“We need to explode the concept of what a cat guy looks like, what a cat girl looks like,” argues Jackson Galaxy in his book, Cat Daddy: What the World’s Most Incorrigible Cat Taught Me About Life, Love, and Coming Clean. “We need a country literally full of cat guys and cat girls, bikers, politicians, clergy, and everyone in between, in order to keep millions from dying without homes.”
In Jackson’s case, the look includes a shaved head, sculpted facial hair, enormous earrings, and loads of tattoos. On last week’s episode of his wildly successful show, My Cat From Hell (which you can watch online), he revealed a new accessory: a humane trap.
“TNR,” explained Jackson to an enthusiastic audience (the guy’s got more than 38,000 “Likes” on his Facebook page!), is “how we manage feral colonies. It’s the most effective and the most humane way to do it.”
In this case, TNR was a means to reduce the stress of an owned cat, Finn, featured on the show.
“If I can trap these cats and get them neutered—without the hormones coursing through their veins, they’re not going to feel that need to hit this area over and over and over again. It’s very simple: if the cats stop marking outside the home, why would Finn feel the necessity to mark inside?”
Sure enough—although Finn’s guardians were certain there were no cats roaming the neighborhood, Jackson trapped one.
Now, there’s no telling how having that cat sterilized might have contributed to Finn’s behavioral changes—there were so many other factors involved. But when TNR gets prime time exposure like this, there’s bound to be behavioral changes of a different kind far beyond Finn’s neighborhood! TNR is—at long last—coming out from the shadows (figuratively, if not literally).
Thank you, Jackson!
• • •
My Cat From Hell airs Saturdays at 8:00 pm PDT.