Cats and Dogs: Living with and Looking at Companion Animals from Their Point of View

Cats and Dogs

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Living with and Looking at Companion Animals from Their Point of View

FRANIA SHELLEY-GRIELEN

Copyright © 2014 Frania Shelley-Grielen.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0339-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0340-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918213

Archway Publishing rev. date: 2/10/2014

Table of Contents

Introduction

Cats and Dogs

Blended Families, Introducing Cats to Dogs and Dogs to Cats in Your Home

Play Behavior-Know What It Looks Like and Let It Happen

How to Use Time Outs

Choosing Your Child’s First Pet

What You Need to Know About Pet Sitting and Dog Walking

Choosing the Right Vet for You and Your Pet

Make Daylight Savings Time Less Stressful for Pets by Adjusting Feeding Times

Can Science Really Understand the Animals in Our Lives?

Studying Animal Communication-A One Way Street?

Cats

Some Cat Questions Answered

Cats-Social or Solitary?

New Research on if Your Cat is Sick or Just Stressed Out and How to Use It

Feline Communication

Know the Signs of Stress in a Cat

How to Pet a Cat

Helping Your Cat to Use the Litter Box Each and Every Time

Stress Free Approaches to Getting Your Cat in the Carrier

Cats Talk We Listen

Making Your New Cat Feel at Home

Adding to the Family? Strategies for Successful New Cat Integration

Introducing a New Kitten While Keeping Your Older Cat a Happy Camper

Socializing Ferals

Enrichment Strategies for Your Cat to Use at Home

The Importance of Post Surgery Recovery in TNR Programs

Losing Kitty

Dogs

Dogs Communicate Visually with Humans

Dogs Watch Every Move You Make

Canine Communication

Talk to Your Animals-Please

Expanding our Definitions of Canine Vocalizations

Bringing a New Dog Home

How to Train a Dog and How Not To

New Puppy Advice

Know When to Tether Your Puppy and When Not To

Housetraining 101 for Dogs

Getting your Dog to Use Training Pads Each and Every Time

How to Walk the City Dog

Get the Most Out of Your Dog

Walk-Rain or Shine

Easy Walking- Helping Your Dog Not to Pull

What to do When your Dog Becomes Afraid of the Walker

How to Lessen Barking and Keep a Quiet Dog Busy

Strategies for Working with the Fearful Dog

Strategies for Working with Aggression in Dogs

Reading the Canine Ladder of Aggression

The Use of Shock Collars with Dogs

Know What Heatstroke Looks Like in Dogs and What to do About it

Hot Dog Not - Keeping your Dog Out of the Heat Come Summer

Winter Safeguards for City Dogs

Last Words

References

Bibliography

For Nicholas (a cat) and Stanley (a dog), I wish I had known.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. They are also capable of some inherited improvement, as we see in the domestic dog compared with the wolf or jackal.

-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 1.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

-Henry Beston, The Outermost House.

Introduction

This book is a collection of work written about understanding cats and dogs. It is about beginning to understand how these companion animals in our lives experience their own individual worlds. It is about stopping to consider what that experience might be like, how it might feel to be a cat or a dog and knowing that on some levels we can never fully know this. Hampered by our own human constraints we take our own experience of being as our starting point. We will never see in the dark the way a cat or dog does but we do see some in the dark, we can make out the foot of the bed at night and what is on the nightstand beside us, if we start with that we can imagine what it might be like to see more. We can never hear all the sounds that cats or dogs do but we do hear the baby crying, the alarm clock starting to go off, the boom box on the street and we can imagine what more sounds in our world might be like. We can never smell the richness of the world the way a dog or cat can but we do smell goodness in savory cooking smells and stench in garbage and from this we can imagine that everything might have such strong important odors as well. And because we know how important it is to process information about our own world by the things we see, because we see so much, we might, if we try very hard, try and imagine a world where smell or sound means just as much as seeing does.

Along with beginning to understand how non-humans experience the world this is also about beginning to understand how to live with each other. The practical approaches, guidelines, strategies and tips for successful intra species coexistence. Here, once again, our own human experience can hamper our understanding of other animals. Dogs jump up on each other when excited to see each other. Cats amble toward each other with upraised tail and touch noses and muzzles. Humans smile and embrace or shake hands. Each species is different in how they communicate. This then requires more than imagination, it requires rethinking from the unique cat or dog perspective or natural behavior. Successful coexisting with our cats and dogs also calls for making room for their own natural behaviors in a human dominated existence.

I wrote most of this in response to the actual questions I would receive from the students and clients I worked with. People who wanted to learn how to approach and work with animals or why their animals were acting the way they were and what they could do about it. Questions like: How to get a dog to stop pulling or barking or biting? How to help your resident cat accept the new kitten or stray or just use the litter box every time? The answers would help people to take better care of the pets they would work with and better live with their cats and dogs and oftentimes to keep them. Inappropriate elimination with cats and behavior problems with dogs are some of the main reasons owners ask professionals for assistance and surrender their pets. Getting the right assistance to an owner makes the difference between a successful living situation and a stressful or temporary one. Assistance that starts with allowing for much of what we already know. Cats in their natural environment routinely bury their waste in the outer reaches of their territory, using a new spot each time. When we ask our cats to alter natural behavior and use a litter box the appeal is the texture and the condition of the box. Getting your cat to use a litter box regularly works best by keeping the box clean because cats naturally want to dig in a soft space free of waste to deposit their own. By approximating conditions in the cat’s natural environment we successfully enable the cat to alter their natural behavior in a man made environment. It works. It also works because these animals in our lives are precious to us. Behaviorist’s questionnaires for prospective clients (mine included) often ask Why have you kept this animal in spite of the issues you are encountering? The responses are all about how valued and loved and precious this pet is. That is the why. And this too works.

This book works through some of the most common behavior topics for cats and dogs. You cannot work through behavior topics for cats and dogs without talking about humane handling. I write much about what humane handling looks like and how to get there. Often, when I am told about a dog or a cat’s behavior the narrative describes the animal acting alone: My dog pulls or barks or growls. My cat scratches or hisses or is always meowing. The dog is pulling against something or somebody and barking about something or somebody and growling towards something or somebody. And the cat is scratching or hissing at something or somebody and meowing for somebody to hear the cry.

When examined, it turns out that most of the time this problem behavior is a response to what is occurring in the environment at that moment. Usually what is happening stems from our interactions with our cats and dogs. The spaces we create for them, what we permit them or prevent from doing, how we handle them or don’t. Learning humane handling and how to best pet a cat or walk a dog is learning how to best use our own bodies around these animals including posture, modulated voices, averted eyes and soft hands. As simple as that sounds many of us have never ever learned what it means or what it looks like or feels like when done properly or improperly. We spend much time teaching our children to avoid dogs that are sleeping or tied or eating or not our own. We teach them to ask before petting a stranger’s dog. And then we stop. We fall short on teaching how and where to best pet our dogs and cats.1 And if we have not learned this as children or have been doing it wrong all along, how can we know?

As much as we know about animals, as many theories exist on behavior, resources are scarce for acquiring applied skills in humane handling. There is much written about training animals to do what we would like them to do with varying methods of how we should accomplish this and not enough out there on humane handling practices. Humane handling is based on considering the animal and proceeding from that species specific point of view as to what determines welfare with regards to natural history, behavior, contact, affiliations, environment and resources.

When I began teaching a vocational course for aspiring pet care technicians I searched extensively for material on humane handling practices to use in my classroom. This is why I know how scarce the resources are and what age the target audience is. I was happy to use material aimed at children as long as it was sound and even happier when I could show highly esteemed experts like Ian Dunbar lecture that those same approaches to strange dogs applied to adults as well as children (How to approach a strange dog? Never!). More work was out there about dogs, which was both good and bad as inhumane handling practices were just as likely, if not more, to be found as humane ones. Cats were pretty much ignored as far as handling was concerned; much was written about their needs but little about how to go about physically interacting with them. And so I could show my students (and others) what these very things should look like, I began to make videos of how to pet a cat and a dog, how to pick up a cat, how to walk a dog and more and I wrote about it. I needed to utilize practical methods to teach humane handling from a species specific point of view and if the methods were my own I would be guaranteed that they would be humane and they would now exist as a resource.

I also write on some of the practicalities of living with pets; from creating feline and canine friendly spaces, winter proofing your dog to how to prevent heat stroke to deciding on your child’s first pet, choosing a vet or a pet sitter and other things that go into the day to day of living with cats and dogs.

If you are reading this, you, like me are no doubt an animal lover. Good for us, good for us to take the time to consider the animals and to love what we see. I believe that one of the things that make animal lovers who we are is that from that measure we have made the rightful room for these animals not just in our homes and in our world but in our hearts. With that room; comes the space to allow, at least part of the way, the possibility and potential that each animal’s experience be what they might choose for themselves had they the freedom to do so. By knowing more about how to interact with the animals in our lives in ways that are truer and closer to who they are we can come closer to that choice.

Cats and Dogs

Photo by author.

Photo by author.

BLENDED FAMILIES, INTRODUCING CATS TO DOGS AND DOGS TO CATS IN YOUR HOME

When it comes to cats and dogs in our homes does it make a difference who came first? A study looks at some answers and I add some other important aspects to consider for those families ready to blend.

AMERICANS, ESPECIALLY URBAN AMERICAN LIKE NEW YORKERS love our pets. There are cat people and dog people and there are cat and dog people. And then there are those single pet owners who are thinking about another pet but are just not sure. Just how well can dogs and cats get along? Especially if they have not been raised together?

Researchers, N. Feuerstein and Joseph Terkel studied the relationships of cats and dogs living with humans in an article published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The authors’ analyzed questionnaires distributed to 202 households in Israel and observed cat and dog interactions in 25 of households surveyed. The scientists found, that, yes, cats and dogs can live amicably, read happily, together.

According to the study, cats and dogs are more than adept at reading each other signals and dogs will even adapt their own greeting behavior to accommodate the cats in the house. When encountering each other, cats tend to sniff nose to nose while dogs prefer a nose to tail sniff. When cats and dogs live together the nose sniff becomes the universal greeting.

Other key points made were that dogs and cats seem to be the most successful in adapting to each other when the cat is adopted first. Cats that are brought into the family before or after a dog, seem to more readily become accustomed to the dog, whereas when a dog is an established family member prior to a cat’s introduction the dog may exhibit greater aggression or indifference to the cat. The reason for this is thought to be the dog’s greater dependence on humans and what might look like and perhaps be jealousy on the part of the dog. Don’t blame the dog though. Human