My Life Among the Animals
Mieshelle
Nagelschneider
My Animal
Family
I come from a family steeped in animal life. My
uncles on my mother’s side were cattle ranchers and
trophy-snagging rodeo riders. My great aunt and uncle on my
father’s side were both horse stunt riders, like their parents
before them. They all loved their horses. Their grandson and my
cousin, Tad Griffith, now works closely with animals as the
owner of a stunt and production company in Hollywood.
In my hometown of Redmond, Oregon, my Aunt Vicki
has long raised Toggenburg goats, the oldest known breed of
dairy goat, which hails from the Swiss valley of the same name.
Aunt Vicki also had real pet cats, the kind that lived in the
house. While the goats thrilled me, the cats – indoors, for Bastet’s sake! – made me bitter with envy. Every Sunday our
family would visit Aunt Vicki’s house and I would spend the
entire time playing with the cats. One of her cats, Elsie,
didn’t like to be stroked or held. My older cousin Samantha
would remind me, “That Elsie’s a biter, Mieshelle.”
But I found that you could indeed pet Elsie—just
not for very long. You had to pay attention and watch for
certain responses that indicated she had had enough. So I would
pet her for a while, but stop before I saw her ears go back or
her tail flick. Samantha bragged to everyone that I had the
magic touch with Elsie, but I knew I was just petting her in the
way she liked, and stopping before she got agitated. It was my
first lesson, at the age of 5, that you can't make a cat do what
you want, but you can change your own behavior slightly to get a
result that will make both of you happy.
On The Farm
 I always felt a little introverted and shy
around other children. But luckily I was let loose to run with
the animals on the farm our family lived on, in the high desert
of Central Oregon, and they became my companions. I found the
animals much more interesting and easy to get along with than my
much older brothers or the other children around me. And how
many people have a wild hummingbird for a friend?
Yes, I really did! I first remember being aware
of it when I was about four and I kept hearing a fluttering in
my ear, like a vibration, as I walked around outdoors. The first
time I saw it, I thought it was a bug or bee, but others told me
the creature, iridescent and green, was a hummingbird. It would
fly over me and in front of me and hover for a bit like it was
trying to tell me something. After a while, it would zip off,
only to return again, making that odd sensation in my ear.
My
dad used to tease me because a hummingbird followed me around,
which embarrassed me because I was sure he thought it was
ridiculous. But one day I heard him bragging about me and the
hummingbird to some visiting relatives, and I realized that
there was something special about what had happened.
My father was a gruff, hard-working man. The
only time I saw him show emotion, no, melt, was in the presence
of animals. Maybe that’s partly why I came to love animals too.
Dad kept all the kinds of animals you’d expect to find on a
family farm, and when I say he kept them, I mean he could not
bring himself to put any of them on our dinner table.
He and my
mother had both grown up on cattle ranches where raising animals
for meat was simply what you did, but he grew too attached to
the calves on our farm to turn them into table-top beefsteak,
even though he’d bought them for that purpose. So ten calves
grew into ten cows, and those cows simply became among the
largest of my pets. What we really had was not a working farm,
like the one our next-door neighbors had, but a large petting
zoo.
Of course we also had horses, Missouri
Foxtrotters. I learned to love horses, and to ride at a young
age. We had a Rocky Mountain horse named Sinbad who’d been given
to my father because he was supposedly “no good.” He had an
injury to his hoof so it was uncomfortable for him to run. Dad
decided that made him safe for me. A horse is a fantastic
introduction to the world of animals. As any horse person knows,
the big animals have a special, palpable sort of consciousness.
I can stand next to a horse and feel the energy of a sentient
heart and soul.
We had two sheep – I organized picnics with
them. The geese and the ducks and I sat in the dog house
together, and I swam with them in their dirty pond (much to my
mother’s distress). The chickens needed me to spend time with
them, too, and I climbed on the roof to crow with the rooster.
Then there was the enormous bull in a corral
next to the house. No one could even go near him without being
charged. My parents warned me many times to stay away. Even the
dogs were terrified of him. But I felt sorry for him. So I
hatched a plan: I would hop hop hop into his corral like a
bunny. And he wouldn’t be afraid or bothered at all. We had
bunnies in our barn, after all, and he’d seen them, and I knew
no one could be afraid of or angry at a bunny.
It wasn’t so much that I was a lunatic. I was
four.
First I took some paper and drew two bunny ears,
which I colored pink as the inside of a bunny ears. Then I cut
them out and asked my mother to tape them on. “I need to be a
bunny,” I said, already savvy enough to speak to my mother only
on a need-to-know basis. “How sweet,” she said, and taped the
bunny ears to my hair. I also knew I had to be a white bunny,
like the ones in our barn, so I mashed several handsful of
cotton balls into a tail which I attached to my white ballet
leotard
It was a nice, warm summer’s dusk when I crawled through the
bars of the bull’s corral.
Careful not to look directly at him,
I stayed low and hopped around the perimeter, as bunny-like as I
could be, while he regarded me warily. Just going about my rabbity business. And then he stood up and walked over to me. I
stopped hopping. His massive head blocked out the sun. His big
nose reached down to me. His giant, light-pink wet nostrils
flared and pinched, flared and pinched. He snorted into the
dust. And then I reached up and patted the fur at the top of his
nose.
It was utterly exhilarating.
When my parents found me, I was sitting in the
dirt at the animal’s feet, stroking his head and caressing his
neck and throat. The family lore of “Mieshelle and that bull”
would echo in my ears throughout my childhood, instilling in me
my first sense that I had a special gift and passion. Of course
my parents were horrified. But why did I have to play with a big
old dangerous smelly bull? Because my parents wouldn’t get me a
cat.
Unfortunately, the animals on whom I most wanted
to deploy my special gift were cats – the one animal we didn’t
have on our farm. That’s why, when I was four, I used to sneak
across the street to a house where our neighbor ran a daycare
service for children who were around the same age I was. I
wasn’t going there to play with the other children; I went to
play with our neighbor’s Siamese cat. Eventually the daycare
owner told my mother that I could no longer come and play with
the cat for free; my mother would have to pay for my being
there, just like the rest of the parents did. But my mom was a
stay-at-home mom and she didn’t think it made much sense to pay
for me to be allowed to pet the kitty across the street. She
told me that I was no longer allowed to go to the daycare lady’s
house.
So I began camping out in the woman’s driveway.
Sometimes the willowy Siamese would see me through the window
and come outside to receive my petting. I used to bring a brush
that belonged to my Barbie doll (which I’d quickly abandoned as
uninteresting) and the cat would purr and knead on me until
finally I was not allowed to sit on the driveway anymore either.
One night, when I was four-and-a-half, my mother
handed me the phone. “Come here to the phone, Mieshelle. It’s
Santa Claus.”
Standing in my nightgown, I took the phone from
her.
“What do you want for Christmas?” a voice said.
“I want a cat.” I clarified that. “A real cat.”
“You want a real cat?” said the voice, amused.
This was already annoying.
“Yeah. A real one.”
“Oh,” he said, “I think you want a stuffed cat.”
“I don’t want any more stuffed cats. I want a
cat that purrs and eats milk.”
“I don’t think your mother would want a real cat
in the house.”
“I want a real cat.”
It went on like that for some time. Then, seeing
no progress, I hung up on Santa.
For Christmas I got a large, pink, stuffed cat,
a sad product of a misbegotten union between a domestic
short-hair and the Pink Panther.
Not at all what I wanted, but now that my Dad is
gone, I wish I had kept that stuffed cat.
My campaign for a real cat continued for several
years, and remained fruitless. One year, after my mother had
enrolled me in the Blue Birds, the little-girl wing of the Camp
Fire Girls, we were all given autobiographical scrapbooks whose
pages had blanks we were to fill in.
There was one page called “All About Me.” My
page read:
My Best Friend is: My cat
What I love to do the most is: Play with my cat
The first thing I do when I get home from school is: Play
with my cat
If I could be anything I would: Be a cat
I’m not making that up. But I still didn’t have a cat, a very
sore point for me. I would soon, however, embark on a secret
cat-taming project involving the feral cats in the canyon behind
our house.
Cheshires in
The Canyon
Like a lot of little girls, when I was a little
girl, I wanted to be Snow White. But not because of the prince.
I wanted to talk to the animals. Lucky for me, our house sat on
the edge of a shallow canyon, lush and green, with a nearly
level floor, and that canyon was my haven to explore. The canyon
was teeming with wildlife - deer, coyote, rabbits, butterflies
and hummingbirds, and of course our own pets, dogs, horses,
rabbits, sheep, and calves wandered there too. The neighbor’s
white peacocks visited daily. They were all my friends.
Occasionally, I saw cats in the canyon. For me
it was like spotting a unicorn – something rare, rarely seen,
and unpossessable. These feral cats were really what drew me to
the canyon. They popped their heads out from behind rocks and
trees, and then, like the Cheshire Cat in the Alice in
Wonderland coloring book that my father and I colored in
together, they vanished just as quickly. And like the Cheshire
Cat when he was invisible, they watched me from the dark places.
One day, I got an idea. I’d throw a tea-party
like the one in the Alice story, and I would invite the
Cheshires of the canyon. So early one June morning, just after
my fifth birthday, I gathered up all my plastic teacups and
plates, a tablecloth, my stuffed animals, and a stack of
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and descended into the
canyon, where I sat atop a flattish volcanic rock by a small
stream. On each of my plastic plates I put a morsel of PB&J that
I cut with a pink plastic knife, and then the stuffed animals
and I sat there, looking at each other, waiting for something to
happen. Nothing did.
I ran back up to the house to get some milk.
Maybe that would be the draw. As I was heading back down the
trail to my rock, I saw a buff-colored shorthaired cat sitting
at one of the plates, eating some of the peanut butter and
jelly. A cat! As soon as he spotted me, he bolted and ran away.
But I knew I was onto something.
Over the weeks that followed I learned I could
get closer to some of these flighty tea party guests – the ones
who were more relaxed - if I remained at a distance until they
gradually got used to me. But I also learned that some cats are
more reactive than others and I couldn’t get closer to them
without their running off. In time, as they got used to my
presence, even the highly reactive cats would not run as far and
would return more quickly.
Looking back now, I’m sure that together we were
discovering the behavior modification techniques of
counter-conditioning and de-sensitization. Counter-conditioning
pairs something attractive, such as food, with a negative
stimulus (such as the presence of a little girl) in order to
change an animal’s negative feelings about the stimulus into
something more positive. As the weeks went by, I learned that
tuna fish sandwiches were the sandwich of choice; that milk
bested Kool-Aid in all taste tests; and that as long as I made
no sudden moves, I could sit and dine with my striped and
whiskered friends with relative ease and the happy certainty
that no one would run off.
A year later we moved away from the canyon to a
new house in the country. I missed my Cheshires and I renewed my
campaign for a cat of my own. “What about all those cats in the
barn?” my father grumbled one day. They were feral, almost as
wild as the canyon cats, but after what I had learned from the
Cheshires, I decided I could make even better friends with the
barn cats, if I just paid attention to what they liked. This was
the beginning of several years of close observation. I copied
their behavior; I tried to put myself into their heads and see
the world through their eyes; and soon I felt that the barn
Cheshires were becoming my family.
If I got to the feral kittens early enough and
played with them, I could make some of them quite friendly. I
was about eight years old when neighbors noticed how friendly my
barn cats were, and started asking me if they could adopt one or
two as a pet. I even caught my dad cuddling one of the cats I
had socialized.
One morning, when I was eleven, I saw a young
gray tabby cat crawl into a ten-inch irrigation pipe in our
yard. I knew I had a small window of time before water would
surge through those pipes, as it did daily. Crisis! I called,
whispered, dangled a leaf, patted the ground – I tried
everything to lure the little cat out, hoping to save its life.
Nothing seemed to work. Then, without really thinking about it,
I made eye contact with her, closed my eyes briefly, wishing for
her to come out, and then opened my eyes again.
And the cat blinked back at me, slowly.
I blinked again, slowly, and immediately the
little cat came tumbling out of the pipe. She allowed me to move
her to safety, and only a few minutes later the water came
rushing through the pipes.
My parents saw how happy I was and to my
amazement they let me keep her. I named her Curly for her
curious little spiral of a stump tail. Many years later, I heard
the experts say that slowly blinking and then looking away is a
powerful form of cat communication, but by that time I had long
known that a cat that blinks slowly at another is feeling
content and relaxed. The blinked-at cat, in turn, interprets
this as meaning she is not in harm’s way. Blinking can
immediately reassure a cat and relax a tense situation. I still
use this technique today, when a client's cat won’t come out
from under the bed.
The
Veterinary Office Years
I was in seventh grade when I got my first
glimpse of a world in which you could be with animals all day
and even get paid to do it. My friend Jamie asked me to help her
take her cat to a vet’s office. In the exam room a woman came in
to take Shadow’s temperature. She was very impressive. “How long
did it take you to go to vet school?” I asked her. “I’m not a
vet,” she said. “I’m a vet tech.” A vet tech, or veterinary
technician, would become for me a kind of ideal, but from my
vantage point of twelve years of age, it sounded impossibly far
away.
The years passed quickly, however, and when I
was 19, studying psychology at a college in Portland, Oregon, I
got a job at a veterinary office. Though all the other vet techs
were more experienced than I, it soon developed that when no one
else could get a cat out of its cage, or hold it still while
blood work was being done, the vet would call me.
By touching a cat’s body or just reading its
body language, I could feel how a cat was feeling and sense what
he was communicating – and I adjusted my touch accordingly. The
clients as well as the vets began to ask for me to be the one
present in the exam room with their cats. I was able to calm
cats who would not let anyone else close enough to inject them
with vaccine or trim their nails. Clients also began to ask that
I pet-sit their cats when they were out of town.
For the next several years, I learned to do
surgical prep, assist during surgeries, take X-rays, trim nails
and give vaccinations, administer sub-cutaneous fluids, perform
dentals, draw blood and run tests, and fill prescriptions. At
the two clinics I went to next, I was named Head Vet Tech and to
my responsibilities I added the ordering of all pet products,
anesthesia, office supplies, medications, and training new vet
techs.
Over time, more and more of the vets’ clients
asked me to watch their pets while they were on vacation. I
would eventually make many thousands of house calls for cats
with special needs. Then came the day that started me on the
path to creating a job that filled a big vacuum -- taking care
of cats with not just health care needs but behavioral ones too.
That day I happened to answer a call that came
in to the vet’s office. It was from a woman, in obvious
distress, who was driving in circles around the parking lot of
the local Humane Society. “My cat’s in a crate,” she said. “I
have to give him up.” She began to cry.
“Why do you think you have to give him up?” I
asked.
“He’s been urinating in the house for over eight
years,” she said. “My husband said either he or Tedd would have
to go. I’ve been to every vet around, they ran tests on Tedd, I
did what they told me to do.”
“Can you do something for me?” I said. “Can you
park and let Tedd out of his crate?”
She pulled over and let Tedd out of his crate.
Soon he was purring so loudly I could hear him through the
phone.
“Now he’s curled up in my lap purring and
kneading my leg,” she said. I could easily imagine it. Kneading
is soothing to cats. It’s a behavior that begins in nursing,
when a kitten rhythmically pushes and pulls its forepaws against
the mother’s teat, both to push the queen’s skin away from the
kitten’s nose and to help stimulate milk flow. Cats ever after
associate kneading with happy feelings. And cats purr not just
when they’re content, but when they are under stress and want to
soothe themselves.
Now that she could clearly see and feel what was
at stake, I asked her what she had done to stop the problem. She
said she had followed her vet’s advice: she’d added another
litter box. Where had she put it? Right next to the original.
Were there any other cats in the house? Yes, there was Arnold.
Had she noticed Arnold sitting on any of the pathways to the
litter boxes? Yes, in fact: he often sat in the hall right
outside the mud room where the cat boxes were located.
Bingo. Adding litter boxes hadn’t addressed the
real issue, which was Arnold’s territorial competition with Tedd
for limited resources and the locations of those resources. I
suggested she spread the litter boxes out, have three, not just
two, and ideally put them in separate rooms. I strongly
recommended that she clean the smell from the areas where Tedd
had been urinating, and told her the best way to do that. And I
offered her a number of other suggestions that you’ll be privy
to in the following chapters. The woman thanked me and hung up
the phone.
A week later she called back to say that for the
first time in eight years, Tedd was happily using the litter
boxes. A few months later, the woman stopped by the vet’s office
and asked for “the girl who saved my cat and my marriage.” When
the vet techs looked at me, she ran over to me and hugged me,
telling me that Tedd was completely reformed and that Tedd and
Arnold were even getting along wonderfully for the first time.
That’s when I knew it was time to choose between
my job at the vet’s office, and the work I was doing on the
side, caring for cats in my clients’ homes. I was spending so
much time fielding clients’ questions and tending to their cats
that I felt I was working two full-time jobs. And the second job
was something nobody else I knew was doing. So, in my early 20s,
I quit my “real” job and began to work for myself. I never again
worked for anyone without four legs and the ability to purr.
The Cat Behaviorist: Filling a Void in
Feline Behavior Expertise
I was able to help Tedd’s owner because of what
I had learned caring for the cats in my client’s homes. It was
my habit to visit my clients’ houses once or even twice every
day. Sometimes when I showed up on the first day I would find
the litter box packed high with feces and urine clumps, and I
would immediately clean it out, and keep cleaning it every time
I visited. When the clients returned, they’d thank me for
cleaning the box, thinking, I guess, that I had only saved them
some labor. But a few days later they’d call to report, “Hey, my
cat stopped pooping outside the box!” That’s how I learned how
important a clean box is.
I learned a lot of other things during my
pet-sitting days, often by trial and error. Ever since I was
young I’d been unable to watch a cat without asking myself, “If
I was a cat why would I have done that?” If a cat was urinating
outside the box, I’d ask, “Why would she want to do that? Poor
access? Too obese to get into the box? Intimidation?”
I watched and made connections.
I also got to be very good at reading cats’ body
language. I could immediately tell if they were stressed, and
began to understand whether they were stressed about something
in their environment, one another, or both. While I was
nominally providing in-home cat care, I became something of an
interior decorator. I made minor changes to each client’s house
to suit the needs of the cats (I made even more changes when a
client left on an extended trip). And the cats stopped
exhibiting behavior issues.
When the owners came home, and saw to their
surprise the positive changes in their cat’s behavior, they
became fiercely loyal to me. Over the years, I had in effect
conducted a longitudinal study of thousands of cats, keeping
track of which changes in their environments affected which
behaviors.
Take the Maine Coons that had defecated outside
the box for over a year. Despite my suggestion, the owner had
refused to separate the cats’ litter boxes from their food.
“They really like their food in the bathroom with the litter
boxes,” he insisted. My instinct told me otherwise. I also
recommended that he give his big cats more and bigger litter
boxes, but he never got around to it. Then he went away for
three weeks. In the feline utopia I set up for his cats, not
once did anyone eliminate outside of the box.
“What did you do?” he asked on his return.
“I followed my own advice.” After that, he did
too.
I didn’t always understand exactly what may have
initially caused the cat’s problem. But I nearly always proved
that it was largely environmental. Change the environment,
change the cat.
Many of my clients reported that their cats were aggressive.
They said their cats would nip them or chase other cats. Others
reported that their cats hid, were “shy” or “timid.” But when I
got a chance to re-arrange the cats’ environments as I’m going
to teach you to do here, they were calm, happy, and utterly
friendly toward people and toward other cats.
“I don’t know what you did,” they’d call me up
to say, a few hours after they returned home. “This is not the
same cat I left here. She’s so confident and so friendly, so
affectionate and loving. What did you do?”
I even got cats to play. A shocking number of
clients solemnly informed me that their cats didn’t play, and
some clients would even illustrate -- by wiggling the cat’s toy
in its face. But cats appear to have evolved to view anything
that hurls itself into a predator’s face as inedible, so in
order to get a cat to play, you have to make the toy appear to
be fleeing the cat.
Then there were the clients who would instruct
me, “They eat off the same plate.” When an ownerBut if I noticed
that the cats seemed to be competing at the food bowl, I’d
ignore the instruction and feed them separately. When the owners
returned, they’d always ask, “Why are the cats sleeping
together? They’ve never done that before. And what did you do to
make them stop fighting?” By eliminating the competition between
them, I’d resolved the hostility, too.
I’ve now spent nearly two decades making house
and phone calls to solve cats’ behavior issues, affording me
invaluable experiential information. In the last 19 years, not
counting my childhood observations of feral cat colonies or my
own cats, I’ve logged about 33,000 hours observing cats and
investigating clients’ reports of their behaviors. That’s the
same number of hours a psychologist would log over 22 years
while listening to patients’ self-reports (as opposed to the
more useful witnessing of their behavior) for a prodigious
thirty clients per week, 50 weeks a year. I’ve invested some
time, that’s for sure. I’ve even worked with wildcats like
African Servals and Bobcats.
The Cat Behavior Clinic
The Cat Behavior Clinic is devoted to
researching and solving cat behavior problems in person or by
phone. Since I opened the clinic, I have worked with thousands
of clients and vets from all over the world. My success rate on
behavior issues – success meaning total or partial improvement
-- naturally depends greatly on whether my clients follow my
instructions, but when they do, it’s near 100% for most behavior
issues, and well over 90% for even the most intractable.
Most of the vets I’ve had the pleasure to work
with are fantastic, dedicated people. But behavior issues aren't
their specialty. Going to a non-behaviorist vet with a behavior
problem is like getting psychiatric advice from your general
practitioner. In fact, I’m often sought out by vets who have
behavior issues with their own cats. The first piece of
information they invariably give me arrives apologetically: “I
didn’t get much training in animal behavior, you know.”
Few if any veterinary schools even offer a
course specifically on feline behavior. I’m amazed at this state
of affairs. The instincts and behavior of the world’s most
popular pet remain a mystery to the caregivers who could make
the biggest difference in lives of cats and their owners. Even
most animal behaviorists specialize in dogs.
Cat owners live in an informational vacuum. The
fact is, there are only several dozen people like me, trained in
feline behavior, in North America. Even many of these
“behaviorists” are vets who actually specialize in the
occasional medical conditions that cause behavior issues. It’s
time behavioral medicine was integrated into the curriculum at
every veterinary college, especially for feline behavior. The
good news is that while the field of cat behavior is relatively
young, it is, finally, here.
I’m now privileged to help clients all over the
world with their cat behavior issues, and I love my work,
because I still have a fierce love for animals and I know by
experience that most behavior issues can be easily solved.
Today, I have nine animals, including six well-behaved cats
(Jasper Moo Foo, Rhapsody in Blue, Clawde, Barthelme, Lady
Josephine, and Farsi Noir), the cats’ bird friend Pidgeoto,
their playmate Piccolo (a Teacup Chihuahua), and a soulful Great
Dane named Jazzy.
You can read Mieshelle's whole story, and
learn her breakthrough behavior techniques, in the forthcoming
book, The Cat Whisperer: Why Cats Do What They Do --
and How to Get Them to Do What You Want, from Random House.
Email us at eyesofacat @ thecatbehaviorclinic.com to be notified
when it's ready!
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