Total Cat Mojo

This comprehensive cat care guide from the star of the hit Animal Planet show "My Cat from Hell," Jackson Galaxy, shows us how to eliminate feline behavioral problems by understanding cats' instinctive behavior. Cat Mojo is the confidence that cats exhibit when they are at ease in their environment and in touch with their natural instincts--to hunt, catch, kill, eat, groom, and sleep. Problems such as litter box avoidance and aggression arise when cats lack this confidence. Jackson Galaxy's number one piece of advice to his clients is to help their cats harness their mojo. This book is his most comprehensive guide yet to cat behavior and basic cat care, rooted in understanding cats better. From getting kittens off to the right start socially, to taking care of cats in their senior years, and everything in between, this book addresses the head-to-toe physical and emotional needs of cats--whether related to grooming, nutrition, play, or stress-free trips to the vet.

Autorentext

Jackson Galaxy with Mikel Delgado, PhD

Leseprobe
¿Que Es Mojo?
 
I am in front of a large and very enthusiastic audience in Buenos Aires, while on a tour of Latin America. Over the course of the year, I’ve adjusted to speaking with a translator in places like Malaysia and Indonesia, and I had just been in Bogotá and Mexico City. If you can have simultaneous translation, with the audience wearing headphones, it is a blessing beyond belief, because the audience is with you—the laughing, gasping, and applauding happens (one hopes) just a second or three later than with an English-speaking crowd. In the big scheme of things, it’s a minor inconvenience.
 
But, when you and your translator switch off (you finish a full thought before he begins), well . . . it’s just a massive headache at best, an absolute kamikaze mission at worst. My translator would stand next to me, a ghost dodging my physical outbursts and stream-of-consciousness rants. The more excited I get, however, the less I remember to heed the presence or the needs of my “ghost.” Some translators, the ones who pride themselves as practitioners of a linguistic art form, allow me to get an entire para­graph out of my mouth before tapping me on the shoulder or giving me that sideways glance, in order to succinctly and with equal fervor catch the audience up.
 
On this night in Buenos Aires, my translator isn’t that person. She is actually a newscaster who happens to be bilingual. It is not the most grace­ful dance, that’s for sure. There is much in the way of toe stepping on both of our parts.
 
Improvisation aside, I always introduce the concept of Cat Mojo early in the show. It’s the linchpin of my entire presentational spiel. That intro­duction, on this night, is firing on all cylinders; I’m feeling it for sure, as I attempt to occupy the space between cat guy and Pentecostal revivalist. I’m breathlessly demonstrating what a Mojo-fied cat looks like, shame­lessly preening, modeling the tail and ear postures, the overall gait of con­fidence. This all culminates at that moment when I say, “And what do we call this? Man, we call this Cat Mojo. Your cat. Has . . . MOJO.” I allow that statement to reverberate. And it reverberates for entirely too long, going from a drama-filled beat to an awkward silence. I give my translator that sideways glance. Nothing comes out of her mouth, and her eyes be­tray a slight panic.
 
At once, she allows her newscasterly character to fall away. She leans in close to me and whispers, “Qué es mojo?” And I respond, in hindsight maybe a bit too loud, “What do you mean, ‘What is mojo?’ You don’t know what mojo means?” We’re having a conversation on this stage, and with every passing reverberant second, I’m losing my grip on this audi­ence. Incredulous, I turn to them with equal measures of validation seek­ing and creeping dread, and say in full sideshow-barker voice, “Hey, folks, you know what mojo means, right? ‘You’ve got your mojo on,’ ‘You’ve got your mojo workin’.’ How many people here know what the word ‘mojo’ means?”
 
Cue the crickets. That feeling of creeping dread is now a full-on, flop-sweat-inducing nightmare. For the first time since I was twelve years old, holding a guitar with a broken string at a YMCA talent show, I am about to flame out before a live audience, and I couldn’t think of a single way out of it.
 
I think back to 2002, when I was sitting at my desk in Boulder, Colorado. The desk consisted of a big chunk of particleboard resting on two saw­horses. I was inspired at the time to turn what I knew into a manifesto of sorts—well, less inspired and more motivated. After a few years as an inde­pendent behavior consultant, I found myself trying entirely too hard to boil my knowledge base about all cats down to a relatable info-nugget for my clients, so we could more readily get to the part where they apply that knowledge to getting to know their cats. As is the case today, but much more so back then, cats are dismissed as being inscrutable—so far outside the behavioral and experiential realm of humans that we have no anchor point to hang a relationship on. I was determined to find that hook.
 
Finding the hook was not about convenience, either. Remember, I had worked for ten years in an animal shelter and was more than a little in­vested. Far too many cats—millions a year—were (and still are) being killed in these shelters. Time and time again I would witness a question mark–shaped barrier of communication becoming a barbed-wire fence that led to the fracturing of very tender and tenuous relationships. It was the “mys­tery” of cats’ behavior—their inscrutable nature being fed through the human gumball machine called ego and emerging as a perceived insult—that compelled those frustrated humans to surrender them to the shelter or even turn them loose into the street. I was trying to, at the very least, take the barbed wire off the fence, so that the human and the animal could meet there safely and begin the process of deep­ening, instead of destroying, their bond.
 
One hook that I had already started employing with my students and clients was the concept of “the Raw Cat” the idea that the cat in your lap is, in an evolutionary way, milli­meters removed from his ancestors (more on this in chapter 1). The Raw Cat represents the innate drives that have influenced cat be­havior for the entire time cats have roamed the planet: the need to hunt, the realization that they are in the middle of the food chain, and the need to own and protect their territory.
 
As such, I came to believe that many, if not most, of the problems that my cat clients were experiencing (with the exception of undiagnosed physi­cal issues), could be boiled down to territorial anxiety. The Raw Cat, con­tent most of the time to stay in a place in the back of your cat’s mind, comes screaming to the fore when confronted with a threat to territorial security. Whether that threat is real or perceived matters little. The fact is, if they feel it, they will almost have to act upon it. It’s not enough to address the symptoms that become hair-pulling annoyances to us. Rather, we must find the opposite of that anxiety and coax that Raw Cat quality out to the point where it dominates and eventually extinguishes the anxiety.
 
Back to my makeshift desk: It was very late at night, and I was trying to push through that insistent, hallucinogenic moment when sleep would com…