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WHY IT WANTS ‘SPACE’
What Your Cat (Or Your Neighbor’s) Can’t Tell You About Its Needs
A cat psychiatrist reveals what he’s learned from decades of studying feline behavior
I used to explain why I prefer dogs to cats in either of two ways:
- Cats are too aloof — you can do fun things with dogs you can’t do with cats, which just sit on your lap.
- I’ve never seen a dog kill a sweet little baby bluebird for sport.
I still prefer dogs, no doubt in part because I grew up in a home with a beagle and German shepherd but no cats. And I may never get used to seeing cats kill birds, as you do often on my part of the Gulf Coast.
But are they really less interesting than dogs? I’m less sure after reading Claude Béata’s new The Interpretation of Cats.
Trained as a veterinarian, Béata became a cat psychiatrist — yes, that’s a thing — who has spent much of his career trying to fathom what goes on in the minds of his feline patients. His book has been a bestseller in his native France, where he’s a vice president of the French Association of Vets for Pets, and it makes a good case that cats are more complex than most of us know.
