When my husband and I first adopted Katherine, a Bengal-ragamuffin mix (but as Helene can attest, she is probably 90% Bengal sans the liking for water -.-) in November 2017, we had no idea what we were in for as first-time cat owners.
Unfortunately, Katherine endured our failure to attend to her needs for closeness, openness and engagement (in the form of sufficient play) for a good nine months, by which time she had become very frustrated and anxious, resorting to biting hard and attacking us with scratching (we also didn’t know we had to cut her nails regularly).
It got to the point where we thought it was normal (although quite painful) to walk around with multiple scratch scars and swelling from bite wounds on our hands, forearms and lower limbs. Finally, in mid-September 2018, I decided we had to do something about Kat’s relentless (and increasing) attacks that seemed triggered by nothing in particular and found The Cat People from googling for cat behavioural consultants.
I reached out to them on Facebook and soon I set up a meeting with Helene, who visited us for the first time on 3 October 2018. After interviewing us over dinner and meeting Kat, she already had her first confrontation/staredown with our angry little girl.
That evening, she spent no less than four and a half hours with us—so dedicated was she to helping us understand what we needed to do for and with Kat that she ended up only leaving our house and getting home past midnight. She helped us understand her psyche, explained the problems Kat was facing and the trouble with how we had been interacting and shutting her out (of our room at night for instance), and how we were failing to give her enough intellectual stimulation and exposure through interaction. We learned that the toys we were using for her were all wrong too—small ones made her think our hands and feet were also appropriate prey and play targets—and because of the lack of attention (and also slightly too infrequent meals) we paid Kat, she resorted to chewing up plastic, paper, cardboard and even ingested a few of my own pills once around the house too (thankfully she seems to be Wolverine and hasn’t ever fallen sick or shown any issues from these strange aspects of her past diet).
And so we committed ourselves to dutifully obeying her instructions and doing the homework Helene assigned us—opening all our spaces to Kat, swapping out all our small toys to long ones with long strings and sticks for her to chase at a distance, eating with her at mealtimes so she can feel like she is a part of our lives and activities, even introducing calming pressure jackets and using pheromones and essential oils to help calm her down at home. We also started taking her out on evening walks once a week, to give her more engagement with the environment outside, and all these efforts showed cumulative results within the first three weeks of working on Helene’s instructions.
Throughout this time, Helene patiently responded to every question I had and every text I sent to her in panic when Kat didn’t respond to things in the way we hoped or expected. She even came over a second time to help us with some follow-up challenges we faced, teaching us how to put on her jacket, guiding us in teaching her new tricks to help her focus on a task and to feel engaged and involved with us, and would later on personally oversee installation of catification for our little home.
A couple months later saw us adopting our second kitten George — a mostly-grey domestic shorthair, who came to us, one of a National Day litter of four, at four months old in early December. And of course, Helene was there for us every step of the way, even assisting us in the adoption process—sussing out potential “candidates”, advising us on personality traits to look out for, even going the extra extra mile in helping to enquire on our behalf with rescuers and fosterers to assess a cat’s suitability before recommending them to us to meet them. After we adopted George, she didn’t stop there— she also taught us in great detail how to integrate George into the household, how to prepare a separate room for him, how long to keep them apart, what to do and look out for because he was sick at first, and how to carefully introduce them to each other so Kat wouldn’t feel threatened by him. She would review every video I sent her—through broken phone screens and a hectic house move on her end—through the year-end holidays and send me once-again immensely detailed text messages assessing the situation and giving me very helpful guidance, picking up signs in each cat’s behaviour in their interaction and alerting me to them and what they mean.
We believe we can now say Katherine and George are happy siblings who play together, eat together, sleep peacefully in respective spots during the day and share food at mealtimes. They did go through a period of rough play and some fighting—which Helene really guided us closely on as well, by the way—but with Helene’s mentorship, we were able to work with both to keep Kat calm and from “bullying” George a bit too excessively, and also give George the opportunity to stand up for himself too.
I can’t explain how grateful I am to Helene and The Cat People for all she and they have done for us and our kitties 🙂 George is still learning how to jump to the higher platforms on our catification but he is already enjoying it almost as comfortably as Kat :)) we love it all — and them both — as much as they do!