It’s not the cat, it’s you, says behaviourist

A COUPLE of years ago my husband and I returned home from a three-week holiday. Our cat Butters seemed over the moon to see us again and fussed around at our feet. We went to sleep that night with her purring contentedly at the foot of our bed.

My husband woke up the next morning to see Butters eyeballing him from the chair in the corner of the bedroom. And then he smelled it. The poo that was balancing precariously on the doona. She hated us for leaving her and spent the night plotting her naughtiest act of revenge. Right?

Nope. Not according to Australia’s veritable cat whisperer Dr Kim Kendall.

“There’s no such thing as a naughty cat,” said Dr Kendall, an applied cat behaviourist who opened Sydney’s first cat-only clinic 23 years ago.

“What she’s telling you is that you are being completely unreliable and she has learnt to live without you.”

However Dr Kendall believes that the poop also had a purpose that was actually rather sweet.

“You’ve come back smelling of something else, so your cat wanted to make you smell like her the fastest she knew how. The fact that she pooed in your bed while you were in it signals a really high level of distress.”

◗ CHANGE THE ENVIRONMENT, NOT YOUR CAT: Dr Kendall said that many of the physical symptoms and problem behaviours she sees in cats are caused by underlying issues relating to the way they’re being looked after.

“A cat not using a litter tray is never a mistake – it’s a signal of distress,” she said.

Take my friend Justine’s cat, who does a protest pee on a particular spot on the carpet if Justine returns home past her cat’s dinner time.

“The cat feels that its owner is unreliable; that its environment is unreliable. There is no such thing as a naughty cat, just in the same way that no toddler is naughty. It’s a concept that took me a long time to discover.”