Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  Don’t Declaw Your Cat!

  It’s easy to think of declawing a cat as just permanently clipping her nails, but nothing could be less accurate.

  Imagine somebody cutting off all your fingers just below the first knuckle, and then having to go through life like that. That’s much closer to what a declawed cat experiences. Declawing can cause physical, behavioral, and emotional problems for years to come.

  If your cat is scratching things you don’t want her to scratch, here are some things you can do:

  make sure she has satisfactory scratching surfaces that aren’t furniture

  instead of old carpet, try sisal or corrugated cardboard

  try Soft Paws: covers you can put on her claws to keep her scratching from doing any damage

  “Hey,” I said, stars in my eyes, “I’m in the process of going into this field, and I’d love to have a conversation with you.” I went on, for just long enough to realize that I was just speaking, doing that “Jesus, she’s not saying a word and I want to show her I’m smart and the silence is making me sweat” type of prattle. As I talked, the expression on her face gradually went from sure-I’d-be-happy-to-autograph-your-copy-of-my-book to what-the-fuck-is-that-floating-in-my-soup. “And so I guess I thought I’d just…” I couldn’t continue, not in the face of that stony wall.

  “It’s not something you can just decide you’re good at,” she finally said in a voice that would have given me frostbite if it could have. And then she turned her back on me and started talking to somebody else.

  I don’t know whether she felt threatened by me literally—in a sea of sweater vests and horn-rimmed rapture, maybe she thought I was going to steal something—but later that week somebody sent me a link to a post on her Web site from the day of the seminar that said, “ANYBODY can call themselves a cat behaviorist. BEWARE.”

  I had let her reload the double-barrel fear/doubt shotgun. And from that point forward, I didn’t call myself a cat behaviorist. I didn’t want her to get mad at me and ultimately reveal me as the fake I was. So I called myself a “cat behavior consultant.” And as time went on I called myself a lot of other things, but initially, at least, calling myself Cat Boy or Cat Daddy or cat translator or cat shrink was just a lighthearted way of avoiding the embarrassing truth that there was a part of me that had heard her and believed that I wasn’t qualified to do the job. It wasn’t enough to be an empathic being, it wasn’t enough to know a lot about cats, to understand them on a fundamental level. I began to cover my tattoos when I went to people’s houses; I took out my earrings. “I want my clients to pay attention to their cats and not my look,” I said to myself, but what I really meant was, “I want my clients not to notice that I don’t know the four-syllable words you have to know to do this work.”

  When I was very young, I used to go to work with my dad, watching in awe as he made deals in his unsteady English and just as often ripped somebody a new asshole. He had a sign on the wall near his desk. The walls were that dark wood paneling that was everywhere in the early ’70s. The sign was driftwood, the kind of plaque that was abundant on every boardwalk from Coney Island to Atlantic City. Next to a hobo’s face were carved the words, “Selling is like shaving—if you don’t do it every day, you’re a bum!”

  My dad always said to me that as long as I was happy, he was happy. But now, in the early days of punching my own clock, clean and sober for the first time in memory, completely out of any comfort zone I’d ever known, I reverted to that kid—I hung on my dad’s approval, and felt like I was the face on that stained driftwood. From across the country he knew, I imagined, that I was sleeping too late, not presenting myself like a professional.

  The problem, or the blessing, depending on how you look at it, was that the image I had spent a lifetime crafting was not coverable, not erasable, not shavable. When I actually worked for my dad, starting the summer after my sophomore year in high school, the struggle was apparent. I was an inveterate people-pleaser, I wanted my dad to be happy with me, but still I HAD to fly my freak flag. That summer I got my ear pierced; my first serious girlfriend did it with a safety pin and ice, of course.

  “What the hell have you done to yourself?” asked my father when he saw me.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Well, you’re not working with that in your ear.”

  So I took it out in the morning and put it back in during lunch, then back out, then back in at the end of the day. I was a bleeding, oozing mess. It made no sense to me—how could my dad be fine with the blood running down my neck but find a stupid gold stud unacceptable?

  Back then I hadn’t given a shit—within weeks I was making earrings out of matchbox cars. Now, though, with my dad’s perceived entrepreneurial judgment on one side, the well-known behaviorist’s scorn on the other, and nothing in the middle except my missing letters, I didn’t know what to do.

  But then Jean Hofve came into my life with her letters and her approval, to let me know that everything would be okay.

  Two weeks after the shelter had moved into our brand-spanking-new building, we experienced a tremendous outbreak of upper-respiratory infection in our cat population. The cats were in serious trouble, because the infection meant that they couldn’t smell their food, and the fact that they couldn’t smell their food meant that they weren’t eating. At all. We had feeding tubes in most of them, and I had a crew of cat volunteers, but despite our best efforts and intentions, they couldn’t do much good, and I couldn’t do much good. I mean, what were we going to do, hang out around the cats and love the infection away?

  And then somebody told me about this veterinarian, Dr. Jean, who had a line of holistic remedies called Spirit Essences. “You should ask her to formulate something for the cats,” he said, and because we were in a desperate place—these cats were starving to death—I did.

  “Just tell your volunteers,” she said over the phone, “as many times a day as they walk into that isolation area, just put it on the cats, mist the area, put it in their water.”

  And the cats got better.

  Fast.

  I tried to justify it, because this might as well have been something cooked up in a witch’s cauldron. “It must be the fact that we’re touching them with intention,” I said.

  “Well, that’s possible—it is the nature of vibrational medicine,” said Jean, “but minus the explanations, flower essences just work.”

  That was our first contact, and after that it seemed like everybody was telling me randomly that I needed to work with this woman. I’d finish her name before they got it out, with a semiweary nod. It’s like hearing a song you might have just ignored before as background noise and then you’re hearing it everywhere. “You and she just see cats and their needs in the same way,” one of the shelter workers told me.

  When I was “cut back” six months later, suddenly out of a “normal” job, my ass on the couch trying to figure out how to feed Benny and Velouria, it turned out that people had been telling her she needed to meet me, too. Virtually at the same time as I was let go, she walked away from her $75,000-a-year practice. And a few days after that, literally as I walked in the door of a monthly networking potluck for animal professionals in the area, the hostess of the party, our mutual friend and animal communicator Kate Solisti, said, “Oh, finally—Jackson, this is Jean, Jean, this is Jackson.”

  The Importance of Intent

  Cats are SO energetically sensitive. A pinnacle manifestation of vibrational energy between beings is touch.

  Why be careless with your power? Every time you bring touch to a being (especially when there is no common spoken language), you have the power to choose a healing message.

  Center yourself with a simple message—for example, “I bring you calm,” “I bring you peace.” If nothing else, it brings you peace and calm which helps to bring wellness to the recipient.

  You can use Spirit Essences or even some hydrosol-based essential oils to act as an energetic conductor for th
is type of exercise.

  “Oh, my God, it’s YOU!” we said in unison.

  “We have important work to do,” said Jean.

  And ten minutes later we had decided to go into business with each other.

  Little Big Cat was born out of our deep desire to keep cats in their homes, keep them from becoming part of the statistics that tell us that more than six million cats die in shelters every year. Jean and I had both worked in shelters, and we’d both been forced to euthanize healthy cats. Little Big Cat was created to offer another road—a way through and out of problems.

  The mind-body approach was the first concept we developed, although we didn’t have a name for it at the time. It was obvious that this was where our strengths intersected: the physical and behavioral aspects of a single situation. Jean and I wanted to take the normal, everyday relationship between people and cats to the next level: an enhanced, deeper bond. We knew that if people understood their cats better, knew what the instincts and evolutionary forces were that shaped feline behavior, not only would they be less frustrated with behaviors that were seemingly odd (but actually totally normal), they would develop an admiration of and fascination with those forces.

  The name of our company emphasized the essential big cat nature—tiger, lion, leopard—that’s still present in the housecat. Domestication is something of a challenge to the cat; although ancient peoples took cats into their homes and hearts, their social life with humans has been very much love/hate since then, and it is much more recent in the cat’s history than any other domestic animal that we finally “brought in” for good. Our “little cats” have a core of “big cat” within them (as I’d noticed with the idea of tree and bush dwellers) and so they have very similar needs in terms of behavior and health.

  Little Big Cats

  It’s not only fun for humans to watch their feline companions to bring out their “inner lions,” it’s important, too!

  Two major components of Little Big Cat, two pillars Jean and I built our house on, are:

  Play Therapy

  repeat after me:

  HUNT

  CATCH

  KILL

  EAT

  GROOM

  SLEEP This is the natural life of our little predators. If they can’t hunt, your play sessions must be geared toward mimicking this activity both in focus and energy expenditure. Play every day and so many “behavior issues” fall by the wayside!

  The Catkins Diet (again!) Aside from the physical benefits, discussed previously, of a carnivorous diet like weight control and coat health, behaviorally, you will notice a difference in your cats as they eat their food in a more evolutionarily connected way. They’re more likely to compromise. Try to get your cat to perform a sit with a bowl of kibble versus a bowl of meat as a reward. Which one wins?

  We would walk into a house where the cat was peeing outside of the litter box, and even though at first blush it would seem like a cut-and-dry behavioral issue, something, some pattern in the urination or manner of gait, for example, would seem… off. Jean and I would confer, she’d step in to do the proper labs and a nose-tip-to-tail exam, including a total reeducation on what cats needed to eat. And that level of completion overcame my “letter paralysis.” What she didn’t know about cats’ secret life I knew, and what I didn’t know about the machine draped over the secret, she did. It was incredibly empowering to know that we were philosophically in lockstep and, as a unit, confident and complete. Having Jean with me meant that I didn’t have to be quite so terrified that this conversation would happen:

  “So, Jackson, you say you’re a cat expert. What are your credentials?”

  “I’m a, um, I have a master’s degree.”

  “Really? In what?”

  “Um… acting. But it helps! No, really…. Wait, where are you going?”

  I would have gone to vet school to be a veterinary behaviorist if my mind worked that way, but it doesn’t. Jean would spend twelve hours reading and researching and spilling it back out into an article she was writing. I would just as soon slit my wrists.

  What I could do, while waiting for the phone to ring for our first consult, and with my dad’s voice bouncing around in my head, was make my family proud and think like a salesman.

  My dad is a salesman. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a salesman. My brother is a salesman.

  I am not a salesman. The only thing I hate more than selling things is having things sold to me. But I needed to eat, I needed to bring in money somehow. And I also needed, I can see now in retrospect, to legitimize what I was doing in my father’s eyes. “You’re selling animal holy water?” he would say, half bewildered, but he understood the idea of selling something. Being a cat shrink made no sense to him. But selling a bill of goods, whether cats, holistic remedies, or the Brooklyn Bridge, he understood.

  Spirit Essences, Jean’s and my line of flower remedies that addressed the energetic imbalance underlying animals’ emotional, physical, and mental issues—things like separation anxiety, asthma, travel stress, and so on—was the only thing in our lives that smelled like commerce. The amount of money it brought in was almost negligible, but it was at least predictable, so I insisted we fold it into our daily Little Big Cat operations. The only way I could make that happen was basically to assure Jean that I would do everything outside the realm of conceptualizing, because after spending five years working this tiny engine all by herself, she was sick of it. If this was going to run up the hill, I had to make it go. We built the Spirit Essences Web site as a complement to the Little Big Cat Web site. LBC was about resources, information, the unbridled enthusiasm we both felt. Spirit Essences was the material outgrowth of the ideal; our chance to have the Ben & Jerry’s effect. Two normal people making some seriously good stuff for your animal friends. We started getting orders. Very few at first—an order a day, two if we were extremely lucky. But we put out the will to the universe so that orders would start flooding in.

  They didn’t.

  We made, on average, thirty dollars a day. This was how I defined myself: as a businessman who only made thirty dollars a day. In other words, the fraud continued. We both lived off our credit cards.

  Every day I would get one of those plastic USPS buckets that mail comes in, and I would take whatever orders we had gotten in the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and put them in that bucket, and bring them to the post office. I’d be standing in line at the end of the day with one or two envelopes, glancing at the other small-business owners with their overflowing buckets.

  “Hey, there!” I’d say to the man working the window, pretending I was proud of my pathetic bucket.

  He wouldn’t answer.

  “How’s your day been?”

  “Mm,” he’d grunt. He didn’t care and he saw right through me. I got it; it was the post office. AND it was the end of the day.

  I would look over at the woman who sold rare books, who would come in with twelve totes destined for the arms of collectors all over the world, I would sheepishly smile at her with my one or two envelopes, she’d look at her watch and I would think to myself, “First you’re a pretend behaviorist and now you’re a pretend businessman.” In two years, not a visit to the post office went by that I didn’t want to stick my head in the sand as deeply as possible. Or at the least in my plastic postal bucket. God knows there was room in there.

  The first time I filled a bucket, I paraded it in there like some postal peacock. Watching the guy behind the desk send my babies off around the country (and the world!) to the hordes of animal guardians who just wanted a better quality of life for their friends, proudly holding up the line of people who just wanted stamps, shooting a flirtatious glance over to my rare book seller compadre, a look she flirtatiously returned—yes, Virginia, size DOES matter—I felt vindicated. I had a business. Not a hobby, like my parents had insisted music and animals were, but a real-life job.

  Jean began to slow down noticeably, sleeping less, showing considerabl
y less of what kept me energized through those really rough beginning years. “I’m like a bulldozer,” she had said once, in a friendly conversation early on in our work together. “If you’re in my way, I’m not going to notice you. And I’m telling you this now because if you ever get crushed under my wheels, the only thing I’m going to say is, ‘Why did you let yourself be caught under them in the first place?’” I remember thinking about this conversation at one point during that time. Her bulldozerness was my rock; she cared not at all about offending people, about tossing off those who moved against us philosophically and wasted our time. When left to my own devices, the approval of every living being was all I cared about. She inspired, pushed, and lit me up full of ideas as a cat student. And she was just disappearing.

  After a particularly scary night in the ER, it was discovered that Jean had heart disease, that at some point she would need a valve replaced. It explained everything. It helped nothing. I was sympathetic and selfishly terrified. I was doing everything: I was ordering essences, I was buying bottles, I was sterilizing the bottles, I was mixing up the formulas, I was designing the labels and putting them together, and I was filling orders, and this stuff took an insanely long amount of time. I was doing everything by myself except making executive decisions, which, at that point, she would just fight with me about.

  This is only part of the story, of course; Jean’s work was beyond instrumental in helping spread our ideas. She wrote so many articles and just gave them away on the Web site. LittleBigCat.com became a bastion of feline idealism—a place where, thanks to Jean, we could share our ideas with other cat guardians. But the whole unfolding situation put me in a terrible frame of mind.