Galaxy - Catification

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

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Copyright 2014 by Jackson Galaxy and Kate Benjamin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Galaxy, Jackson.

Catification : designing a happy and stylish home for your cat (and you!) / Jackson Galaxy, Kate

Benjamin.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-399-16601-3 (paperback)

1. CatsHousing. 2. CatsEquipment and supplies. 3. Interior decoration. I. Benjamin, Kate. II. Title.

SF447.3.G35 2014 2014019022

636.8'083dc23

Version_1

For all the people who have brought cats into their lives, and to the cats who inspired and challenged those humans to change the way they live.

I ts a great time to be the cat guy.

When I started out my life working with animals, around 1993, it was at a shelter in Boulder, Colorado. Within weeks of realizing that the cats had something they wanted to tell me, the other staff members seemed to smell a cat person in their presence. They immediately christened me Catboy, and put me on the job of decoding everything about cats for everybody. Good thing I was up for the challenge.

Back then, the sense of cats being other from humans was clearly prevalent. I mean, if shelter workers were scratching their heads about cat behavior, imagine what the rest of the world was thinking (or not). As a matter of fact, as my knowledge base grew and I refined my techniques, I branched out to other shelters to find the same desperately inquisitive population. You will never find a more compassionate lot than those who dedicate their lives to caring for homeless animals. That said, we were in dire straits. We were labeling as unadoptable cats who were acting out from a place that not enough people understood. In the reality of that time, unadoptable meant euthanized. If that didnt give Catboy a sense of urgency, nothing would.

As I left the shelter to pursue private practice, I was constantly up against a seemingly unsolvable puzzle: guardians cared enough to hire me instead of getting rid of the cat, and that was fantastic; at the same time, however, the suggestion that problems could be remedied by adding more litter boxes, toys, and trees (and, of course, not hiding them in the basement) was a distinctly unwelcome one. We wanted the problem gone, but the solution was aesthetically painful to most. Almost all of the guardians I came in contact with were panicked that if I had my way, I would turn their home into the crazy cat lady house.

Of course, that sense of aesthetic panic on the part of my clients panicked me. It wasnt just a matter of not wanting a litter box in the living room; it symbolized a lack of true empathy toward, and an investment in, love for cats. We could easily bear the notion of spreading dog blankets, toys, dishes, beds and stinky rawhides around our house. We wouldnt ask to hide our dogs existence any more than we would try to hide our children. In the meantime, cats, and the smallest perceptible evidence that they actually lived in our homes, rode squarely in the back of the domestic bus.

In the ensuing twenty years, Ive been privileged to witness the cat renaissance; those that were considered otheralien, aloof, more furniture than familyare enjoying a surge in popularity like no other time in their domesticated history. We hungrily devour cat memes, watch cat videos by the tens of millions (even creating celebrities out of those video cats) and, thankfully for those of us in the rescue community, adopt them in record numbers. The animal that for tens of thousands of years enjoyed a great reputation as a working animalcontrolling rodents on farms, for instancehas become a bona fide companion.

A truly amazing bonus to being seen as a companion is that under the surface we are asking not only what we can do for cats to make their lives better, but we are acknowledging what they do for us. Cats are now seen by millions as supportive family members, bearers of unconditional love. We better understand that cats dont show love and devotion like dogs do, and so we invest in the time needed to learn a new language.

You may think of Catfication as a design book; it is so much more than that. In the same way that our refusal to add litter boxes symbolized cat shame, what you will see in this book symbolizes cat love. It doesnt illustrate what lengths those crazy cat people will go to, but rather the maturation of us as humans. At the very core of my belief system is the knowledge that a meaningful relationship with the animal world completes us as humans. The concept of dominion, of a natural order of things that has us dominating cats with an iron fist and without regard to their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs, is simply an old way of thinking. I jokingly say that successfully living with cats relies on your ability to compromise. Learning the language of cats, and changing up our environment to accommodate them, to me, is a symbol of our evolution, as it demonstrates our willingness, on a deep level, to compromise for the sake of an animals happiness.

And where does that leave us? In a pretty good place.

I hope you believe that what you hold in your hands is something far beyond a design book. Its a celebration. A home that proudly advertises that you care about your own comfort as well as that of your animal companions is beautiful to some, but for shelter workers, rescuers, foster parents, and others, its a moment to shed a tear of gratitude. Cats have cleared a significant hurdle in their timeline. And make no mistake, that timeline has been a rough one. Does Catification mean that were on our way to becoming like the ancient Egyptians, deifying and burying cats alongside our human family members? Maybe not. Elevating cats, however, means we care not only about the ones in our homes, but all of them. We are beginning to carenot just on the lunatic fringe but across the human spectrumabout whether they live or die. And that means more will live. Soon, millions fewer every year will die. And that