Road Apples
Feb. 22, 2010


Stare deeply into Dr. Garfield's eyes, but watch out for furballs

By Tim Sanders

According to a recent BBC article, BBC “Inside Out” reporter Chris Jackson has registered his cat, George, as a certified hypnotherapist with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming, the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists, and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association. These organizations have been awarded the official acronyms BBNLP, UFH, and PHPA by the British Acronym Assignment Board (BAAB).

This cat certification was inspired by the 2002 case of American Dr. Steve Eichel, who managed to get his cat certified as a hypnotherapist by the National Guild of Hypnotists (NGH) and the American Psychotherapy Association (APA). Eichel’s cat’s certificates all carry the impressive title: Dr. Zoe D. Katze. Ph.D., C.Ht., ABPP. (American hypnotists take a back seat to no one when it comes to acronyms).

So why do I mention this, you ask? Do these two instances of cat certification make a profound statement about the laxity of official certification boards, or about hypnotherapy, or just about cats and their remarkable potential?

Well, when it comes to cats and their potential, I am pessimistic. Oh sure, I was raised to believe that cats were very intelligent creatures. Cat fans always pointed out that the reason my beagle could fetch a stick and their cat couldn’t was because their cat was too smart to perform silly tricks just to entertain a mere human. It was beneath old Tom’s dignity, they said. Of course the actual reason cats couldn’t be taught to fetch or roll over was that they were morons. A ten-penny nail can’t fetch or roll over either, but that’s no sign of intellect.

I’ve owned a number of cats over the years. There’ve been black cats and white cats and yellow cats and gray cats; Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and for a few months there was even a stray Catholic, who only showed up when I was cleaning fish. So I can offer several examples of kitty stupidity.

For example, each and every one of my cats, if chased by a dog, would climb a tree. No, not just to the first limb, which would’ve served the purpose, but all the way to the very top. Then, long after the dog had worn himself out laughing and left to find amusement elsewhere, my cat would marshal all of his tremendous brain power and meowl and squeal and scream for somebody to come and get him down. Climbing up was as easy as pie for the cat, but climbing down was beyond his intellectual capacity.

I had a tomcat when I was a youngster. As far as tomcats go (and some can go quite far, especially when romance is involved), he was fairly good natured and amiable. One of his favorite things was to sit on the side of the tub and watch me take a bath. He thought the bath water was fascinating. Of course he also thought licking his own hindquarters was fascinating, if that tells you anything. One Saturday night, trying to find a more comfortable position, he slipped into the tub. The notion that water might be wet had apparently never occurred to him before, because he immediately climbed up my back and perched himself on the top of my head, with his claws deeply embedded into my scalp. I spent considerable time trying to pry him loose, and then flung him across the bathroom. To hear him squall, you’d have thought I was the offending idiot, not him.

My dad had a 1956 Cadillac with deep Cadillac wheel wells. One winter day on the way home from the grocery store he heard what he thought was the right front brake making a right front brake noise. But when he pulled into the driveway and stopped, the noise didn’t. It got louder. As it turned out, there was a long-haired white cat who’d been clutching the top of that wheel well all the way from Keegstra’s IGA store to our home. That stupid cat obviously wandered into the IGA parking lot, looked at that wheel well, and said to himself: “Oooh. There’s a place I’ve never been before. I can fit in there.” We extracted him and tried to feed him, but he wasn’t interested in charity, and ran off–probably to find a Buick wheel well and try it on for size.

Early in our marriage, Marilyn and I had a yellow cat named Ralph Waldo. Ralph’s only skill was the ability to jump straight into the air–sometimes as high as five feet–from a prone position and spin around mid-jump. He didn’t do this on command, but only when something suspicious (a TV commercial, for example, or a dust mite, or a ray of sunshine) startled him. Since almost anything could set him off, visitors often felt uneasy around Ralph.

Sylvia, our current cat, is nearly 17 years old. She is exceptionally smart for a cat, which means she only got her tail caught in the fan of our old Ford F-150 three times before she learned not to roost under the hood anymore. But being exceptionally smart for a cat is a lot like being exceptionally honest for a congressperson, because after 17 years she still thinks it makes perfectly good sense to strut slowly back in forth in front of me with her tail extended skyward when I’m carrying something heavy across the deck. I’ve learned to be very careful of Sylvia, so as to avoid that horrific screech I hear when she winds up underfoot. To Sylvia, however, every day is a completely new day, and if I should once again step on her plumage, she always seems amazed that such a thing could happen.

So no good can possibly come from this cat hypnotherapy trend. An international proliferation of cat hypnotherapists does not bode well for the very people who are most in need of good, therapeutic boding. People, for example, who think they need anti-smoking hypnotherapy–even people who might indeed stare intensely at a cat for several very expensive but meaningful sessions–would eventually tire of watching their professional hypnotherapist cough up furballs, and go back to their four pack-a-day habit.