The Captain’s Log entry: Week of 27 September, the year of our Lord 2025
Scaredy cats, revisited
Happy International Podcast Day! We have had so much joy bringing 6 Degrees of Cats to you.
We cannot believe that seven of nine episodes in season 3 are now OUT in the wild, squeezing into Slack channels, jumping onto the discussion table and knocking weird ideas around in your head.
Thank you all so much for the kind comments, shares and general encouragement you’ve been sharing about this and past episodes. It means a lot! Our mission with this show is to do our part in dismantling harmful myths about all the marginalized and misunderstood things in this world thanks to mis-, dis-, and mal-information that the dominant voices in our cultures have pushed. And if you’d like to help us celebrate, mosey on over here to support your favorite cat-themed culture, history, science AND nature podcast 😉
Speaking of celebrate - we wanted to take this time to celebrate you all for being forces of kindness to cats and their caregivers. Special shout out to rescue and TNR orgs! If you have an extra moment to check them out and see if you can send something their way, please do! Some local suggestions include:
Flatbush Cats (Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY)
Greenpoint Cats (North Brooklyn, NY)
Sunset Park Cats (South Brooklyn, NY)
The 5 Kittens Rescue (Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY)
Itty Bitty City Kitties (Queens, NY)
LIC Feral Feeders (Long Island City, Queens, NY)
Meow Parlour (NYC)
Paws of Hope (NYC)
Bronx Community Cats (Bronx, NY)
Bronx Colony Cats (Bronx, NY)
Bronx Tails Cat Rescue (Bronx, NY)
Catsbury Park (Asbury Park, NJ)
Sip & Purr (MN)
Mission Meow
URI PALs
…and so many more! It can feel overwhelming but it helps to start local - find the nearest rescue or the one that seems the least resourced, and support them by sending them items on their wishlist, donating, volunteering or just helping them gain influencer $s by engaging in their online content by liking, watching and commenting on their posts. Alone we can do a little, together we can do a lot!
Speaking of rescues…
AT OUR LAST PORT OF DISEMBARKATION
In which the editorial director of this newsletter, Captain Kitty reports on our past destinations.
Have you checked out our last episode, Scaredy Cats! Fight, flight, freeze...and feline? with arborist Duane Hook and feline behaviorist Kristyn Vitale, Ph.D. and behavioral biologist Lee Niel, Ph.D.?
We were so grateful last year to have had excellent conversations with Guelph University’s Dr. Lee Niel and returning expert and start of Netflix’s hit documentary, Mind of a Cat, Dr. Kristyn Vitale on recognizing and responding to the fear signals in so-called “scaredy” cats, in order to build trust - a sensitivity that arborist Duane Hook’s cat rescues displays in his harrowing POV videos.
And like all things on this podcast the core of this is the simple, yet super complicated dynamic that we humans still are figuring out. That would be the concept and act of trust, the backbone of this episode.
Trust is informed by the presence or absence of fear, if you really think about it.
Back when I was corrupting the youth running healthy relationships workshops for junior and high school students, I used to say that trust is a gift given and received. It renews in each interaction, and is built and reinforced through clear and proactive communication.
Ah, we all know our limitations there!
It’s hard enough to navigate all these trust and communication dynamics within your own species, so when it comes to establishing trust with, say, a small, vulnerable species whose very survival has relied on its refined defense mechanisms…it’s nothing short of a divine act of bravery and grace that little felis cactus decides, again and again, to let us love them despite the things we’ve done to their world and all the ways we trample on their freedoms.
That’s why we decided to call out the “scaredy cats” label.
Firstly, there’s always a reason someone or something is risk averse or defensive. In humans, the field of psychotraumatology has explored this and it seems that for the vast majority of people, it’s a past experience or series of experiences that impact a person’s systemic response to an anticipated or perceived threat. There is a LOT in this world that poses a threat to a cat - which is why many feline fans, including yours truly, prefer to see a cat well cared for in a safe, enclosed, contained, indoor environment.
Secondly, most if not all fear reactions are pre-conscious - meaning, they are unintentional. They’re reflexes. In a few episodes this season we’ve admired cat reflexes. We considered expanding a bit during our segment on the neurobiology of trauma - something that Captain Kitty used to educate on when working with trauma survivors, direct service providers and school staff and leaders. But while all four trauma responses - fight, flight, freeze and fawn (which we didn’t expand on as much in the episode, but is also observed in multiple non-human species) - are shared by homo sapien and felis catus, we’ve addressed the caveats of generalizing human psychology principles to non-human species.
That’s not to say that some methodologies in non-(human) verbal data collection haven’t helped us understand kitties of course - Dr. Vitale explained habituation/dishabituation study design, for example. But we try to walk the line on that!
The final reason we don’t love that scaredy cat label? Cats are incredibly smart, and brave, to boot. What’s that saying in the zeitgeist? Curiosity killed the cat? (Well, it didn’t because as y’all recall from our Curiosity Didn’t Kill the Cat, Part 1: Research and Righting Reflexes episode, that’s an incorrect quote.) Cats are, indeed, curious. And that brave curiosity might have brought them straight into our settlements, per our findings in our very series premiere, Cats Are the Consummate Domesticate: Origins and Evolution of Our Feline Friends [Pilot].
In all likelihood, they chose us - stinky, messy, noisy, violent us - some 8-10,000 years ago or so.
That took a lot of guts.
Still, the average cat retains a lot of its wildcat form for good reason - those shotgun-fast short-distance running speeds and super-sensitive hearing and scent detection abilities help them avoid the harm of larger predators like dogs, larger wildlife or - worst of all - cruel humans. Unfortunately, in some cases their short term self-preservation tactics backfire, such as when they end up so hundreds of feet in a tall tree - WAY further up than they’d climb under non-emergency circumstances. And I can’t help but wonder if the first human to gain the trust of a cowering kitty wasn’t somewhat similar in demeanor and approach as our resident hero to treed cats, Duane Hook - calm, patient and able to meet them where they are at, quite literally!
We hope that the great insights from Drs. Niel and Vitale, as well as the “in the field” application of their best practices described by Duane have helped challenge the notion that cats are anything but tough little cookies who have developed very reasonable coping mechanisms to survive and - if they’re lucky - thrive in this extremely volatile, unpredictable world.
Scaredy cats? Pfft. Smarty cats. Self-preservation-y cats. Healing cats. That’s what we see. We rest our case.
What do you think?
NEWS FROM THE CREW!
Here is where my team will share their updates.
Next week, we’ll be rethinking another term we use for cats - the domestic housecat! Stay tuned…
Also, keep an eye out on social media! Captain Kitty has been guesting on a few podcasts herself - follow Daily Tips that May or May Not Help You by Arielle Nissenblatt and Ned Donovan and find out!!
Oh, and, don’t forget, NYC pals! On October 31, Captain Kitty will be kittening onstage at our friend’s fabulous Meow-loween event - a Halloween-themed cat-baret hosted by our friend Gemma Smith of Tails & Tassels Podcast! Don’t catnap on this - get your $15 discounted tickets here with the code MEOWVIP!
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Let’s keep loving on cats, supporting those in need in our communities and doing what we can to push back against the tyranny of the here and now. (For more of that, check out this great 7-minute NPR interview.) Peace to you all, and above all, stay brave and curious! Like our kitties.
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Captain Kitty, Binky, Snuggles and Peanut
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