A little book on cat behavior. In a format I’m familiar with from several Desmond Morris books I once read (on dogs and cats, respectively). It’s organized into a few general sections: kittens, behaviors that harken back to your cat’s wild ancestry, things that (may) cause friction between humans and their cats – or just bafflement, on our part- and specific problems, like dealing with a cat that sprays in the house, or claws the furniture, or attacks people’s ankles. A lot of the answers to the questions seemed like just plain old common sense to me, but then I’ve lived with one cat or another for decades of my life. Some of the explanations on underlying reasons for what cats do added to my knowledge (if the author was correct, a few I wasn’t sure about- like why cats put their rear ends in the air -towards you- when you pet them). The teeth chattering for example, that explanation was new to me (it is the same jaw motion a cat uses to sever the spinal cord). And the reasons behind cats playing with their prey- which the author attests wild cats and barn cats don’t do. She states there are two possibilities- pet cats get fewer opportunities to hunt, so they want to make the chance last as long as possible. Also, if they are not experienced with different prey types, they won’t know a small mouse can’t really hurt them, so they smack it around a lot to disable or stun it at first. But for the most part, not much in this book was new to me. I’d heard or read of (or simply observed and deduced) these answers before. And I thought that the advice given on how to deal with some problems and situations fell short of the mark. Solutions are not always so easy as the author presented. I did like that a few pages had little extra side boxes with tidbits on similar behavior in other species- whether big wild cats or completely different animals- ranging from zebra to foxes, bears, chimpanzees, squirrels and dolphins. I was, sorry to say, not very impressed with the illustrations. Most of them had something slightly awkward about the drawing.
I think there’s something about fiction or narratives that my brain still struggles with- maybe the imaginative part. I paused a J Fic novel I was struggling through to read this one, this felt much easier to comprehend. Straightforward. So that’s a plus!
