A basic understanding of what’s going on inside the head of little Tiddles could save cat ‘companions’ much heartache.
“If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.”
–Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein never met Claude Béata. The latter’s book The Interpretation of Cats – with its titular nod to Freud and his The Interpretation of Dreams – has set the scratching post high for books on cat psychology and attracted international media attention because, well, cats are just so weird, aren’t they? What is going on in those adorable little heads? And why did she let me pat her then turn around and scratch me?
All perfectly reasonable questions, and among the many to which Béata provides plausible if often surprising answers based on his clinical experience. He is probably the world’s best-known cat psychiatrist, albeit these are early days for the specialty.
“In France, we have around 200 vets who have got a diploma in behaviour or psychiatry, though not specialised in cats,” says Béata. “We have also some ‘cat-only’ practices but not specialised in psychology.”
Béata has two – presumably emotionally stable and psychologically resilient – cats, Solo and Flora, and a Rhodesian ridgeback called Ursula. “For 20 years, I was a ‘normal’ vet with a canine and feline practice,” he says. “Then I switched to doing only behavioural cases and now I am a psychiatrist.”
He divides his practice between his hometown Toulon, Lyon and Paris. The day before we speak by Zoom, he had been in the French capital making house calls to troubled animals.
It’s important we get our terms right. Béata doesn’t talk about “pets”. In fact, the French language doesn’t have an equivalent for that word.
“In French, it’s ‘companion animals’, or we can say ‘friends’,” he says. “In the US, it’s common to say ‘pet parent’. In France it’s not usual to say that.” (At this point the Listener decides not to tell him about New Zealand’s large population of fur babies.)
“I’m on the edge about it – I think the relationship is something in between being a parent and being a friend.”
Not, however, an owner. Béata would never see himself possessing an animal.
“Most of my clients are referral cases,” he says, when asked how his practice works. “Many of them come because of the book. When I wrote it, I was seeing only one cat to 10 dogs. And in France, we have twice as many cats as dogs.”
With neat logic that would do any French philosopher proud, he extrapolated that to conclude that if the numbers reflected reality, cats were experiencing 20 times less mental suffering than dogs “which is unbelievable”. He wanted to alert people to signs that their cats had problems and what they could do to fix them.
He has become a passionate advocate for the practice of cat psychology. And it’s working, as more and more people are seeking the help their cats need.
“Some days ago, I looked at my statistics and saw that from cats being 10% of animals I am seeing, we have climbed up to 23%, which is still not enough, because I should have at least 50% cats. But yesterday, I was in Paris looking at cases, and I had two dogs and two cats. That was a 50-50, day. That’s nice for me.” And no doubt for the cats.
But before you book your cat into therapy, there are lots of ways you can improve things yourself. As is so often the case with relationship difficulties, problems come down to issues of communication. With Béata’s insights you can gain a lot of understanding of what your cat is trying to tell you. One of the book’s strengths is that, once you know what the cat is thinking or feeling, it’s very easy to deal with. Overnight you will stop insisting or expecting that a cat do something that is counter to all its instincts.
Their way or the highway
One simple message underlying much of what Béata has to say is this: your cat’s just not that into you. Cats are not a social species. Left to their own devices they will not form packs as dogs do. They do not have hierarchies like dogs do. They will share space with you and allow some physical contact but it is always on their terms, whether you think it is or not. They will form relationships, but they can just as soon walk away if it doesn’t suit them.
And they’ll scratch you. When preparing for this interview the number one question that cat-adjacent acquaintances wanted asked on their behalf was: how come I can be patting my cat and then suddenly it’ll bite me or scratch me?
Béata points out that when a dog or a person jumps onto our lap, they want to be patted. Cats – and by now this should not be a surprise – are different.
“Cats come to be close to the person but they don’t want to be touched. People don’t know that, so they stroke the cat, and the tail is waving and suddenly it bites. And people say, ‘This cat is mad because it just came to me and he wanted to be stroked, and when I stroked him, he bit me.’ No, he didn’t want to be stroked. He just wanted to be there.”
Negotiating tactics
You can reduce the risk of hurt feelings by negotiating with a cat. Start with letting him sniff a finger. “If the cat is rubbing his face on it, that’s giving you a ticket to say, ‘That’s okay for one stroke.’ So you can give one stroke. Once the cat understands that if they don’t touch your finger, you won’t stroke them, they get more and more confident, because they get just the amount of petting they want. And when that happens, the cat is going to ask more and more because he can control it.”
Yes, but he was purring and then he bit me. What purring is, how it works and its purpose are still partly a mystery, but Béata has some intriguing suggestions. He thinks that purring is a calming message that the cat first sends to itself.
“It’s quite like the ‘om’ of the [meditating] yogi. It has been shown that the frequency of the purring favours healing. If you purr, bones are going to heal quicker. The skin is going to heal quicker. That goes with the reputation of cats for self-medicating. They purr when they are happy, but also they can purr when they suffer, when they give birth. When the female gives birth, we are sure that she’s in pain, and she’s purring. When cats are to die, often they purr.”
The purring vocabulary is obviously limited – possibly to “om” – but Béata says cats have accents. “They don’t meow in the same way in Germany and in the USA and Japan.” Which sounds dubious until he explains, “After being a kitten, they don’t meow any more. There is no social organisation so they don’t have to talk with other cats – just some hissing to warn them sometimes. But human beings speak to cats, and cats understand that we want to communicate.
I think many cats try to imitate some things and when they speak to people, when they meow they are rewarded.”
The accent – however badly Tiddles mangles it – is part of the imitation.
And yes, they know their names, but they don’t necessarily want you to know they know. “There is some work about that. With the dog, it’s really easy. You say the name and it’s going to turn around. With the cat, when you say his name, many times you see just the ear moving, but it’s not looking at you. Some cats do. Some cats don’t. But I think they know precisely their name.”
They may not know they’re adding to their reputation for aloofness and condescension. There are many stories of cats, whose unsociability we should be accepting by now, moving out of one home and into another. Dogs, being more dependent, don’t do that, but cats know they can arrange to have their needs met somewhere else. Accordingly, it doesn’t take much to get rid of a cat.
No forgiveness
If we have a fight with a human or a disagreement with a dog, it’s usually pretty easy to patch things up. Cats aren’t like that. Cats may appear to forgive, because it makes sourcing food easier, but they never forget.
It’s not you, it’s the cat. “For them, a relationship is not compulsory. So if a relationship is bad, or if a relationship is frightening, they can stop it. And for people, that’s something really difficult to understand.”
Which is why – more problematic news – you must never punish a cat. Ever.
“All other social species – dogs, children – we raise by punishing them. With cats, it never works. People say, ‘You can’t educate cats.’ That’s not true. You can teach many things to a cat, but only in a positive way.
“I had a friend who was working in a circus, He understood that with cats, punishment was not a possibility. So he gave a reward of salmon and this cat was doing incredible tricks. But one day, when getting the salmon, the cat got a fright and bit the trainer badly. “He slapped the cat in response and the cat never worked for him again.”
The rule doesn’t apply to all cats, but why would you take the risk?
Safety first
Another key to cats’ unique psychology is their status as both prey and predator. Most animals tend more to one than the other, but cats are brilliant at being the predator – as the native bird population can attest – and also extremely vulnerable to becoming prey.
Their vulnerability is behind such things as their preference for grazing. “Why does he always leave half his food in the bowl?” They are easier to catch while eating, so prefer to do it in short bursts.
It is also why you seldom see a cat go to the toilet, an activity dogs delight in sharing with us. Because they are so vulnerable when engaged in that activity, they seek out somewhere secluded to do it. And it also explains cases of cats suddenly starting to pee inside – they have had a fright in their usual location so need to switch to somewhere they know is safe.
“As prey they can be really very fearful and disappear as soon as someone else appears in the house. Or they can be really brave as predators, and when there is a stranger coming to the door, they are growling like a dog, defending the house.”
In their dual roles as predator and prey “if they want to survive, they have to switch in a glance between being ‘I am the big predator. I am the lion’ and ‘Oh, I am the prey, and I have to run away.’ They can switch from one behaviour to another in a 10th of a second.”
Hard for them but surely there’s something we can do to help and at the same time make them like us? No guarantees, but we can improve our chances by providing a few essentials. These can be supplied even in an enclosed home such as an apartment, which is just as well because so many French cats spend their lives in apartments. Béata is firm in his belief that cats need not suffer when living permanently indoors, as long as they are given equivalents to what they have outdoors.
Cats may appear to forgive, because it makes sourcing food easier, but they never forget.
In his book he writes, “The cat always organises its living place to cope with all the exigencies of this double nature: so that it can both protect itself and hunt.”
And this organisation is built around what he describes as the five zones of a cat’s world: “Isolation: Where the cat sleeps, grooms itself and where it will feel most safe. Feeding: Where it will find its food. Disposal: A carefully chosen place where it can defecate and urinate in complete safety, and the source of much quid pro quo with humans. Solitary activities: Where the cat can spend a lot of time observing, hunting and playing with no need of partners. Interactions: Where interactions – although they aren’t essential – can be sought and appreciated by our domestic feline. These usually happen in particular places and at precise moments.”
Cats mark territory, as we know, and the five zones are marked out and connected using pheromones. “This is very specific to cats: alongside their main olfactory system they have a supplementary one purely for the detection of pheromones.”
And all this can take place indoors. “That’s really important, because people feel guilty many times because the cat can’t go outside. Some cats are really happier indoors.”
He has the anecdote to prove it. “I had clients who bought a house for the cat. It was also for them, but mainly so their cat could go outside. The first days, the cat was going out. Then he met the resident cat, who attacked him very badly, and he never wanted to go out again into the beautiful garden.
“If a cat knows there are other cats, there are dogs, there are foxes, there are night birds, they don’t feel safe outside. They want to be in a safe place, and so they come inside. People say, ‘Oh, it can go out. Why does it come in?’ Just to be safe.”
And, of course, to get lots of cuddles. When it feels like it.
The Interpretation of Cats And Their Owners by Claude Béata (Penguin Books, $50 hb).
