Cat Chat®

#311: Sheila Massey talks about her Hard Hat Cats NYC, which puts unadoptable cats from the NYC shelter into breweries, restaurants and retail stores where they provide non toxic rodent control in return for safety: a litter box, food and shelter.

#310: Dr. Mikel Maria Delgado of FelineMinds cat behavior consulting, explains that you cannot — nor should you — try to stop a cat from scratching, which is a natural and essential behavior. Instead, you need to offer a variety of sturdy, tall scratching posts in the areas where you spend time. Better yet, do like Mikel does and transform the back of your couch into a stylish array of scratchers!

#309: Allison Ward, the founder of Salty Cat, launched her company with the intention of creating a lower-priced cat food with premium ingredients. How did she do it? Simple! By lowering her profit margin, while also creating an egalitarian management structure in the small company.

#308: Cat behaviorist Dr. Mikel Maria Delgado explains another way to look at “vertical peeing” — cats who raise their butts like a rising elevator to pee behind themselves. But because they have all four feet in the litter box, it is not “marking.” She recommends some litter box accessories to manage the problem.

#307: Dr. Dean Vicksman, the Board Chair of the nonprofit EveryCat Health Foundation, talks about how their grant funding for feline health science has helped crack the code for managing long-COVID in humans. 

#306: Cat behaviorist Dr Mikel Maria Delgado shares Tracie’s dismay at what has become “litter nonsense” (to appease IG and TikTok content creators) instead of using “litter common sense” and giving cats what they need: comfortable clay clumping litter without any added chemical colors and scents. They both extol the virtues of Dr. Elsey’s litters but they miss his signature litter invention the &...

#305: Cat behaviorist Stephen Quandt (https://catbehaviorhelp.com/) discusses the stress to people and other cats in the home when an otherwise friendly cat suddenly displays unexplained aggression towards a family member — and how to make sense of it.

#304: Andrey Gregoryev, who invented the Brook glass fountain, recently adopted Vincent, a kitty from a hoarding situation, who will not touch anything but dry kibble, which Tracie calls Kitty Krack because it is harmful and addictive to cats. After giving many tips to get him off the dry food, Tracie said that Dr. Elsey's cleanprotein dry food is the only one she can recommend because of how...

#303: Rachel Geller helps people understand their cats better with free advice through her personal nonprofit All Cats All the Time. She always recommends putting a new cat in one room in the house and only introducing him/her to the rest of the environment little by little. She often has to convince people that one space is not prison for a cat — it's doing them a favor by not overwhelming t...

#302: Cat behavior consultant (https://felineminds.com/) Dr. Mikel Maria Delgado describes the slow and patient process of introducing your cat to a harness — then experimenting letting the kitty walk you indoors and possibly outdoors to see if it suits his/her personality.

#301: Jay Ingram wrote "The Science of Pets" so people could better understand the science and facts of their pets' behavior — and in particular how to understand what makes their cat tick, as well as what s/he may be feeling.

 #300: Stephen Quant of https://catbehaviorhelp.com/ often gets consulted about a cat peeing on vertical surfaces, usually by backing up to the area in question. Often with a high and quivering tail. The cat will then shoot a stream of urine on the vertical surface. Stephen explains that this is not intended as urination, but is actually spraying as a territorial marker, so he explains ways to red...

#299: When Andrey Grigoryev invented the Brook glass fountain in his quest for enrichment and hydration for indoor cats, he never expected it to become the best-selling cat fountain. Cat lovers snatched up the clear glass fountain for its aesthetic appeal, the purity of the filtered water, the health benefits of drinking for their cats and that they could pop it in the dishwasher. 

#298: Tracie reads from this sequel to Syou Ishida’s prize-winning best-selling first book “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” which she discusses with Jennifer Mowdy from The Literary Cat Co. bookstore as part of the successful phenomenon of translated Japanese fiction generating worldwide attention.

#297: Deborah Magaldi talks about the Helen Sanders CatPAWS organization in Orange County California, where they are saving very young kindles of kittens from a certain death in the shelters (where there's nobody available to bottle feed them every 3 hours) by providing a DIY Kitten box for the people who bring in kittens that are not yet weaned. This gives Good Samaritans a chance to actuall...

#296: Mikel Maria Delgado of https://felineminds.com/ explains how cat lovers tend to have a bias towards certain colors of cats and have (mistakenly) ascribed personality traits to colors that they are projecting onto cats. In fact, a cat's temperament is not genetically linked in any way, but a cat's personality can be influenced by their gender. Dr Delgado explains how that works — bu...

#295: Rebecca van Laer's memoir, "Cat," is for everyone who can relate to her "love letter" to the kitties who have graced her life, using her own cats as a lens to understand what it means to be a "cat person." 

#294: Dr. Heather Davis from PRN (employee-owned by the veterinarians) explains why they developed Felycin®-CA1, the first weekly therapy developed for cats with subclinical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), since this heart problem affects 1 in 7 cats (and 1 in 3 senior cats). She suggests videoing your own kitty while sleeping so you can see whether he takes less than 30 breaths a minute (good)...

#293: Jae & Adrienne talk about how their huge cat-loving following has grown organically, all from a place of mutually caring about cats and wanting them to be well, which is how their own supplement company evolved.

#292: Susannah Fullerton speaks from her home in Sydney Australia about the delight of researching her instantly sold-out book  “Great Writers & the Cats Who Owned Them,” with in-depth chapters chronicling the close relationship of 17 celebrated authors around the world who adored cats, with one in particular stealing their heart. Susannah also discussed the captivating  literary tours she lea...

#291: Rachel Geller — of the non-profit cat behavior practice All Cats All the Time — discusses Feline Non recognition Syndrome when one of your cats suddenly treats his former housemate as a stranger, often with hostility — usually when returning from the groomer or vet clinic.

#290: Mikel Maria Delgado talks about the variety of ways that cats communicate with different vocalizations, and the fact that cats meow almost entirely to humans and not to other cats (other than mama cats and kittens).

#289: Karen Dendy Smith is a trained animal communicator and devoted cat lover, who explains how her training as an intuitive guides her to receive messages from a person's cat, here or in the afterlife.

#288: Rachel Geller’s new book has won some prestigious literary awards and is named for her own philanthropic nonprofit (through which she helps people “work things out” with their kitties without charge). “All Cats, All the Time” is filled with solid advice and suggestions for managing feline issues in Rachel’s signature calm, patient nonjudgmental style.

#287: Kaan Kerman in the Department of Psychology at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, talks about getting international attention for his research study that showed cats vocalize more with the male humans in their lives than the women. The study was designed reliably — so what conclusion can we draw from its conclusion?