Gradually, you move each box toward the place where you want there to be one litter box.
So I set up three litter boxes for Benny in the places he wanted to pee. Instead of trying to get him to do something I wanted him to do, this was very much about embracing compromise and acknowledging his overriding need to reinforce territorial identification in these places. Recognizing that these boxes were smack in the middle of my space, even impeding logical walkways, I had a moment of being a litter box baby, whining that what I had to do for him was so invasive, so inconvenient. “Fine,” I said to myself in the end; “I’m going to put litter boxes in those places. And I will give it exactly a week. Not a day more.” And it worked. Benny started using the litter boxes again within a day.
Of course with Benny I had to know that any celebration would always be mocked. A few days later I moved two of the boxes a couple of feet toward the third, which was in a slightly more human-friendly location, and Benny started peeing everywhere again. I spent days going, “What? What? What the hell is it?” and feverishly thumbing through my inner cat/human dictionary, looking for the answer and not finding it. In this case, the moment of translational discovery was my realization that I’d been moving the boxes too far. When Benny saw a box that was three feet away from where it had been the day before, he would become disoriented and furious—three feet would be fine for most cats I had known, but was absolutely unacceptable to Benny—and would pee in the same old place again. The trick became finding his “challenge line.”
Don’t Be a Litter Box Baby!
If I told you that your cat would stop peeing all over your house if you added well-placed litter boxes, would you blink? Of course not. So when I tell you that they need to go in socially significant areas (bedroom or dining room, for example), don’t turn into a litter box baby! Do you want it on the floor or in the box? I thought so.
Put a litter box wherever your cat is peeing (or pooping). Now you are giving her an acceptable choice to mark territory; you’re giving her the possibility of a positive behavioral outlet.
As time goes on and the boxes are used with a 100 percent success rate, you can start to shift them toward an area that is more amenable to your lifestyle. But remember, just a few feet a day.
Finally, when all the boxes are concentrated in the one area, begin to eliminate the extras. Three become two become one—presto! Problem solved.
How Can You Use the Challenge Line?
Even if you have a seemingly well-adjusted cat, there has to be something that challenges them. Why do we want to find it? Two reasons:
1) Meeting challenges means increased self-esteem. Just as you gained confidence the first time you scaled the monkey bars or the day you got your driver’s license, so it is with any being. With scaredy-cats, their challenges so often have to do with ownership, or as they perceive it, lack of ownership. Kill the toy, you own that toy and the space in which it was killed. Venture out to a living room full of people and other animals when you’re used to hiding under the bed and your confidence zooms as you take your place in the world.
2) The ability to push through challenges lowers stress in times of unforeseen life changes. Not that this is something you want to think about, but if something happens to you, what happens to your cat? If she will only eat a certain brand of food, with this or that sprinkled on top, and then only on odd-numbered days, the stress of having to do something different in, God forbid, a shelter environment might well be insurmountable and she might quit eating.
We owe it to our cats to shake up their routines, to allow them to grow. On the other side of the challenge line is comfort, and although we want them to know that their world and the beings in it are safe, permanent, and friendly, feeling success and pleasure on both sides of the line provides them with a behavioral elasticity that will serve them (and in turn, us) well for their whole lives.
The challenge line is something that became a 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, taking off training wheels, or taking away a blankie or a pacifier. In trying to effect behavioral change, it’s totally cou
nterproductive to throw the cat’s sense of comfort out the window, to throw her into an ice bath of sorts. She’ll push back violently, squirming to be free of the ice again, as Benny did, trying to find the comfort again. So instead, we ask her, every day, to approach challenge, and put one paw over it. The line is suddenly extinguished and moved up. And we start again, always gently assuring her that small challenges are met with great reward on the other side. In this case, I found that if I moved those boxes a few inches each day, Benny could get with the program. Six inches was comfort; a foot, unacceptable challenge. So it came to pass, after my discovery of the challenge line concept, that my apartment was full of litter boxes for three weeks, moving by inches as Benny slept, like I was the litter box version of Santa, until the boxes finally merged into one, in a human-acceptable location.
At the same time as we were dealing with the litter box issue, though, Benny also really started to dominate Velouria. Cats thrive on ownership, and Benny was who he was, so he felt like he needed to overassert himself, to over-own. I think the enlarged territory, for once unburdened by closed doors and other cats, led Benny to make sure Velouria knew where she was permitted to stand, sit, and lie, at exactly what times and in what manner. This was his chance, and he wasn’t going to waste it. Velouria was not just submissive but scared, so she was always on the run, always looking for a place he couldn’t get to, but many times it would end badly for her. It was not a good scene. Velouria, furthermore, didn’t do herself any favors, because a cat who runs and makes noise and turns herself into a great little squeaky toy, as she did, is going to get chased. Whenever I let her sleep under the covers with me, which she loved to do, some time during the night Benny would walk across the bed and literally step on her. She would make a noise, and all hell would break loose. He got to a point where he really didn’t like her being on the bed at all, so instead of accidentally stepping on her, he would patrol with vigilance to keep her off.
“You guys,” I finally said to them—and to myself—“we’re going to be together for a long time, and we have to make this work. I’m not going to give either one of you up, but we have to work together.”
They looked dubious.
I didn’t really want to do too much of anything; site swapping, for example, would mean more closed doors, which I felt in this case would only mean heavier retribution from Benny. This situation provided my first opportunity to solve problems in a large, open “behavioral laboratory” of sorts. There were no outside influences—no roommates, no other cats, no dogs, practically no visitors. The question was, how could I ensure safety on Velouria’s end of the equation and confident ownership on Benny’s?
Observation of Benny and Velouria led me to the concept of Tree Dwellers and Bush Dwellers. What I realized was that Velouria always felt more comfortable high up, even when she wasn’t threatened. She would leap up to the top of a door frame and then look for the next high-up space to jump to, like Tarzan looking for a vine. Benny, in the meantime, was decidedly more at home when all four paws were on the ground. He had dropped out of cat school before they taught Jumping 101. I chalked it up to his old pelvic injury, though there are all sorts of natural reasons cats can be attracted or restricted to the ground.
Site Swapping
When cats have met poorly or have had a crazy fight that results in distrust, most often I take them back to square one and reintroduce the cats as if they had never met. One of the initial keys is site swapping.
The cats should never be allowed direct eye contact in the beginning; instead, they get equal access to the territory, but during different times. One gets free reign, one gets the “base camp” (most often the master bedroom). This way, they can each own everything, increasing confidence, and begin to be reintroduced gently, through shared scent, but not tussle over who owns what.
It reminded me of watching big-cat hunting behavior. Lions and many of their cousins crouch low in the brush, moving almost noiselessly among the reeds. Sometimes they eat their kill right there in the middle of the plain. These cats show their confidence on the ground, hence bush dwellers. Other big cousins, most notably the leopard, will kill with equal precision on the ground, but then drag their prey into a tree, where hyenas and other scavengers will more than likely leave them alone. They will eat, nap, and survey the vast territory from the safety of their tree houses; leopards are tree dwellers.
Sure, adapting these behaviors to house cats involves healthy doses of liberal interpretation and imagination. But the upshot was that I had a new tool, a new way of categorizing the cats I met, assessing their confidence (or lack thereof), and devising solutions based on those needs. And the cool thing was that this could be accomplished without robbing these cats of their individuality. In the case of my cats, knowing that Velouria was a tree dweller and Benny was a bush dweller meant I could design an environment pleasing to both while doubling the volume of the perceived territory.
I used kitty sills, condos, run-of-the-mill Home Depot shelving units, and turned what had been a one-lane dirt road into a cat superhighway. Benny and Velouria could, if they chose, stay completely out of each other’s way so as to establish a system of time-sharing that cats, no matter how large the group, can be masters at. I kept Velouria safe and I gave them both places to go where they would be able to claim different areas of the house. But I didn’t enforce a separation, and over time, depending on Benny’s stress level, he just let Velouria be.
Tree Dweller or Bush Dweller?
It’s important to note that just because a cat is a tree or a bush dweller, it doesn’t mean that one is a better option than the other. For instance, some cats like heights. They derive confidence from these locations. Many cats I’ve known have been chased to, say, the top of the fridge, and they become too scared to come down so they pee, poop, and eat up there. The same can go for bush dwellers, those who seek floor-level safe havens like a closet or under a bed.
Observe your cats nonjudgmentally. Are they confident or nonconfident bush or tree dwellers?
If they’re confident, build your space to accommodate.
If they’re nonconfident, use the challenge line to show them a fuller world filled with brave choices.
One of the main reasons I didn’t become a professional before I did, during the long spell when I was contemplating leaving the shelter, was that I didn’t have any letters after my name (well, that and the fact that I was incapacitated). I couldn’t call myself Jackson Galaxy, VMD, DVM, AVSAB, CAAB, IAABC, or CABC. I didn’t go to school for what I was professing to do, and this made me afraid to go out in the world, because I was terrified of being wrong… and, worse, being judged.
What made it worse was that there were definitely issues on which I disagreed, sometimes vehemently, with the people who did have letters after their names. One of the earliest examples I can remember of this was my initial repulsion over the seemingly common act of declawing. It was just common sense to me, no matter what studies I read to the contrary or however many vets and veterinary behaviorists I consulted, that the result to both cats’ bodies and their psyches was more often than not catastrophic. I knew, just watching a cat walk across the floor, that she’d been declawed. Her gait seemed unnatural. I was recording more and more litter box issues having to do with box aversion from declawed cats. The number of “botch jobs” was astounding. And even worse, those cats with tendonectomies, where guardians’ vets convinced them that the surgery was a humane alternative to declawing, angered me to no end. Those poor guys had to walk around with no power of retraction over their claws, getting them snagged on carpeting. And the “professionals” I sought the advice of would, with equal parts self-righteous anger and condescension, assure me that there were no studies that backed up any such assertion, that I was being anthropomorphic and was failing if I ever wanted to pursue the “science” of animal behavior. I’m happy to say that declawing is now illegal in twenty-seven countries, earning prison sentences in some, and in many Ame
rican cities. But there are still vets and guardians all over the place who see no problem with it.
The Cat Superhighway
Take advantage of every conceivable nook and cranny and survey point, from under the couch to the top of the bookcase. Be imaginative about how you can accommodate your feline tree or bush dweller.
Especially if you have multiple cats, catering to the bush and tree dwellers means they can own the world on their own terms.
Not competing for doors and wall space on the floor means less traffic. Build more lanes for different kinds of feline commuters and you’ll have fewer traffic snarls, literally!
Remember, whatever you build, including spaces for litter boxes, needs to have multiple entrance points. Also, more exits on the highway mean less chance for ambush and more for happy coexistence.
Now, fifteen years later, I’ve come to believe that I’m part of a different generation of professional animal people who come to the field from a different direction, one that offers equally informed discourse but from a fresh perspective. At that time, however, the only thing that I knew was that I was a fraud; I felt like I had stolen someone else’s identity and I was using it liberally, knowing, with a true addict’s mix of dread and excitement, that at any moment I would be caught.
After going to a seminar in Denver given by a respected animal behaviorist, I went up to her, full of relief that I wasn’t alone on this island. It wasn’t even that I wanted her advice on how to establish myself as a behaviorist. I just wanted to talk about cats. It was like the first time I met another musician at a twelve-step meeting and we ended up talking about Sgt. Pepper’s versus Pet Sounds. It was a three-hour talkgasm, a friendly face in a foreign land.
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