Iam a few days into training my cat and things aren’t going too well. She has been sick all over the carpet and her blanket. My attempts at making her perform simple tasks are met with bafflement and tail flicking. The custom-made toys I have crafted for her are summarily ignored. At one point, she starts chewing on the copy of the training book I’m using, looking me in the eye as if to say: “Just you try.”
The book in question is The Trainable Cat by biologist John Bradshaw and Sarah Ellis, a feline behaviour specialist at the charity International Cat Care. The duo’s BBC Horizon programmes, The Secret Life of the Cat (2013) and Cat Watch (2014), aimed to demystify cat behaviour and their new book sets out detailed instructions on how to help cats deal with the sources of stress inherent to life as a pet: trips to the vet, visits from strangers and new and potentially upsetting situations such as moving house or the arrival of a baby.
After dogs, cats are the UK’s second most popular pet choice, with 17% of households owning one or more of the 7.6m cats in the country. Yet they are seen as mysterious and unpredictable; it’s not a coincidence that sphinxes are symbols of inscrutability. Cats, we are told, are independent creatures and, as a result, owners largely leave them to their own devices.