Cats From Hell And Sex On Six Legs
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Cats From Hell And Sex On Six Legs MR. SAM LITZINGER
12:33:33
Welcome back to "The Animal House." I'm Sam Litzinger. Cats are sometimes fickle, independent for some reason. For many of us, impossible to understand. Well, there's one person who is not deterred at all by the feline mystique. Jackson Galaxy, host of Animal Planet's "My Cat from Hell," has enough knowledge about cats to fill the universe. He joins us now from Los Angeles to share a bit of his wisdom. When do you know your cat is actually from hell? The show is "My Cat from Hell." Do you ever run into one and you say, hey, I really have my doubts about this one. I think it may be from deep underground someplace.
MR. JACKSON GALAXY
12:34:06
Yeah. Yeah. There have been a few that when I met them, you know, there's this switch in me that when I meet a cat, I would say instantaneously there's just sort of that empathy that you feel for whatever situation they're in, and you work that case from that point of departure. But there have been some cats who have just from go were just so driven to kill me that -- and whoever else around them, that it's pretty hard to flip that switch.
MR. JACKSON GALAXY
12:34:38
I mean, you'd have to be some sort of monk to, you know, to have that level of zen groundedness, you know, but yeah, for sure. I mean, we had the episode last week, a cat named Penny Lane, who in all my years, I've never seen a cat like her.
LITZINGER
12:35:26
We're talking with Jackson Galaxy, host of Animal Planet's "My Cat from Hell." Think like a cat for a minute. What do we humans do that generally tends to be a mistake in cat's eyes? Presumably we do quite a lot of odd things. If a cat is looking at us and saying, my, what a strange thing this is that I'm sharing the house with, what mistakes do we commonly make with cats?
GALAXY
12:35:46
I think that one of the things, you know, one of the big talking points of any of my classes, or whenever I go into a client's home, is environmental enrichment. Not just life enrichment, but, you know, making sure the space is catered to the needs of a cat. The thing that I think that we as humans do, we'll see this a lot of times with our children more so than the adults, but we tender to corner cats. We tend to put them into a corner. We approach them, we want to pet, and even though they're backing up and they corner themselves, we keep coming at them.
GALAXY
12:36:19
Remember, cats are prey animals. They're used to being hunted by other animals. So cornering them means triggering the fight or flight instinct, and as soon as that's triggered, trouble's gonna happen. So, you know, letting them come to you is a lot of the solution. When I come into a home, the first thing I do, I get off my feet, I sit on a chair, sometimes I'll put out my glasses or something that smells of me, and I'll let them start coming to me on their own time.
LITZINGER
12:36:47
Do cats get bored?
GALAXY
12:36:49
Of course. If they don't have an outlet for their deeply entrenched hunting desire, bad things happen, in my experience. So that's why I probably teach 99 percent of the people I come in contact with how to play with their cats. How to get them hunting, and then at the end of it, eating a nice meaty treat and completing that cycle. It's so important on a daily basis to keep cats stimulated that way because it -- as I've always said, you have two choices with a cat, you're either draining energy out in a creative way, or you're allowing that energy to collect in a negative way, and it'll just come out sideways when you least expect it.
LITZINGER
12:37:28
Do you remember when you were able to make a connection the first time?
GALAXY
12:37:32
Yeah. Yeah. Basically when I was working at the shelter I worked at for a long time in Boulder, Colorado, the story was that I was working very late at night trying to get a proposal done, and I -- there was a huge thunderstorm going on and there was 45 transferred cats from another shelter that had closed, next door to my office, screaming -- screaming their heads off. And I had heard of a technique through a book called "The Natural Cat" in which to calm them down, which is now -- I call it the slow blink, the soft blink, the cat I love you, lots of things we call it on the show, and I figured now was as good a time as any, and within a couple of hours, I had that entire room quiet and I got them, like I just -- I spoke cat.
GALAXY
12:38:25
It was like being immersed into a new country and you came out speaking the language fluently, and it happened in a few hours, and yeah, there was no turning back from there.
LITZINGER
12:38:34
We've been speaking with Jackson Galaxy, host of Animal Planet's "My Cat from Hell." Jackson, thank you very much for being with us in "The Animal House."
GALAXY
12:38:41
Any time. Any time.
LITZINGER
12:38:49
The thought of insects can send people scrambling for the repellant, but not Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at the University of California Riverside, and an accomplished science journalist. Dr. Zuk has written a new book with a rather provocative title, "Sex on Six Legs," and she's here to take us inside the private lives of our friends in the insect world. Dr. Zuk, welcome to "The Animal House." Glad to have you with us.
DR. MARLENE ZUK
12:39:12
Thanks for having me.
LITZINGER
12:39:13
Are there basically two human reactions to insects, one being ooh, interesting, and the other being ick, creepy?
ZUK
12:39:19
Yeah, pretty much. And I have to say that I, for some reason, was born without that eew creepy gene. I've always thought insects were ooh, interesting.
LITZINGER
12:39:31
Now, you know, the bottom line here for "Sex on Six Legs" is -- my conclusion is that many insects have much more interesting sex lives than we humans do. Is that a fair conclusion to draw?
ZUK
12:39:41
Absolutely. In fact, sometimes I have to prod people into concluding that. I'm so happy you reached it on your own. (laugh) So humans, you know, we've, you know, been on this path and whatever's worked out for us through natural selection or through, you know, random factors has just worked out for us, and so we've got one thing we do. But with insects, there's all kinds of different opportunities, and one of the things I like about studying them is that they make you realize that there aren't any rules.
LITZINGER
12:40:08
Please elaborate on that. So some -- what are these insects doing, because you would think evolution would be a factor in some way, but they seem to have some element of choice.
ZUK
12:40:17
Not -- no, not -- and so I don't mean that they're doing it consciously, and what -- again, one of the great things about insects is that they aren't doing this consciously. They have brains that are, you know, the size of a poppy seed, and yet they're doing these incredibly complicated things that look like a lot of the things that humans do. It's more that evolution's acted on them to produce a lot of different solutions to the same problem.
ZUK
12:40:38
There's lot of insects where females will mate with lots and lots of different males, where males will only mate with one female, and it all works out just fine. So it's not like biology dictates, oh, it has to happen a certain way, and when we think that our sex roles have to be like some, I don't know, you know, 1950s "Ozzie and Harriet" version of family life, we're wrong, and we're really, you know, missing out on a lot of the diversity that nature has to offer.
LITZINGER
12:41:04
Is there one insect that you look at and you say, what a very strange, fascinating insect, and I wish I knew a lot more about it.
ZUK
12:41:11
Ooh, there's tons of them. And so one of the things that I like a lot are parasitic insects, so insects that need to complete their lifecycle in another insect, and I think the complexity of those lifecycles just blows me away. So for instance, there are flies, some of which parasitize the crickets I work on so I know more about them, and so the adult fly has to hear a calling male cricket in order to complete its lifecycle. And this is a really weird for a fly to be able to do, because flies ordinarily hear using their antennae, but these kinds of flies, because they have to hear crickets, they have ears that are more like cricket ears located on the body of the fly.
ZUK
12:41:51
So they have in effect cricket ears on a fly body. Then once the female fly hears the cricket, she goes over, deposits her larvae on him, the larvae burrow inside the cricket, they live inside the cricket while the cricket's still alive, so the cricket's walking around with this big disgusting maggot inside. After about a week, the maggot bursts out.
ZUK
12:42:14
It is like this horrific thing that if it happened in creatures that were the size of like your dog or cat, people would just be running and screaming, but, you know, it happens in little tiny crickets and so no one notices, and then they complete their lifecycle and then they are an adult fly, and then the whole things happens all over again, and you think, how in the world did this evolve. You know, this kind of lifecycle just amazes me.
LITZINGER
12:42:35
What a fascinating world. You haven't quite changed me...
ZUK
12:42:37
And creepy, as you pointed out.
LITZINGER
12:42:38
Creepy occasionally. You know, you haven't quite changed me from an ick to an ooh, but you're very, very close, so thank you for that.
ZUK
12:42:44
All right.
LITZINGER
12:42:45
Marlene Zuk is the author of "Sex on Six Legs." Thank you for being with us in "The Animal House."
ZUK
12:42:50
Thanks a lot for having me.
LITZINGER
12:42:57
Dr. Gary Weitzman answers your animal-related questions next in "The Animal House."
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