Read during Winter 2002/2003

I didn't learn all I expected to from this book on cat behaviour but I liked that the little chirping sounds my cat makes to me are the sounds a mother cat makes to her kittens and she is treating me as such. Hmmmm.

Cat Speak had all the worst qualities of a really bad self-help book, presenting advice that was either common sense dressed up in pseudo-science or which sounded good, but wasn't. The author begins by talking about how famous he is for his work with dogs, but he's really always loved cats too (honest!). The self-aggrandizement was pretty annoying and read more like an ad than a passage by a cat lover. Things only got worse from there, starting with some gimmicky lists such as "The Seven Instinctive Feline Behaviors" and the "Six Special Feline Abilities and Idiosyncrasies". The advice for understanding your cats mood was mostly of the obvious type - at least, no one in my family has ever had trouble telling when our cat is angry, sad, or hungry without someone to explain what different ear angles mean. If a cat wants you to understand how it's feeling, they're pretty good at letting you know. Where the book really went wrong was when it tried to give scientific explanations for cat behavior. One mistake they made is referring to cats as nocturnal, when they are actually crepuscular (awake at dawn and dusk). While this might seem nit-picky and unimportant, as someone about to adopt a cat it would be nice to know that they might (like my cat Maggie) be really wild as you're going to bed and want lots of attention in the morning - but not all night. In a lot of cases, I just felt like the author was trying to do too much in too little space. He went into just enough detail to get it wrong and not enough detail to explain cat behavior accurately. ( )

Well, let's see. It . . . parts of it are about cats . . . and . . . um . . . there are useful tables on pages 133 and 138 . . . and . . . that's about it, really, for those who have ever crossed paths with a cat. Did I mention the tables on pages 133 and 138? Those were good. ( )