The cat whisperer
He can cure your furry friend’s hang-ups
Paul Easton (and his cat, Myrtle) meets Jackson Galaxy, the world’s expert in taming tearaway
felines
T‘It was the most humbling experience I’ve ever had, He literally and figuratively kicked my butt at every turn.’
Jackson Galaxy
all, peppered with tattoos and laden with gaudy rings, you wouldn’t pick Jackson Galaxy as a cat lover. But the part-time rocker with the celestial name turns to goo whenever he spots a moggy.
He understands cats, and cats get him.
That connection has brought Galaxy a career as a cat behaviourist, plus a successful television show My Cat From Hell, now into a sixth season and screened around the world.
‘‘I had no desire to be the cat guy, I wanted to be a rock star, and that was all I wanted to be since I was a kid, but when a light is shined that brightly on you, you go with that,’’ Galaxy says.
Born in New York, Galaxy grew up with a dog, a goldfish and dreams of rock stardom.
The rocker inside remains – his 23-year-old brown and black cat Velouria is named after a Pixies song.
But about 20 years ago, while working in an animal shelter, he discovered a connection with cats that set his life on a different path.
‘‘That thing was when I would sit in a room and cats would come to me,’’ he says.
On a windswept night he managed to calm a room full of distressed cats by slowly blinking at them – a technique thought to show affection.
‘‘It was this transformative event where three hours later there were 45 quiet cats, I was exhausted, and you’ve just had one of those epiphanies,’’ he says.
‘‘When you’re working in a shelter situation, and you’re killing a lot of cats in those shelters, you soon realise that if you have a thing, let’s make this work, let’s make these cats more adoptable, less freaked out and get them out of here alive. Euthanasia is the mother of invention. If it’s a gift that’s been given to you, you use it.’’
In My Cat From Hell the 49-year-old Galaxy (born Richard Kirschner, he changed his name in his twenties) is called in to sort out the behaviour of a host of nefarious felines. and frequently their owners.
His biggest challenge came in the frightening form of Lux – the infamous ‘‘911 Cat’’.
Lux went viral after he attacked a baby, then frightened his family so much they shut themselves in a room and called 911.
‘‘It was the most humbling experience I’ve ever had, He literally and figuratively kicked my butt at every turn. Every time I thought I had him figured out, every time I thought we had a happy ending scripted for him, he’d come undone,’’ he says.
‘‘A very violent cat, very unpredictable. It was a really heart-breaking case. For six months every time I got a text and it had the name Lux on it, I knew it was bad news.’’
Lux was eventually given a new home and sent to an animal hospital for ‘‘professional care’’.
Galaxy says cats are woefully understood by humans, seen as aloof killers – ‘‘robots with fur.’’
But in fact cats say ‘‘I love you’’ all the time – we’re just not listening.
‘‘When you have a prey animal, they always have to deal with something killing them, so for them to come up and just sit next to you is huge. They fall asleep
next to you, it’s huge. Shows of affection from cats can be very very subtle. It’s anything that shows vulnerability.’’
Galaxy’s on a mission to prove that cats can love as much as any creature, maybe more.
‘‘They are so ‘‘other’’ from us that their way of expressing has nothing to do with humans,’’ he says.
‘‘With dogs we brought them in from the wild over thousands of years ago we and programmed them to act a certain way so that we recognised it. With cats we never asked them anything, so now when they express things we’re like what the hell was that? It must mean nothing, it must mean you don’t like me.’’
Galaxy hates the ‘‘Crazy Cat Lady’’ label for example. It’s the idea that anyone who gets a cat is just a few felines away from going completely bonkers,’’ he explains. ‘‘It’s done a lot of damage, it keeps us from embracing cats as a culture because we’re so worried about being judged, like if you have two cats you’ll never get a date.’’
‘‘The Crazy Cat Lady thing is actually costing cat’s lives because people don’t want to be judged. It’s time for us to blow that up.’’
New York-raised Galaxy lives outside Los Angeles with his wife Minoo Rahbar and a menagerie of two dogs and 10 cats (five pet felines and a nearby half-feral family).
They couple married last year at a pet sanctuary, with their dog Mooshka and a resident donkey as ring bearers.
‘‘We both have an affinity with donkeys.’’
New Zealand has the highest rate of cat ownership in the world, with 1.4 million moggies, according to a 2011 survey by the Companion Animal Council.
Most of those roam outside, while in the United States inside cats are far more common.
‘‘It’s pretty educational for me to go around the world, and people are saying why would you keep your cats inside?
‘‘I’m from New York City, you’re not going to have a cat outside. And of course you have far less predators here than in the United States.’’
This is Galaxy’s first visit to New Zealand, though he’s previously slammed Gareth Morgan’s campaign against cats as ‘‘doing nothing but stir hatred for a species. All that happens is that animals suffer and die.’’
Galaxy simply wants humans to put down their barriers and let cats into their heart – to love, play, and mourn without fear.
‘‘Allow yourself to be a little humble in front of a cat. Cats have something to teach you they really do, but it’s important for you to release this sense of dominance over them in order to experience it.
‘‘What they have to bring you is I think profound, but you have to cross your own challenge line in order to appreciate it.’’
And if your pet dies, don’t be afraid of feeling upset.
‘‘Sometimes we grieve animals harder than we grieve humans, it’s a more pure pain, when we’re allowed to express it. It’s an incredibly devastating feeling. There’s no resentment, there’s no unsaid things, no ‘I shoulda said, coulda said’. It’s just love and loss, distilled down to it’s purest place and it’s really hard.’’