Do our cats really love us? In his latest book, animal behaviourist Mark Vette – best known around the world for his work with dogs – goes inside the mind of a far more inscrutable species.
Mark Vette, the guy who wrangled wolves for Narnia and taught dogs to fly, has been a practising Buddhist since his early 20s. But it was a cool cat called Mozart who taught him the true meaning of zen.
The giant ginger tabby had been left at Vette’s Auckland cattery while his owners went on holiday, never to return.
One day, Mozart – so named because he liked to play piano by walking along the keys – was watching Vette work with a difficult dog called Bob at his animal behaviour clinic.
Suddenly, Bob went for the cat, lunging viciously at the mesh that separated them. Unperturbed, Mozart leapt at the snarling dog and swiped him through the wire. “He absolutely nailed him,” says Vette.
A cat with both charisma and composure, Mozart was officially adopted into the family.
Each day, Vette would take him on walks through the forest and along the river to a kahikatea where he’d meditate with the purring cat draped like a scarf around his neck. Sometimes, half a dozen or more dogs went with them.
“Hercules [the Toyota ad’s “bugger” dog] and Monty [the rescue pup he trained to drive a Mini] would just lie down quietly," he says. “But some of the other dogs were highly aggressive to cats; it was a big part of what we did at the clinic. None of them ever touched Mozart.”
The animal behaviourist and trainer for film and TV has dedicated his new book to this “Cat Zen Master” – sadly no longer with us – who opened his eyes to the untapped potential of cats and their magical bond with humans.
The philosophy he outlines in Cat Zen: A Comprehensive Guide to Raising Gentle and Resilient Cats has a similar framework to his popular training manuals Dog Zen and Puppy Zen, but adapted to infiltrate the psyche of a far more inscrutable species.
When Vette first started working with cats 45 years ago, the science of feline cognition was almost non-existent, he writes, in a chapter called Inside the Cat’s Mind. “At that stage, we looked to dogs as being the cognitive master.”
More recent research suggests cats have a level of intelligence that’s much more closely aligned.
They’re also clear winners in the popularity stakes: New Zealand has one of the highest rates of cat ownership in the world, with a total population of some 1.2 million. More than 43% of households have at least one pet cat, while only a third share their home with a dog.
For someone who’s been largely defined in the public eye through TV shows like Pound Pups to Dog Stars, Vette’s apparent shift in allegiance comes as a bit of a shock.
After all, the world is firmly divided into two camps: dog people, who see cats as insipid, soulless creatures who slaughter native birds, and cat people, who see dogs as needy, slobbering oafs.
“The cat is much more of an opportunist; there’s no doubt about that,” says Vette. “Dogs have owners, cats have staff. Everything revolves around them.”
However, while cats have a more solitary nature, they’re also extremely adaptable, allowing them to socialise and bond with humans in a similar way.
“But in countries like New Zealand, where our biodiversity is compromised by their predatory behaviour, people either love cats or they hate them.”
In truth, Vette has always comfortably straddled the cat-dog divide.
As a young kid, he grew up with a long-haired rescue moggy (Toots) and a hyperactive German shepherd (Scott). He adored both, but, even then, he remembers being struck by their difference.
Scott’s love, he writes, was presented noisily and wetly at his feet. Toots was a mystery wrapped in silent beauty. “He held his secrets close, and I learned early that I would have to earn my way into his world.”
A zoologist by training, Vette has studied and worked with all kinds of species throughout his career, from elephants to butterflies. In the US, he’s legendary for teaching Californian cows how to dance. He’s even trained an octopus to take photographs.
A natural in front of the camera, Mozart joined Vette’s film academy, landing a Go Cat commercial and appearing regularly on The Funny Farm, a behind-the-scenes reality show that screened in 2002.
Cats were notoriously difficult to work with. It was only when he teamed up with an American wrangler on a series of TV ads that he saw clicker training in action, a standard technique used with dogs.
Intrigued by its success, he began looking more closely at cat behaviour, gaining insights from both the science behind it and his own hands-on experience.
Already familiar with Duke University anthropologist Dr Brian Hare’s research on dogs, Vette turned a similar lens on the domestication of cats. In Cat Zen, he breaks down the process into five evolutionary stages.
About 10,000 years ago, the domestic Felis catus evolved from its wild ancestor Felis silvestris lybica – a solitary, territorial hunter – when colonies of cats began to congregate around human settlements and had access to plentiful food.
With the advent of city living, cats moved in to become our companions, but still free to come and go as they please. Latch-key cats, Vette calls them.
“It’s that Jekyll and Hyde thing; inside they’re highly social, outside they’re ancestral cats, effectively,” he says. “The typical latch-key cat is attached to their family and their territory, but they really don’t want to know much about anything else.”
Today, some breeds such as ragdolls, persians and Burmese selected for their sociability have become “indoor cats” that never venture into the outside world.
Vette’s vision is to take that one step further with a fifth evolution of gentle, resilient cats that are strongly bonded with humans and have adapted to our modern, mobile lives.
As well as early socialisation, that means getting them comfortable with different environments, including being crated for travel.
And for anyone who’s dreaded opening the front door to find a dead bird on the mat, here’s the real game-changer: with the right training, Zen cats can be taught not to hunt.
Kittens start to learn hunting skills at around four to six weeks of age, and prevention is the only cure. Once they develop hunting behaviour, warns Vette, it’s very difficult to train them out of it.
That doesn’t mean you’re permanently stuck with an indoor cat. The “no-hunt conditioning” outlined in Cat Zen limits access to the outside world for only the first three to six months, but with a curfew at night.
Even as kittens, supervised outdoor sessions are encouraged if they’re harness-trained (that’s covered in the book, too).
While it’s important to limit early exposure to wild birds, the cat’s innate prey drive can be redirected through play that mimics hunting – picture a toy mouse dangled from a pole.
The central idea is to create such a strong bond that the cat wants to be with you, rather than marking its territory outside. “When you imprint them that strongly onto the human family and they don’t practise hunting, then they become very poor at it or don’t do it at all.”
Over the years, Vette had observed that kind of behaviour evolving organically with Mozart and some of the other film cats. Now, he’s actively putting his theory into practice with his own ragdoll kitten.
Zen – what else would he be called? – goes on campervan trips with Vette and his wife, Kim Morresey, frequents the cafe near their home in the Coromandel, and joins them on harness walks at the beach.
“He can come and go as he pleases, and he loves being outside,” says Vette, “but he wants to be with us.”
Zen also shares the house with Awa, a rustic golden retriever, who’s been cross-fostered onto cats. The pair are great mates, play-fighting like siblings and cuddling up together.
Last month, Vette and Morresey got married on his 70th birthday, after a very long wait. They’d become engaged 14 years ago when he surprised her with a helicopter flight to Waiheke Island and she looked down to see his proposal written on the sand.
Finding time to seal the deal hasn’t been easy. Over the past decade, they’ve worked together on four books and three TV shows. Morresey, who has the unenviable task of trimming Vette’s manuscripts back to a manageable size, has also just completed her own poetry collection.
The couple stepped back from the day-to-day operation of the business a few years ago after moving to the Coromandel, where their hillside home overlooks Hot Water Beach.
Vette’s Dog Zen training courses had already gone virtual to cope with demand and are now run by his daughter, Jazmin (one of three children from his first marriage), although he still does some consulting for behavioural problems.
An ordained Zen Buddhist, Vette began exploring the practice in his late teens. The philosophy forms the central platform of his training technique, too, where the aim is to create a parasympathetic state in the animal he’s working with so it’s calm, relaxed and able to focus on learning.
Cats are naturally zen because they live very much in the moment. While some breeds are genetically predisposed to shake off their wild, ancestral roots, Vette says the developmental environment they’re raised in is much more influential – and that includes moggies.
Unlike dogs, which see their owners as a mentor or a more dominant member of the pack, a cat attaches to its human as kitten to surrogate mother.
One thing I didn’t know is that adult cats don’t meow to each other, so when your cat “talks” to you, it’s a personalised love language.
More than a dozen district councils have adopted animal bylaws that make microchipping and desexing compulsory for cats, to help control the population. Vette supports that being rolled out nationally and acknowledges the problems feral cats cause.
His book includes chapters teaching children the right way to approach a cat (let the cat make contact first and start with a cheek tickle) and how to read its body language (slow blinking, for example, is a sign of affection and trust).
There’s also a large section on dealing with specific behavioural problems, from urine spraying to phobias. The isolation of Covid lockdowns has led to a spike in anxiety among pets, just as it did with schoolchildren.
Various studies have found numerous health benefits to owning a cat, including the reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes, and lower blood pressure.
When interacting with pet dogs and cats, the levels of attachment hormones (such as oxytocin and dopamine) are found in similar concentrations as when we engage with our children.
Studies show that’s a two-way street – once that attachment relationship has formed, cats love us right back.
Alongside the legendary Mozart, Cat Zen is dedicated to Vette’s grandchild, Foss, who was born on the day the book was completed – the first grandson after a run of six girls.
His next book, Our Zen, is already under way. Having ticked off dogs and now cats, he’s moving on to humans, the most invasive species of all.
More than a study on mindfulness, it seeks to deepen our understanding of human nature by exploring how our social structures evolved.
While oxytocin is a powerful hormone that creates strong bonds within families or tribal groups, it can also have an “othering” effect that creates conflict and competition with those perceived as outsiders.
“Sadly and frighteningly, that’s exactly what’s going on in America at the moment,” says Vette, burying his hands in Zen’s fur, as the purring cat nestles close to him on the couch.
“The black side of oxytocin is that you can very quickly become attached to your immediate social group and form a barrier to others. We need to keep drawing that family circle wider and wider.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.