How to handle a cat that hates being picked up
Dear Cathy: We have an 18-month-old tabby. When we brought her home from the shelter, she had an upper respiratory infection and chlamydia, which was passed on from her mother. For six months, we had to “burrito” her to give her eyedrops. Now, if we pick her up, she only allows us to hold her for literally 10 seconds before she starts to hiss, bite and scratch, which makes it impossible to give her routine nail cuts or get her into her cat carrier for a trip to the veterinarian.
Our vet prescribed a tranquilizer for vet visits, but even under the influence she becomes a devil cat at the vet, escaping and running around the office, hissing and biting. We tried the same tranquilizers at home for her nail clipping with the same results.
We think this behavior developed from her earlier medication routine. She is otherwise a sweet cat and will brush up against us and allow us to pet her. What can we do to regain her trust?
— Frances, Levittown, New York
Dear Frances: While some cats simply don’t like to be held, early experiences can shape behaviors. Let’s replace an unhappy memory with a new experience associated with food. Here’s what you can do.
Get her a feline pheromone collar to wear. These have a calming effect on cats. Let her wear the collar for a few days so she is in the proper mindset for training.
When you start training, pick her up — but only a few feet off the floor and only for a few seconds. Talk to her in a sweet voice, and then immediately put her down in front of a tempting treat or special wet cat food. It’s important you put her down before she reacts. Essentially, you are rewiring her brain to associate being held with a special treat. For the next few weeks, pick her up only to give her the special treat or food, increasing how long you hold her and how high off the floor.
After a few weeks, reintroduce nail trims, but only do a paw a day, followed by a treat. When taking her to the vet, drop a towel over her to pick her up and put her in the crate. With time, you can build up her tolerance to these things. But remember, some cats simply don’t like to be held and prefer to sit on your lap instead.
Dear Cathy: I have a 7-yearold dog named Baxter. I have had him for five years. I have a doggy door that he uses to go into a fenced backyard. However, he pees on the dishwasher, refrigerator, washing machine, couch and cardboard boxes. If my new boyfriend leaves the door to his room open, Baxter pees on surfaces in his room, most recently on a computer sitting on the floor. I have never caught him peeing. I always just clean up the mess and do not yell at him because he is sensitive. I am at a loss at what to do.
— Autumn, Littleton, Colorado Dear Autumn: Your dog is likely marking the home to show that it is his, and the new boyfriend likely triggered the behavior even more. There are a few ways to address this problem. First, make sure your dog is fixed. Second, get a canine pheromone collar for him to wear so he is more relaxed and receptive to training. Third, make sure you pick up around the house to limit his places to pee. No computers, cardboard boxes or dirty laundry on the floor.
Next, use an enzymatic cleaner (available at the pet store) to remove all traces of the urine so he is not drawn back to the same spot. Then, start leaving treats in these areas for him to find. If he thinks he might find a treat by the dishwasher, he is less likely to pee on it. Don’t rely on the doggy door. Routinely take him outside to reduce his ability to mark.
Finally, have your boyfriend feed your dog, give him treats, pet him and take him for walks. They need to forge a relationship since your dog may be feeling anxious with his presence. The walks will also encourage Baxter to mark outside, which should help limit his inside offenses.
Cathy M. Rosenthal is an animal advocate, author, columnist and pet expert. Send your questions, stories and tips to cathy@pet pundit.com. Please include your name, city and state. You can follow her @cathym rosenthal.
In “The Father’s” house are many rooms, all of them appointed with details so sharp and precise that you might be startled to find them vanishing a few moments later: Didn’t those backsplash tiles look different a minute ago? Wasn’t there a lamp on that side table? The French writer-director Florian Zeller, adapting his internationally acclaimed play for the screen, has a meticulous eye and a keen sense of mischief, which doesn’t lighten so much as heighten the implacable tragedy at the heart of this story. The pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.
Those pieces have been plucked from the life of an 80-year-old Englishman named Anthony. Known as Andre in the play, he has been renamed here in honor of his interpreter, Anthony Hopkins, who repays it with a performance of extraordinary psychological cunning and emotional force. We first encounter Anthony listening to a recording of Henry Purcell and John Dryden’s 1691 dramatic opera “King Arthur, or the British Worthy.” Before long his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), comes in and the music stops, though not before an aria have rung out: “What power art thou, who from below/ Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow/ From beds of everlasting snow?”
Soon enough, a deep, menacing chill descends on this movie like a fog and stays there, wrapping around the mind of a man trying to shake off his slumber.
Less an unreliable narrator than an unreliable observer, Anthony is in a rapidly advancing state of dementia. His fierce tantrums have recently burned through a series of in-home nurses, leaving Anne at her wits’ end.
Anthony, for his part, has a rather different understanding of who’s intruding on whom. His daughter sometimes becomes a stranger. He is visited and attended to by others he doesn’t recognize. He reacts to each new piece of information with skepticism and fascination as if he were an investigator making a surprising discovery.
“The Father,” in other words, is both a detective story and a study in confinement. The original play availed itself of the natural abstractions of theatrical space, turning the stage into a psychological hall of mirrors. But Zeller, making an elegant and incisive feature debut, finds an ideal equivalent within the more realistic parameters of the movie screen.
The rigorous interiority of “The Father” compels your attention: If narrative cinema is largely predicated on the illusion of seamlessness, there’s something apt about the way Zeller both upholds and shatters that illusion, bridging the narrative gap across a series of jarring discontinuities. You can imagine the mind doing something similar, struggling for lucidity in the wake of mounting incoherence.
But you don’t need to imagine it because for the entirety of the movie, Hopkins embodies it. His Anthony can be vulnerable and fierce, broken and defiant: His moments of verbal acuity and self-aware humor exist on a continuum with his equally sudden lapses into oblivion.
The film’s final embrace is a quietly astounding vision of grace in solitude, and it harks back to that opening aria, with its invocation of eternal winter and the unheard rejoinder that follows: “’Tis Love, ’tis Love, ’tis Love that has warm’d us.”
MPAA rating: PG-13 (strong language and thematic material) Running time: 1:37
Where to watch: In theaters and streaming on demand Feb. 26