The Inner Life of Cats

Author: Thomas McNamee
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316262862
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Our feline companions are much-loved but often mysterious. In The Inner Life of Cats, Thomas McNamee blends scientific reportage with engaging, illustrative anecdotes about his own beloved cat, Augusta, to explore and illuminate the secrets and enigmas of her kind. As it begins, The Inner Life of Cats follows the development of the young Augusta while simultaneously explaining the basics of a kitten's physiological and psychological development. As the narrative progresses, McNamee also charts cats' evolution, explores a feral cat colony in Rome, tells the story of Augusta's life and adventures, and consults with behavioral experts, animal activists, and researchers, who will help readers more fully understand cats. McNamee shows that with deeper knowledge of cats' developmental phases and individual idiosyncrasies, we can do a better job of guiding cats' maturation and improving the quality of their lives. Readers' relationships with their feline friends will be happier and more harmonious because of this book.

Cat Sense

Author: John Bradshaw
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465031013
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Cats have been popular household pets for thousands of years, and their numbers only continue to rise. Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. Unlike dogs, cats evolved as solitary hunters, and, while many have learned to live alongside humans and even feel affection for us, they still don’t quite “get us” the way dogs do, and perhaps they never will. But cats have rich emotional lives that we need to respect and understand if they are to thrive in our company. In Cat Sense, renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using cutting-edge scientific research to dispel the myths and explain the true nature of our feline friends. Tracing the cat’s evolution from lone predator to domesticated companion, Bradshaw shows that although cats and humans have been living together for at least eight thousand years, cats remain independent, predatory, and wary of contact with their own kind, qualities that often clash with our modern lifestyles. Cats still have three out of four paws firmly planted in the wild, and within only a few generations can easily revert back to the independent way of life that was the exclusive preserve of their predecessors some 10,000 years ago. Cats are astonishingly flexible, and given the right environment they can adapt to a life of domesticity with their owners—but to continue do so, they will increasingly need our help. If we’re to live in harmony with our cats, Bradshaw explains, we first need to understand their inherited quirks: understanding their body language, keeping their environments—however small—sufficiently interesting, and becoming more proactive in managing both their natural hunting instincts and their relationships with other cats. A must-read for any cat lover, Cat Sense offers humane, penetrating insights about the domestic cat that challenge our most basic assumptions and promise to dramatically improve our pets’ lives—and ours.

Feline Philosophy

Author: John Gray
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374718792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.

The Lion in the Living Room

Author: Abigail Tucker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476738238
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Cats are incredible creatures: they can eat practically anything and live almost anywhere. Tracing their rise from prehistory to the modern cat craze, Abigail Tucker presents an adventure through history, natural science, and pop culture. With keen reporting and lively wit, Tucker investigates the way house cats have used their relationship with humans to become one of the most powerful animals on the planet--

Who Moved My Mouse?

Author: Dena Harris
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 1580083560
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
"This self-help guide will empower cats to make the 20 minutes they're awake each day the best 20 minutes of their lives"--Provided by publisher.

The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats

Author: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345458699
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In the hugely popular New York Times bestseller, Dogs Never Lie About Love, provocative psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson brilliantly navigated the inner landscape of “man’s best friend.” Now he delves deep into the secretive, playful world of cats, revealing emotions, debunking myths, and honoring the feline’s evolution from solitary jungle creature to human companion. Drawing from literature, history, animal behavioral research, and the wonderful true stories of cat experts and cat lovers around the world, Jeffrey Masson vividly explores the delights and mysteries of the feline heart. But at the core of this remarkable book are Masson’s candid, often amusing observations of his own five cats. Their mischievousness, aloofness, and affection provide a way to examine emotions from contentment to jealousy, from anger to love. Consider the question: Are cats selfish? While human egocentricity is defined by how little a person cares about others, the cat’s narcissism is not like that at all. Cats may appear self-centered, but they watch us all the time, taking us in. They see us; they notice us–a far cry from vanity. Cats are curious, a trait that rarely kills them. On the contrary, it gives them the chance to assess, in their own idiosyncratic way, whether we are worthy of their attention. Cats are happy to be themselves. What they think of us is a different question entirely. “We need cats to need us,” notes Masson, “It unnerves us that they do not. However, if they do not need us, they nonetheless seem to love us.” The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats will captivate readers with its surprises and insights, offering a new perspective on the deep connection shared by humans and their feline friends. This is the book that Masson’s many fans and cat lovers everywhere have been waiting for.

The Inner Life of Animals

Author: Peter Wohlleben
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 1771643021
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees. “The Inner Life of Animals will rock your world. This book shows us that animals think, feel and know in much the same way as we do.”—Sy Montgomery, bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus Through vivid stories of devoted pigs, two-timing magpies, and scheming roosters, The Inner Life of Animals weaves the latest scientific research into how animals interact with the world with Peter Wohlleben's personal experiences in forests and fields. We learn that horses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids. Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices, and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up. In this captivating book, Peter Wohlleben follows the hugely successful The Hidden Life of Trees with insightful stories into the emotions, feelings, and intelligence of animals around us. Animals are different from us in ways that amaze us—and they are also much closer to us than we ever would have thought. “Wry, avuncular, careful and kind. . . Each story adds to a widening vision of intelligence, emotion and relationship.”—The Guardian Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute

Second Nature

Author: Jonathan Balcombe
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0230613624
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
With vivid stories and entertaining anecdotes, Balcombe gives the human pedestal a strong shake while opening the door into the inner lives of the animals themselves.

All Cats Are Introverts

Author: Francesco Marciuliano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781449495633
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of I Could Pee on This comes this humorous collection of self-reflective poetry from cats that clearly shows them to be the insightful, often alert, crowd-averse, personally engaging, probably napping-as-we-speak introverts of the animal kingdom.

All My Cats

Author: Bohumil Hrabal
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228967
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
A literary master’s story about the aggravations and great joys of cats, from “a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humor and a hushed tenderness of detail” (Julian Barnes) In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer. All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is a confessional memoir, the chronicle of an author who becomes overwhelmed. As he is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas created by his indulgent love for the animals, there are episodes of intense brutality as he controls the feline population. Yet in the end, All My Cats is a book about Hrabal’s relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources of redemption that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the cosmos—and about love.