CatSmart: Ultimate Guide to Understanding, Caring and Living with Your Cat

An in-depth guide to owning, living with, and properly caring for a cat presents tips on maintaining a health-care plan and advice on how to solve basic behavioral problems, such as scratching, spraying, and a refusal to use a litter box.

Veterinarian Milani offers over 90 exercises that help readers explore their attitudes toward and knowledge of cat behavior and care. Cat owners then discuss their responses to the exercises, and Milani shares information about why domestic cats behave as they do, the proper environment for cats, the human-feline relationship, litter box problems, feeding, exercise, and health. She ignores other topics such as grooming and aggression, however, and it's unlikely that a reader would have the patience to complete all the exercises-especially as some are peripheral to cat care ("Examine your list of your preferred cat characteristics, first through the eyes of an adoring ancient Egyptian, and then as a medieval cat-hating churchman"). For more complete, practical books about cats, consider Cats for Dummies (LJ 12/97), The Purina Encyclopedia of Cat Care (LJ 2/1/98), or The Cornell Book of Cats (Villard, 1997) for behavior, care, and health and Nicholas H. Dodman's The Cat Who Cried for Help: Attitudes, Emotions, and the Psychology of Cats (LJ 8/97) or Pam Johnson's Twisted Whiskers: Solving Your Cat's Behavior Problems (Crossing, 1994) for solving behavior problems.?Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove P.L., Westmont, IL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Every D.V.M., it seems, has a book buried in him or her--pretty much the same information, from caring for a kitten to watching a geriatric cat. Milani deviates from the usual by emphasizing the psychological aspects, delving into the feline's feral and domestic backgrounds, human bonding, and the environment, to get clues about inappropriate behavior or just strange habits. The format, too, is novel; she uses disguised-identity but nonetheless real-life stories to emphasize points--such as Rick and his purebred Norwegian forest cat, who started to exhibit feral qualities after 12 months of age, or her explanations, via client tales, of the three different approaches to cat keeping: perceiving the animal as baby, as robot, or as part of a limited interspecies partnership. The style is more than a bit long-winded, but every subject is patiently explained--including free-access crate-training for cats and the use of double-sided tape to extinguish destructive behaviors. Barbara Jacobs