Total Cat Mojo: The Ultimate Guide to Life with Your Cat

by Jackson Galaxy

cats are dismissed as being inscrutable—so far outside the behavioral and experiential realm of humans that we have no anchor point to hang a relationship on.

The Manero strut is not a walk of demonstration, of proving. It is simply the outer manifestation of a grounded inner sense of ownership and belonging.

Cats’ source of Mojo is unquestioned ownership of their territory and having an important job to do within that territory. That job is a biological imperative that cats inherited from their wildcat ancestors, and I call it: Hunt, Catch, Kill, Eat, Groom, Sleep.

“three Rs”—Routines, Rituals, and Rhythm—in

Hunt, Catch, Kill, Eat, Groom, Sleep (HCKEGS).

The type of cells that cats have (Merkel cells) are ultrasensitive, more like those on your fingertips. Even their hair follicles are innervated, so having hairs out of place can be irritating for a cat.

Cats are more active at night than we are, but they are not truly nocturnal. Rather, they are crepuscular. Their natural rhythm, devoid of other influences, is to be active at dawn and dusk, just like rodents, their primary prey animal.

Either way, we’re pretty sure that the purr is not under the cat’s conscious control, but is more like a reflex. The brain sends a signal to the muscles in the larynx, or what we call the voice box. These muscles move the vocal cords at a rate of approximately twenty-five times per second while cats inhale and exhale, which produces that distinctive rumble we call a purr.

Purrs might have healing powers; they are in a similar range (20 to 140 Hz) to sound frequencies that help with both healing injuries and improving bone density (at least for cats, anyway; to date, the evidence on healing human bones is inconclusive). This may help explain why cats who are wounded or sick will often be purring.

In the sanctified realm of our home among our family members, true empathy shouldn’t be reserved for one and not the other, for some and not all. As enlightened as we may fancy ourselves, as long as there is even a splinter of treating our animal family members as things we own as opposed to those we love, that splinter will infect the body of our family.

And yet, you know that children have to go to school, because if they don’t, the rest of their social existence, their intellectual development, and their ability to face challenges will be completely compromised.