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

by Jackson Galaxy

One of the most important things I can tell you about keeping your cat Raw happy and Raw healthy is that play isn’t a luxury, something that is a fun diversion if and when you have time. Look at it this way: If you have a dog, you have a collar and leash and you take the dog for daily walks. And likewise, if you have a cat, you have interactive toys and you use them for daily play sessions. These things should hold equal weight because for the respective species, they are a physical and behavioral necessity.

First, I want you to pretend you’re a bird. If you’re the bird, you’re going to do that subtle, moth-on-the-ceiling movement for a minute, simply hovering, and then you do that thing that gets you caught: you swoop down and suddenly hit the ground. And now your cat is going to pounce. But what makes this a game? Just yanking the toy away and having the bird fly away again? No, you’re going to play dead, and make it so your cat will then bat at the bird to test if you are really dead. Next, he will likely walk away to try to trick you into moving again. From there, you might slowly begin to inch along, playing not-quite-dead, as you take faint little steps away and try to get to refuge around the side of the couch. You’re heading in the right direction when you see wide-eyed, rapt attention, tensing muscles, and maybe a twitch at the end of the tail. And then the dilated pupils, the “head bob” as he sizes up the exact dimensions of the kill, and the famous “butt wiggle” right before he pounces tell you that your cat has stepped into that alternate universe. This is when your cat will run at you . . . but then you take off again! Now it’s time for you to decide: do you want him to catch you, or is it not time to be caught yet? And off you go again, repeating this sequence—moth-on-the-ceiling movement, wiggle butt, pounce . . . all the while thinking, What are your best methods to elicit that confidence, a.k.a. Mojo, from your cat? Personally, one of the things that makes me ...

cats will generally have a preferred style of hunting, innate to them. In general, they might prefer to ambush from an open clearing; stalk-and-rush from behind cover; or wait to pounce on prey that pops out of the ground. Incorporate these different strategies into your play and see what your cat responds to best.

The difference between a wild cat who is hunting all the time and your cat is that your cat’s circadian rhythm is hooked into yours. When your family wakes up in the morning, energy in the house skyrockets, and so does your cat’s. So, ideally, that’s when it’s HCKE time. You come home from work, and the same thing happens: your cat’s energy rises. And then once again before bed. Every time there’s a ritualistic rising of energy in the home, you should be ritualizing play and food (HCKE) around that. Controlling when your cat eats regulates your cat’s energy. Regulating your cat’s digestion gives you information about when he will eliminate. We tend to overcomplicate things. Keep it simple and connect the feeding schedule back to the Raw Cat!

Everything we provide for cats is an opportunity for challenge. Food is it. They are food and resource motivated, not human-praise motivated. It’s not just routine and rhythm. You cannot get cats to do what you want if they’re not a little bit hungry.

My question for people who bathe their cats all the time is this: why are you torturing your animal? There is simply no reason to bathe your cat. In fact, unless your cat has been skunked or has soiled himself, he will never need a bath (with the exception of the hairless breeds, who, because of their unnatural state of hairlessness, need to have a bath once a week). Cats spend all that time grooming to cover themselves with their scent, a Raw Cat staple and a source of serious mojo, and then a human steps in and bathes them, erasing their ID. Some cats can be wiped down with a baby wipe if they are older and don’t groom much, or are obese and can’t clean themselves well. Otherwise, step away from the bathtub.

Sleep is a welfare issue, and cats under stress can be sleep deprived just like us. So make sure your cats have quiet, calm, and safe places to rest, especially in active households or homes with multiple pets.

the onus is on us guardians to do just that. Consider this: our own cats would naturally have a territory of about six or seven city blocks. By keeping them indoors and by living in higher densities, we are shrinking that territory down. The outward world is getting smaller while their inward Raw world remains the same. If that imbalance is not corrected, well, in my experience, bad things happen. Relationships become rivalries, competition for those valuable resources fester. And don’t think I’m just talking about cat-to-cat relationships, either; the strain is felt by all species sharing the space between the four walls. The good news is that we can beat the territorial squeeze. Catification is the art of creating an enriched environment that is acceptable to both you and your cat. Catification teaches us that every square inch of the home can be shared in a positive way. Allowing our cats to own spaces through scent distribution and finding confidence in the vertical world can be accomplished—all while respecting and adhering to our own personal aesthetics. In this new, significantly reduced world that we share with our cats, nobody loses as long as we embrace compromise. If we don’t . . . well, like I said, it’s a good bet that bad things will happen.

for cats, scratching is not a luxury (or a pathology). Repeat after me: scratching is not a luxury for cats. It’s how they stretch their back and chest muscles, how they exercise and de-stress, and how they shed loose nail sheaths. But scratching serves two even more important and Mojo-rific functions for your cat: Scratch marks are proof of ownership. Scratching allows cats to mingle their scent with ours (and one another’s). To truly understand a cat’s territorial impulse to scratch, consider this: we humans tend to decorate our living environment with stuff—material possessions, such as furniture, art, photos, books, and keepsakes. Cats tend to decorate their living environment with scent and visual signals, which they like to maintain and “keep fresh.” Scratching is an excellent means to both ends.

Urban Planning is a process for setting up your home to accommodate the needs of everyone who lives there—humans and animals—in a way that promotes peaceful coexistence. The key is traffic flow: everyone must be able to move freely through the space without conflict. This idea is especially useful for homes with kids and dogs, where we use, to our best advantage, the fact that cats are just as comfortable vertically as they are horizontally.

Think about it: for your cat, every room in your house could represent the strangeness of a hotel room or the intimacy of a bedroom. If you want to maximize Mojo, you will put litterboxes in socially significant areas. These are spaces that both the humans and the animals occupy equally. As humans, when we come home, we sit on the couch, and we go to bed, which makes those places major human scent soakers. This compels cats to spend time in these areas, complementing our scent with theirs, thus making your bedroom and living room the most socially significant spaces in the home. And yes—those are the rooms where you may need to place litterboxes.

Today, scientists and animal trainers recognize that positive reinforcement is the most effective way to change behavior. Although punishment might work temporarily, it doesn’t change your cat’s motivation, and it doesn’t tell your cat what to do instead. Punishment also comes with a healthy dose of side effects like fear and aggression (not to mention a complete erosion of the trusting foundation of your relationship). Still, in the wake of this reality, a common question that comes up is “Without using some form of punishment, how do I discipline my cat?” To which I respond: there is no such thing as disciplining your cat. They have no idea what you are doing when you scold them, shoo them away, or squirt them with a water bottle. Besides, for punishment to yield its desired result, it has to happen every single time the behavior occurs, and very shortly after it happens.

There is no successful relationship that comes down to establishing dominance. This book is about positioning yourself as a Mojo enabler, not a Mojo disabler. Invisible fencing, scat mats, shock collars, declawing, and, yes, even the ubiquitous spray bottle should all be thrown into the “things we used to do” pile.

When your cat goes into fight or flight, has redirected aggression episodes, or has freaked out on somebody or something, you can lead him to a small, confined environment, with lights down low, no sounds, no stimulation, no nothing. This decompression zone allows that cat to reenter his own body’s orbit, to go from being absolutely glued to the ceiling energetically, to bringing it back in: to fuse the etheric body and the physical body and bring them back together in harmony. That’s what purpose a time-out can serve. And a time-out can last five or ten minutes. It’s just to get your cat out of DEFCON 1 . . . out of fight or flight, and back into the real world. NOTE: If your cat is too wound up to be led into a time-out location, DO NOT attempt to pick him up and carry him there. In this case, bring the mountain to Muhammed, so to speak, by turning the room he’s in into a quiet zone. Turn off the lights and leave the room. This should safely help accomplish the same time-out goal.

in general, cats are communal animals who have been victimized by the stereotype of being asocial, aloof loners. The Raw Cat lives in colonies, as we’ve seen with feral cats. They problem solve as members of a whole community. The only thing they do solo is hunt. That being said, there are some cats who really don’t mind being alone; it’s about individuals.

Cat behaviorist and author of The Natural Cat Anitra Frazier learned, perfected, and wrote about a technique she called the “Cat I Love You,” just by looking at cats in windows on the streets of New York. She observed that, when approaching, if she softened her face and gazed at the cats, the cats would slowly blink at her. She took this as a cue and began initiating this when approaching—and the cats, or at least the vast majority of them, would blink back. Using this discovery with her cat clients, many of whom were traumatized, anxious, aggressive, or flat-out untrusting and scared, she found that the blink was a Rosetta Stone, an “in” to the hieroglyphic nature of cat language.