 The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps. Michael Maria Delgado is a certified cat behavior consultant. She's worked full time as a cat behavior specialist at the San Francisco SPCA. She's also founded Feline Minds, which I'm reading her bio from felineminds.com. She's been featured in Cat Fancy, The New York Times, Slate, and The Huffington Post. And I read about her this week in The Washington Post. She comes to us today from Berkeley, California. Michael Maria Delgado. Hello, Michael. Hi. Thanks for having me. Thank you for doing this. I'm currently a PhD candidate. You see Berkeley in the psychology department. That's right. I am wrapping up and hope to be a doctor by next year. Okay, Dr. Delgado, may I say that? It's a little... I don't want to jinx it. I have so much to ask you, but is YouTube changing the way people like you are learning about cats? I wouldn't say it's necessarily changing how we learn about cats, but it's changing how we share information about cats. I think the problem with YouTube is that there's a wide range of quality in what's getting posted on there. I think a lot of people are just trying to make their cat famous. And so they're trying some wacky things like dressing their cat up in a costume or making their cat play drums. Those kinds of things are not necessarily beneficial to cats as pets. But on the other hand, cats are getting a lot of attention. They're naturally cute. People are becoming obsessed like you. So I think overall that could have benefits like increasing the number of cats who are adopted because now everybody thinks cats are cool. Cats are cool, but did you ever see something on YouTube and say, I didn't know that? I mean, there's always idiosyncratic behaviors that... And these are the things that people always want to know, like why is my cat afraid of cucumbers? That was the trend last year. And a lot of times we don't necessarily know the answer to the question. It's like your cat is an individual. Just like you are, you do weird things. So yeah, occasionally you do see things and you scratch your head and without more data, we can't really make a conclusion about what that means for cats overall. We might know that that one particular cat maybe got attention for doing a cute behavior or for whatever reason it enjoys a particular behavior. But we don't necessarily learn a lot about cats in general. You know, I have three friends who are psychiatrists. Actually, it's transference, so I'm seeing three psychiatrists. Okay, that was going to be my next question. Yeah, I think they're my friends, but no, I know three psychiatrists who insist that cats are much more interesting than dogs. Are cats smarter than dogs? Everyone always wants to compare cats to dogs. So cat people versus dog people are cats smarter than dogs or dogs nicer than cats. And I see the only thing that they really have in common is that they're the two most popular pets and they're both predators. But other than that, they have a very different evolutionary history. The reason they became pets is very different. And so I really don't like to compare them. I think cats are very smart. They have evolved to solve certain problems. The main one being how to kill mice and dogs have been very highly selected through domestication for particular behaviors, which is why you have some dogs that like to fetch and some dogs that maybe like to point and some dogs that like to sit on laps, whereas all cats have kind of just come into our lives to do one thing, which is to control pests. I do a radio show with Ralph Nader. Yes, I'm bragging. And by the way, Noam Chomsky was on with Ralph and yes, I voted for Ralph Nader twice. Just FYI. So yes, you're even smarter than I imagined. And you know, I always try to impress Ralph Nader that I know something we're talking about cats. And I said, you know, cats have not evolved in 10,000 years. And he said, actually, that's not true. And you just kind of reiterated that I was under the impression at least for the past year that they've unraveled the kitty cat genome and they have found that despite man's effort, they could not change cats that they will not evolve. And so cats who are in your house are really confused and thinking, what the hell am I doing here? Why am I not in the jungle? How did I get stuck living with these strange two-legged beings? Yeah, but that's not true, Ralph says, and you kind of intimated that, that the cats have evolved. Well cats have changed through domestication, you know, and you will hear this debate or cats domesticated or not. And so kind of the current scientific consensus from experts is like, they're sort of domesticated. We have made some changes to the genome, especially related to memory, fear, and also the recognizing of rewards, which suggests that cats have, our domestic cats have a slightly better ability to remember that, hey, this human is a source of food. Maybe I should like them. But we also know that cats closest wild relatives, which is the Middle Eastern wildcat, is fairly similar in behavior and also in ability to be tamed if you get them at a young age. So I wouldn't say that we haven't changed cats at all. I mean, 10,000 years is 10,000 years. And we have imposed a few things on cats. So we ask them to live near humans. And we ask them to be more flexible about living with other cats, because most people who have one cat want at least one more or maybe 10 more. So you know, I think that they do have some flexibility and some of that is imposed just by socialization and getting them when they're young. But they're not completely like bonkers off the wall wild. That said, they do have some special needs and we're not very good at meeting those needs. Right. We'll get to that in a second. I'll get to that in a second. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So if there are some changes, maybe we'll see more as we continue to selectively breed. But the thing with dogs is that we've done a lot more selective breeding where we actually choose their mates for them, whereas most cats get to pick their own sex partners. So an analog to dogs would be the royal family. Right. And that's why most of them look like dogs. Yeah. We pick their mates. We breed them. They are cats crazy. No. Humans are. Okay. We might make cats crazy, but I don't think cats are crazy, but you know, they're responding to their environment. And if their environment is poor, then they might have behavior problems. How many cats is too many cats? So how many cats is too many cats? It really depends. I've had clients who had a three story house and two cats was too many. And I've had clients that lived in a very small space and peacefully lived with five cats. So I think it really depends on how well the cats know each other, how well they get along and how well the person can take care of their needs. And so when you have too many cats, that's when you perhaps are not meeting their needs very well. I'm all for multiple cat households. Okay. I have a friend who named her cat Simon Feinberg. Is it right to give last names to cats? Absolutely. Really? I mean, I think they should have a middle name because when you get frustrated, you want to like when you're a little kid, you know, your parents would suddenly use your first name, Andrew middle name. So it's good to have a full suite of names. But I find actually most people don't even call their cats by their official names. They tend to have at least 20 nicknames for their cats that are unrelated to their actual name. But I think it's acceptable to give a cat the last name. Okay. Does a cat know it has a name? So that's a good question. I think cats will respond to a name if you teach them that, hey, when I say your name, I deliver your meals. I don't know that they recognize that I'm pinky and this is my identity. I think they know when my human says the sound in a certain tone of voice, it means something good will happen. One of my ex-wives, we by the way. You have multiple ex-wives? Well, I'm not allowed to talk about. Okay. We always had four cats that was in our house. I think the cats might have been responsible for a lot of problems in the marriage. That's not uncommon. Yeah. And four, always four, always four cats. I was married to a saint, kindest person in the world, but she gave nicknames to our cats. One of them was named Ginger, but my wife would call her Fatty in front of everybody. Do you think the cat was humiliated? Well, the cat was very heavy, so my wife would unleash invectives. She would say, there's Fatty here, and she'd call her Fatty. I didn't think it was right and I'm being serious because I think especially around kids, you don't call it, you don't fat shame a cat and you should take responsibility for your indoor cat being fat. Why is your cat fat? Absolutely. I'd say the first step is helping that cat lose weight so that they're healthy because obesity in cats, I mean it might be funny and a lot of people think it's cute, but it can actually cause medical problems like diabetes, joint problems. So the nickname, is it cruel to call your cats funny names or humiliating names? I don't think it's cruel, but it might reflect some other sentiments you have towards the cat or it might even color other people's perceptions of the cat. So if you were to suggest that the cat was lazy, then other people might not try to help the cat exercise or play because they just assume because the cat is Fatty, he's lazy. So I do think that nicknames can be harmful in that they might color people's opinions about a cat. So if you have a cat who bites and you call them killer, your friends are going to come over and be like, oh, that's the aggressive cat and you've already kind of pegged that cat as difficult. We came up with a theory because I get over 30 years for cats all the time. We must have had, I don't know, 20 cats. We have a theory that black and white cats are the best. And from what I understand, there are some theories about coloration in cats and their personalities. Is that true? That is true. Actually, some colleagues and I did a study looking at people's perceptions of personality based on coat color and what we found actually is that people tended to associate positive terms with orange cats. So your kind of stereotypical Garfield appearance and we're less likely to say nice things about white cats and tortoise shell cats. There's another study out of UC Davis maybe a year or two ago asking people about their cat's personality traits and behaviors and their cat's coat color and also suggested that perhaps tortoise shell cats did present more aggressive behaviors in certain circumstances. So I think we have ideas about coat color and whether or not those cats are nice or not. Some of that, of course, is biased by our own personal experience and I did find when I worked at the animal shelter that people who had had a particular color of cat often came in wanting a cat that basically looked the same as their previous cat. So I think perhaps people put a little too much weight on the appearance just like we wouldn't want someone to maybe want to be our friend or date us just because of the color of our hair. I would say get to know the cat as an individual and don't necessarily judge them based on their coat color. Food positive. But black and white cats are adorable. Yeah, we've had the best. They're adorable. I love them. I had a black, we had Crazy Jerry. By the way, that was, you know, we gave our cats really bad names. We had Crazy Jerry and Crazy Jerry, I would roll them up into a ball. I'm not making this up and I would slide them. He would start purring the minute I rolled them up and I'd slide them across the floor and then he'd come back to me and we do not try this at home folks. I know. I know. And he would we would play fetch with him and he just and it was we would eventually he got dizzy. But my kid, my kids thought it was the funniest thing in the world. When they're purring, does that mean they're happy and they're enjoying being slid across the floor? Tortured. Do you mean? Is that torture? No. I mean, you know, a rough play with cats is it can be a dangerous place to go because some cats will get aggressive. I mean, it sounds like he enjoyed it. He might have enjoyed other types of play, too. So I always encourage people to try different types of play with toys, you know, feather wand, that sort of thing. So you know, it sounds like he had fun and nobody was hurt and he came back for more. So yeah, not necessarily torture, but purring is usually a sign of contentment. Sometimes cats will purr when they are injured. And so it's not always positive, but I'd say most of the time it's positive. Always play rough with cats, girls don't, correct? I find that former dog owners like to play roughly with cats, and yes, some men like to play roughly with cats, whether it's, I mean, I've certainly met women that like to play rough with cats, too. I don't advocate using your hand as a toy. Again, this is a predatory animal. They have teeth that are meant to tear apart a rat. They have claws that are meant to disembowel a rabbit, you know, their weapons. And so when we direct those weapons toward us, it's kind of giving the cat mixed messages because when you want to pet the cat and have a cuddly moment, do you want them to turn on you and start biting and bunny kicking your arm? Usually not. And then the person gets mad at the cat, the cat's confused like, hey, it was fine two minutes ago, what's your problem? So I'm very much about handling cats consistently and not purposely getting them riled up because usually those things are something we want and not necessarily what the cat wants. I'm very much, you know, the humans should do the cat's bidding. Was it fair to say that men don't believe in petting cats, they believe in deep tissue massage? Isn't that? Yeah, I don't know, I've definitely, I think you might be projecting a little bit. Okay. All right. But. Food, this is one of the reasons I've called you food puzzles for cats. You maintain that the reason cats get fat is because they're being fed too easily that they're hunters that they need to hunt for their food that they wouldn't eat a bowl of mice. Absolutely. So yeah, I think part of it is they're being fed too much and they're not being exercised enough. You could exercise cats in other ways, but the nice thing about food puzzles is that they don't require a lot of effort on the part of the owner. And what I found is the less you give the owner to do, the more likely they are to do it. So give me an example of a food puzzle for a cat. Sure. There's basically two different types. There's the kind that roll around. So there's something like a slim cat ball, which is basically a ball. It has holes in it. You put a cat's dry food inside. They roll the ball around and sporadically, food will shoot out of the puzzle and then they can eat the food, play with the ball some more, more food comes out. And then there are stationary puzzles, which are more like a base that has cups or it might have tunnels, tubes, anything like that, where you put the food inside the tunnels and the tubes and the cat has to manipulate the food more with their paws. So that's good for cats that are very dexterous, whereas the rolling food puzzles are definitely good for cats that maybe are not as focused on using their paws for interacting with things. And you can learn more about this by going to food puzzles for cats. Absolutely. That's a website that my colleague Ingrid Johnson and I put together. Basically to give people a resource on how to get started, what types of puzzles there are, and you know there's lots of cute videos of cats interacting with these food puzzles. And so if you want to go down a rabbit hole of watching cat videos, you can watch a lot of videos of cats playing with food puzzles and then you will think it's totally cute and you will want to do it with your own cats at home because it's really fun. I'm a vegetarian. So am I. For moral reasons. Me too. Why can't cats be vegetarians? Well cats are obligate carnivores. You will hear that a lot. And so you know again looking at what have cats been eating the whole time they have been cats, rats, birds, mice, snakes, lizards. And so it's only been the last couple hundred years that we have even had cat food. In fact I think cat food was invented in the late 1800s. So cat food is a relatively new invention and that really I think sped up this process of cats living in our homes, sleeping in our beds, cuddling on our laps. All of this has happened very recently. So what we know nutritionally is that cats are evolved to eat meat and if they don't have meat they are lacking in certain nutrients that can cause heart damage, it can cause blindness. They definitely need taurine which is only found in meat and the vegan supplements are questionable I would say I'm not a vet so I don't like to give nutritional advice but I will say your cat should be eating a meat based diet. And again you know it's like projecting what humans want, okay I'm a vegetarian, I would prefer to not feed my cats meat because I'm a vegetarian for moral reasons. But I don't want to impose my beliefs on my cat and I believe that if I gave my cat a choice between a pile of vegan food and a pile of regular cat food that they are going to want to eat one and probably not the other. Is there vegan food for cats? I think someone's marketed it but I don't even want to go there. Let me ask you some difficult questions now. Okay. Alright. Bring it on. Alright. Do you believe in evolution? Absolutely. Do you believe that there was a time when humans had to kill a living thing to survive? So I'd have to say human evolution is not my scientific area of expertise. Have we always lived around plants? I believe so. So I think that there have been periods where humans did eat a lot of meat obviously but do I think we were eating other things at the same time? Most likely we're also eating a varied diet with like roots and grasses and tubers. I think that as we've gotten smarter and we understand nutrition people like me who always choose the path of least resistance will go okay you've proven to me that it's safe to live on a vegan diet I will have a vegan diet now but if it couldn't be proven to me I probably would eat chicken and fish but it's been presented to me scientifically that I don't need that and that is a 20th, 21st century notion. I think if I lived it knowing who I am in the 19th century I would have eaten meat. So my difficult question is this. What if we start putting cats on vegan diets and keep the ones who survive? They will be blind and have heart disease so they won't be able to reproduce. You know I understand the argument you're making I don't think those are the kinds of changes that we could make in cats overnight I mean we have seen that in cats and dogs but if we did breed if we just said I'm gonna say could you breed could I go off to a farm and rescue all these cats these are difficult questions but it's gonna get harder as we go along here I go off to a farm and ethical test well I've got some tough questions to ask you now I'm gonna start a farm and I'm gonna rescue cats and I'm gonna breed vegan cats and I'm gonna have a breed of cats that survive on vegan food so in other words I'm to feed all these cats vegan meals the ones who live to a ripe old age or look healthy I will then with Dr. Mengele at my side we will pick the the ones who are thriving on a vegan diet and will create a super race of kitty cats who don't need to kill those cats are gonna be too tired to have sex seriously they're they won't reproduce seriously so you're taking I mean I think the that's animal protective services calling they were listening to the show why are you talking about so you're you know I think then do you even have a cat anymore like the essence of who a cat is is a hunter I can't accept that then perhaps we shouldn't have them as pets is it true that other than human beings what am I gonna ask you wait other than human beings so you know what I'm gonna ask you know I don't know our cats the only other animal that hunt for fun and not for food hmm no I think that any natural predator gets pleasure out of hunting and so for cats every part of the hunt is pleasurable and we know that cats will will hunt while they're eating their last kill one reason is because if you're living outside you don't know when that next mouse is going to come along so you have to just take advantage of every opportunity but we can also assume that cats brains are evolved developed to experience pleasure at the various stages of hunting that's the chasing that's the chewing the crunching on the bones I'm guessing that all of that is fun to cats and that's why when we see them quote-unquote playing with their prey it looks very cruel and yeah it's not necessarily fun to watch if you love all animals which I do but you know and and by the way my cats are indoors so they don't they don't hunt any live animals they hunt toys but when we play with them with toys like a feather wand or a you know a cat dancer we're seeing those same pleasurable pleasurable behaviors that you know the pleasure is triggered by all the different aspects of hunting so I would say it's fun and we play games where we shoot things right and we have fun doing it so maybe it's a brain chemistry and something about killing mice is really fun for cats I read and it was in the New York review of books a review of a controversial book about cats I'm gonna get to in a second that they said that cats are the only other animals besides humans who will hunt on a full stomach and just and enjoy it and leave the dead carcass the carcass there by itself and move on I I mean I don't know I would have to do a little investigating but I would say for any species that has to survive by hunting that there has to be a drive for hunting that unless you hunt something where you are just guaranteed a food source for a long period of time that you would need to be kind of keeping one eye on your next kill because again you just don't know it's not like us where we can go to the fridge or you know like our pets where we feed them three meals a day it's just a very different kind of survival mindset now a cat will bring you a mouse right yes and if you don't eat the mouse you're being rude you're not being rude you can just hide it under your napkin when they're not looking you scrape it into the trash but if you don't eat that mouse they don't eat it well they don't eat everything they kill again the instinct to kill is not necessarily entwined with hunger so so yeah the mouse may have died in vain because the cat was practicing killing all right here's where we're gonna wrap it up after this is it's gonna get hard now I'm ready bring it on well this new book that I read about that says what is this a cat wars book well it's the one that says that cats are murderers and they're destroying the planet right killing every bird on the planet but more than just birds you know rodents who we need for our ecology that they are just trained to not trained as you said they're hunters and they are causing more damage to the planet I think than cars you know running them over running animals over pesticides they're more dangerous than pesticides more dangerous than global warming that cats that do us in right well I mean but that there's a new theory or at least in this book that cats are murderers and need to be rained in where do you where do you stand on this well where I stand on it is you know some of the science behind that book has been critiqued and a lot of the reports are based on modeling so they're not always it's not like someone's going out and checking every you know rodent and bird that's been killed in a particular transact and being able to like use forensic technology to show you know that fluffy killed this bird and max killed that mouse so do cats have an impact on the environment I would say absolutely I mean just like humans do we live in a very complicated web of interactions between species and we've screwed that up a lot first of all by having pets we destroy animals habitats and then we drive certain animals into other areas because we want to build housing in them so you know we kill a lot of birds by cutting down trees deforestation so I think it's a it's a bigger and more complicated question than just saying yeah it's all cats well it's like yeah let's just blame the cats they're cute but you know ultimately yeah they're going to kill us off the reason human civilization will go down is because of cats that would actually be pretty awesome but you know I think it is it is a much more complicated picture and a lot of other scientists will argue that what cats tend to kill are animals that are already weak and probably wouldn't have survived anyway so you will get arguments on either side I think the best thing that we can do is in general I advocate that people keep their cats indoors or control their outdoor access I think that's good for the cat it's good for the environment and it's good for your neighbors as someone who has I live in a neighborhood with a lot of outdoor cats who have you know they like to use my garden as a bathroom so I don't really appreciate that so much so I think you know keeping cats indoors comes with responsibilities like keeping them entertained and that's where the food puzzles and the toys come into play but you know recognizing that the human impact on the environment is much more significant I think we can get really focused on one species but then you know the other problem is if you get rid of the cats then the rats proliferate and rats eat birds eggs they kill birds so it's not like you can't just take one piece out of the Jenga puzzle and expect it not to fall over you said the cats cats decided to hunt mice to make themselves attractive to humans well they didn't decide to but it worked out it was mutually beneficial so when humans settled we were becoming agricultural and so we had these large stores of grains that attracted rodents and that attracted the cats and so humans don't want rodents eating their grains so cats show up they kind of take care of the rodents for us and then it's like oh hey maybe I should give this cat a little shelter he's kind of cute and he's helping me out and then the cats like hey this person's you know not so bad maybe I should try to get into his house and sleep on the bed so you know that's kind of the the two second version of what occurred over 10,000 years is that we've had this mutually beneficial relationship and it's only been recently that we've brought cats indoors only you know that kitty litter was invented cat food was invented and now suddenly cats are you know all over the internet we're basically treating them like babies instead of like wild animals and so we've asked a lot of them in a very short period of time so would your if you're there was a thing I saw a story about a cute little girl with a bone disease and how a great dane was her walker that she would go to class leaning on this great dane which is enormous dog you know five times the size of this five-year-old girl you know your eyes well up and it occurred to me that if there were a cat the size of a great dane what are the chances it would eat that girl pretty big I think like would you let a tiger walk your child to school so is it fair to say that your favorite cats if they somehow were given a growth hormone if they got to a certain size they would treat you the you know they turn you into Roy horn we might be prey to them yeah because they're um so cats typically prefer prey that's smaller than a pigeon I think larger than that it's difficult for them to kill it do they want to kill us do they want to eat us no some of them no you think some don't you think some of them no because we are we are predators of cats they you know they we have to earn their trust because we're big and scary and so the other thing that I think we forget is because we focus so much on cats are the predators they're killers but they're also prey animals and that's why you have this kind of scaredy cat um stereotype you know cats have to be always looking for their next meal but they're also making sure that there's not a dog a coyote a hawk that's you know a human that is going to turn around and wipe them out so they kind of live in this in between space now if we were small and they were huge I think that we would probably trigger hunting behavior in them so cats always leave a little food in the bowl not mine really well some cats do I have one cat who leaves food behind but the other one would just keep going oh I all our cats left a little food in the bowl maybe you're feeding them too much can you train a cat to use the toilet um you can but why would you want to do that because it's funny um yeah why wouldn't you yeah because um you know I think if I believe that cats experience humiliation then being forced to go to the bathroom on the toilet might be that but um I really you know so again you know I really I know I'm like kind of a broken record with the cat as a predator and their natural behavior and background but you know cats scratch and cover their waste for a reason that served a function for them when they were wild animals and that was to cover their tracks and so when cats cannot go in a sandy type substrate that they can cover their scent we're creating a situation where they're like oh crap someone might find me and so that could be stress inducing um I don't think a toilet is particularly comfortable for a cat but they do there are some cats who just do that there are some cats that just do it naturally and if they do it naturally you know that's fine but to to force a cat to do that I think is asking for it that it's asking for a cat that's going to crap on your bed okay and that's my advice and do cats have IQs I mean can you can you determine whether or not one cat is smarter than the other no one has done like a standardized cognitive test in cats um there's actually a scientist who's done some of this work in dogs um there's a few scientists actually like you know dognition is very um or dog cognition is a very hot topic in science right now and so I think that cat IQ tests are probably you know five years from now there will be a cat IQ test and we'll be looking at basically problem solving differences in cats I think you know again most cats would be able to solve the one important problem to them which is killing a mouse but you know we want to know can cats count do they recognize my voice do they know when I point at something that I want them to go to it can they learn tricks so that's kind of how we judge intelligence right we kind of judge it on our own intelligence um so you're from San Francisco and Berkeley which is the home of Starbucks and Pete's coffee have you ever had Pete's coffee you know I don't drink coffee I drink tea okay why well here's one of the things I know does that have to do with cats yeah and I want to know if any of my listeners have experienced this uh always have four cats I've had cats before the advent of Starbucks and Pete's coffee that's like you know 1990 93 94 is when Americans really started drinking good coffee and one of the things I notice is that I like strong coffee and I'll put the coffee down on the kitchen table and the ones the cats who would get up on the table which they're not supposed to do would try to bury would make the motion of burying my coffee is that ever happened and I go ahead what did you put in your coffee uh poo and pee no uh no creamer no black black coffee and ever since then I you know my mind plays tricks on me I've decided that coffee has a urine smell to it it's possible I mean chemically it could have some sort of structure that is similar to urine or even food I mean cats will cover food as well if they're um you know you'll see cats scratching around the food bowl and so that the idea is that okay they don't want anyone else to find that so they're trying to hide their hide their tracks um so it is that's it's probably something along those lines I'm gonna say if you put like creamer in your coffee maybe the fat was attractive and they yeah thought but so but let me explain I wanted off my listeners have experienced this what what the cat is doing is about a hot steaming cup of black coffee it walks up to the mug and this is this is several cats have done this and it just rubs its paws against the kitchen table as though it's bearing the coffee but there's no dirt I mean I'm a slob but it's not that bad it sounds like a youtube video waiting to happen it's like a phantom vestigial motion that accomplishes so what is it why are they doing that just it's it's an instinct it's an instinct so again they're covering something that they think is is going to give them away and it's not like they're thinking about it but their instinct you know so again evolution has supported that whatever cats cover their waste or cover their food or their traces are less likely to get eaten by a predator those cats survive so that behavior continues and so the behaviors that they perform don't always seem to have a function to us um but they may have served a function in not so distant history or they might serve a function if they were outside not sitting on your kitchen table like they weren't supposed to and that's something that I could help you with but um okay last question and then you'll come back was this okay oh yeah okay last question favorite cat how many cats have you had um in my lifetime yeah we had a you know we had a revolving door of cats when I was a child that didn't live that long because I lived in a pretty rural area cats went outside got hit by cars you know before you answer that question yeah there is a theory among people like me who have had way too many cats in their lives that you know a cat belongs outside and maybe it won't live that long but it'll be much happier what are your thoughts on that I think cats can be perfectly happy indoors um do I think that cats experience some things outside that make them happy sure um for me personally I've decided that it's not worth the risks I don't feel like I live in a neighborhood where it's safe to go outside and you know again as I said before like neighborhood cats can be a problem and so I think part of being responsible neighbor may mean keeping your cats indoors and so my focus is always like how can we make the indoors fun for our cats and so they're not just sleeping all day and like being lazy but they can look out the window and watch birds so having a bird feeder outside they have toys to play with they have to work for their food they get attention from me they have a heated bed to lay on so making sure that they have an environment inside that is enriching and stimulates all of their senses their sense of smell they can chew on cat grass or you know smell through an open window so um I don't see it as um cats can only be happy outdoors and you can learn more about that how to accomplish that for your cat by going to feline minds dot com or food puzzles for cats favorite cat is it okay to have you can't have a thing you want me to you want me to pick one of my cats as my favorite yeah that's cruel really yeah I mean all you don't have an all-time favorite cat it's hard to say I had this one cat he was really awesome he was a chronic masturbator and he um he had this really big personality he um like anytime we have a party he was you know he walked through the lasagna he sat on my roommate's birthday cake he was always just doing things to kind of get attention and it was just who he was so he was definitely a very big presence in my life and when he died I was devastated and cried every day for like two months kidoms kidoms it's interesting the the the difficult ones are our favorites aren't they yeah I mean and so I at the time I had another cat whose name was Jesus and um Jesus had kind of a mellow personality he was I don't want to call him boring he was very sweet but you know he was just kind of a little wallflower who just wanted you know a couple of cuddles and just chill on the couch but yeah the ones I think that um yeah are more interactive you named a cat Jesus I did I thought my mother thought I was god Jesus I thought it was funny at the time you know I will have met an atheist and when I was a teenager I mean so I got him when I was like 18 and I was living in this kind of punk house with a bunch of boys and we and my cats at the time went outside and so we thought it was hilarious that we were yelling out the front door for Jesus uh so we just thought our neighbors would be mortified so um I think at at the time I was I thought it was very funny you turned water into a very nasty smell it is hard to get off your couch yeah exactly how do you get rid of the the smell of urine uh enzymatic cleaners that are made for cat urine okay my favorite cat then I'll let you go my favorite cat was Sammy and when I would sneeze he'd go oh that's so cute it was bizarre Mikkel Mikkel Michael Maria Delgado is a certified cat behavior consultant and if you're having problems with your cat you should go to feline minds dot com and contact Michael Maria Delgado and you will analyze the cat for a fee okay yeah we offer consulting services mostly in the Bay Area but we do remote consult consultations as well so yeah we mostly deal with problems like litter box avoidance and difficulties introducing new cats cats you people up all night you're a cat shrink right I you know you could call it that more often than not a lot of the work is changing the humans behavior so it's there's a lot of give and take in living successfully with a cat as you probably know since you've lived with a lot of them I would send one of my cats to see you but I don't want my cat on the couch and that's so I don't want them seeing a psychiatrist because they're on the cat that's a bad joke Michael how do people contact you they can email info at feline minds dot com that's probably the best way or um through my blog cats and squirrels dot com great thank you Michael you're welcome the David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you you sad pathetic humps