Understanding and training your cat or kitten - Softcover

Rezensionen

Writing in an anecdotal style, Whiteley, a veterinarian and founder of the Cat Clinic in Amarillo, Texas, focuses on the cat's psychology and behavior. Her consideration of cat selection and suggestions for training will be helpful to prospective and first-time cat owners. She also covers such basic pet care topics as grooming, nutrition, and preventive medicine, though Terri McGinnis's The Well Cat Book: The Classic Comprehensive Handbook of Cat Care ( LJ 6/1/93) provides more detailed information. Whiteley's final chapter, "Saying Goodbye," will be of interest to anyone who has lost a pet. Suggestions for pet funerals and a short bibliography of children's books dealing with the death of a pet are particularly helpful. Recommended for public libraries.
- Charlotte Means, UM-KC Health Sciences Lib., Kansas City, Mo.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Of obsessive-compulsive disorder among cats, Whiteley ( Women in Veterinary Medicine: Profiles of Success ) writes, "MeeMee, a female Siamese looked around with a weird look in her eyes, swung her head to one side, and licked at her left paw in the sort of rhythm that you could set a metronome by. Nothing seemed to distract her when she entered one of her compulsive licking periods." The syndrome? "Displacement grooming"; Valium solved it. Whiteley gets to the point, too, on a range of other problems and issues in feline behavior--anorexia; the insatiable appetite for grass or houseplants; the challenges posed by air travel, w/owner or w/o; and the meaning of purring (cats are not necessarily happy, she says, when they do it). And she discusses training your pet, whether or not you believe it will work at the outset, maintaining that it really is possible to instruct cats in the arts of sitting, stopping, fetching, jumping, and in shaking hands/paws. They can also, she says, learn to ring the doorbell. (But, wait--is that really an advantage?) The proof is in trying all of this stuff out; meanwhile, it's amusing.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.