"I’m not a best-selling author, only a human being with a best-selling story," says Monty Roberts, whose 1997 autobiography The Man Who Listens to Horses has sold over three million copies worldwide and has been translated into 13 languages. His second book, Shy Boy: The Horse That Came in from the Wild, chronicles his experience of using his join-up techniques with a mustang out in the open desert, and how that horse, later named Shy Boy, adjusted to a domesticated life.

Roberts spoke to BookPage recently and compared the experience of writing his first book to digging ditches.

"It was hard work doing an autobiography. There’s so much pressure on you to remember from so far back. But when you’re telling a current story like the one I did in Shy Boy, it’s fun. It started out to be a coffee table book. But the publishers wanted more."

Shy Boy tells its story through a combination of Roberts’s words and Christopher Dydyk’s photographs. Dydyk began to take pictures at Roberts’s farm while he was in college.

"We took him in at the farm and gave him the run of the place to take pictures. Immediately, I thought that I recognized an enormous talent within him. Around that time, my publisher started sending teams of extremely high priced, famous photographers to do the jacket for my first book. I didn’t think they were doing a good job at all and said, ‘I’ve got a kid out here who isn’t even out of college yet, and I think he can do a better job.’ They said, ‘We’re a worldwide publishing company, and we don’t mess with college kids.’ And I said, ‘What can it hurt if he goes with me for a day around the farm. We’ll take some pictures, send them through to you, and you can just throw them in the waste basket.’ And the first picture we sent them is the cover of the first book."

Roberts began working on his first book at the suggestion of Queen Elizabeth. She first invited him to England to demonstrate his techniques in 1989, and has since had all of her horses trained using his concepts. Roberts’s method of starting an untrained horse, join-up, achieves its goal through a series of silent body language motions that he has termed "Equus." Roberts learned this form of nonverbal communication by studying horses in the desert as a teenager.

The success of his book was a great surprise to him because he was told by his initial publishing contacts in Great Britain that it would probably sell only a few thousand copies.

Shy Boy grew out of another British partnership. In a 1996 meeting with BBC executives, Roberts expressed his desire to relive his teenage experience of achieving join-up with a mustang in the wild. After months of deliberation, the BBC agreed in January, 1997 to make a documentary of the project, and Roberts began working out the logistics. Luck was on his side, and Roberts was able to acquire Shy Boy quickly through a Bureau of Land Management adoption. Shy Boy was then transported to a Cuyama Valley ranch that was comparable to his natural habitat and left to roam with a free-ranging herd.

Roberts was anxious to begin filming before the rattlesnakes woke up from their annual hibernation and scheduled the adventure to occur during Easter week in 1997. The resulting documentary, " A Real Horsewhisperer," has been shown with great success on PBS television. In Shy Boy, Roberts follows the documentary’s and the mustang’s progress during the following year. Although Shy Boy eventually thrived in the care of humans, initially Roberts was nagged by the possibility that the horse might have preferred to be left alone with his free-ranging herd. To answer this question, Roberts returned to the Cuyama Valley ranch and let Shy Boy decide whether to return to the wild or stay with the people who had been taking care of him.

Roberts has been touring the U.S. and abroad, demonstrating his techniques, for many years now. While Shy Boy and his fellow mustangs are among his favorites, he says that he remains eager to keep working with all kinds of horses and is still learning from them.

"I’ve done over 10,700 horses now. I think it’s more thrilling today than it was 50 years ago. Maybe I’m easy to please. The hair stands up on the back of my neck with every single horse that I do who comes and communicates with me."

Although Roberts’s specialty is horses, he is able to appeal to a wide audience because his underlying message emphasizes communication rather than coercion and brutality. He is on a mission to bring his concepts to as many people as possible and to promote their application in human relationships.

"Horses don’t need us to work on them. They’ve already got it figured out. It’s people that you need to work on. We’re the ones that are messing horses up. And if we can change our mentality so that we come to the conclusion that violence isn’t the answer, then we’re going to make the world better."

At his demonstrations Roberts makes himself quite approachable, and his policy is to stay until every book is signed. One of his most moving encounters occurred in Tennessee when a huge, weather-beaten cowboy, the real thing according to Roberts, came to his autograph line. "This cowboy said, ‘I don’t have a book, I just have this little piece of paper.’ And he literally gave me a piece of paper that was about the size of four postage stamps. He just wanted my name on it, and he wanted to shake my hand." This man did buy Roberts’s book and came back the following night accompanied by his four young redheaded daughters. That night he told Roberts that he would never treat horses the same again and that the book had convinced him to change his brutal ways towards his daughters and his wife. After the demonstration, Roberts helped the man get in touch with a local agency to help him alter his violent habits.

"Every single night now some little kid or somebody will come up to me and say, ‘You know I don’t have a book, I really don’t have the money to buy one. I just have this little piece of paper. Will you sign it?’ And I say, ‘You bet, give me that piece of paper, I’ll sign it.’ And there will not be anyone who comes to me with a little scrap that I won’t remember that cowboy and how important he’s been in my life. I have never seen him since that evening, but if I can help change what’s happening to someone that dramatically, that’s what I want to do."

Roberts is currently on tour demonstrating his join-up method, and his web site (www.montyroberts.com) lists his upcoming schedule. In addition to putting on a great show, Roberts donates a significant amount of the proceeds from each exhibition to a local horse-related organization.

"I was always writing something down," Peter Matthiessen remembers of his childhood. His voice, on the phone from his home in Sagaponack, New York, is relaxed and humorous. "I don’t know if that was the beginning or not. But even when I was a little boy, I would make strange lists — even of my phonograph records. I don’t know why."

Matthiessen was born in 1927. He wrote what he calls "bad short stories" as a teenager, for school magazines and the yearbook. At Yale he began writing more seriously, and he helped found the Paris Review only three years after graduating in 1950. In the decades since, he has published many volumes of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, ranging from the experimental novel Far Tortuga to the African meditation The Tree Where Man Was Born.

Matthiessen’s latest book, Tigers in the Snow, is a small gem of only 160 pages. It includes dramatic color photographs by biologist Maurice Hornocker, who invited Matthiessen to visit the Siberian Tiger Project and write about it. Inevitably, the book’s terrain and feline star will bring to mind Matthiessen’s 1978 National Book Award winner, The Snow Leopard. But the new book is less mystical and poetic, more journalistic and condensed. It records the plight of these magnificent animals — and the adventures of the scientists and villagers around them — in a prose as sharp and evocative as the lines of a woodcut.

Whatever his aim in each book, Matthiessen never distances himself from his subject matter. "One cannot speak for those who live in tiger country," he writes in Tigers, "but the vivid presence of Hu Lin, the King — merely the knowing that His Lordship is out there in the forest — brings me deep happiness. That winter afternoon in the Kunalaika, the low sunlight in the south glancing off black silhouetted ridges and shattered into frozen blades by the black trees, the ringing clarity of the great cat tracks on the snowy ice, the blood trace and stark signs of the elk’s passage — that was pure joy."

The factual Tigers in the Snow comes on the heels of the fictional Bone by Bone, which won the Southern Book Critics’ Circle Award. Bone by Bone is the final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that began with Killing Mr. Watson in 1990 and continued with Lost Man’s River in 1997. The genesis for this massive work dates back to a single remark in the 1940s. "I was traveling up the west coast of Florida with my father in a boat, and we were off the Ten Thousand Islands — the western part of the Everglades — and he showed me on the marine chart where a river came down out of the Everglades. And he said, ‘There’s a house about three or four miles up that river, and it’s the only house in the Everglades. It belonged to a man named Watson, who was killed by his neighbors.

"That’s all he knew, but the seed was planted: a man killed by his neighbors! Why? The whole thing had a gothic and romantic ring to it. And it began working in my head. For many years, I thought it would be a thread in a very different book, having to do with the Indian Wars and the environment and so forth. But it grew and grew, and when I started writing, it was the main story."

Although published as three volumes, the story was originally written as one. When, in a recent Paris Review interview, Matthiessen mentioned that he hoped to reunite them into a single narrative, the Modern Library called immediately and offered to publish the one-volume version.

Although fiction, the Watson trilogy embodies many of the themes that drive Matthiessen’s nonfiction. "I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism — those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes." He laughs quietly, ironically. "I wanted that aspect of our great American democracy brought out."

Matthiessen has said that the difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is like the difference between making a cabinet and creating a sculpture. "In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth. I’m just doing my job. I’m using my research, and I hope I’m shaping it properly and telling the story well, and you do the best you can with the language. In fiction, you have a rough idea what’s coming up next — sometimes you even make a little outline — but in fact you don’t know. Each day is a whole new — and for me, a very invigorating — experience.

"I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. And a friend of mine pointed out to me, ‘You know, you’re really writing about the same themes in fiction and nonfiction, but some material lends itself better to fiction or nonfiction.’ I think some of my nonfiction books, especially ones like Under the Mountain Wall and The Snow Leopard, appeal to some of the same senses as the fiction does, simply because they’re so strange. It’s the strangeness, I think, which is the common denominator. It’s like a world of the imagination, it’s so different from what you had known.

"I remember saying to George Schaller, as I started out on that snow leopard trip, ‘If I can’t get a good book out of this, I ought to be taken out and shot.’ I was thrilled by the material and the scene and the light." Obviously Matthiessen is not one to pore over the quotidian malaise of suburbia. "For me, that’s never been very interesting. I’ve always preferred sort of life on the edge — people who are desperate or cut off in some way, or loners, whatever."

Books such as The Snow Leopard and Blue Meridian have a vivid immediacy about them — rich with the textures, scents, and sounds of the outdoors — for a good reason. "When I’m in the field, when I’m working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks. I keep them going all day and then write up the stuff at night. I have to get it down quickly, because otherwise I may lose some of it; it’s taken down in a semi-shorthand. So when I go home, I have a sort of rough first draft."

To the suggestion that such attention to detail is part of his appeal, Matthiessen replies, "I think in any writing you’re paying attention to detail. E. M. Forster made that wonderful observation that good writing is administering a series of tiny astonishments. The astonishments aren’t things you never knew. What they are is sort of the first articulation of something you knew but you’d never seen set down in print. And you say, Ah, yes! How true."

Author photo by Linda Girvin.

One of the many pleasures of Dog Days, Jon Katz’s latest collection of "dispatches" about life on his 110-acre farm an hour or so north of Albany, New York, is witnessing a person in the process of opening up at a time in life when others tend to start closing down.

"Sometimes I feel there are two deaths for some people," the 59-year-old Katz says during a call from Bedlam Farm, which sits astride Patterson Ridge, overlooking the churches and 50 or so dwellings of the rural hamlet of West Hebron, New York. "The first comes when people enter middle age and start closing doors and windows and say the world is going to hell and change is bad. But occasionally you’re lucky enough to have the opposite experience. Something happens that opens you up and you have a chance to learn, to change, to grow and experience new things. The animals and the farm have done that for me."

Katz, the "grandson of Russian immigrants who lived their whole lives in two rooms in a tenement in Providence, Rhode Island," has been chronicling his change and growth from a big-city journalist to a rural dog trainer and farm owner since the 1999 publication of Running to the Mountain, which described the beginning of his "Midlife Adventures." A former reporter and editor for publications such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post, as well as executive producer for "CBS Morning News," Katz made a radical shift in his life and career that surprised even his family. He now spends most of his week on Bedlam Farm by himself or with his helpers; his wife Paula Span, a journalist who teaches at Columbia University in New York, is a frequent visitor. They have a grown daughter, Emma, a sportswriter who will publish a book of her own next year.

The story of Katz’s midlife conversion to rural living will be in theaters with the upcoming release of an HBO Films adaptation of his 2002 book A Dog Year, starring Jeff Bridges in the role of Katz himself.

"A SWAT team from the movie came in and grabbed two bags of my clothes," Katz reports, laughing. "They said they were going to bring them back, but never did, of course. They ordered exact replicas from L.L. Bean and had interns sandpaper them so they would look as rumpled as mine. I have to tell you there’s no weirder experience than having this handsome, incredibly charismatic movie star wander around in my clothes. Because right off the bat, I am none of those things."

Katz’s dog training guide Katz on Dogs, along with his articles in Slate and his "Dog Talk" show on Northeast Public Radio, have somewhat gleefully antagonized the snobbish segment of the border collie community, who sniff derisively at Katz’s desire to train his sheep-herding dogs himself. In other words, Katz has often created a bit of a stir.

If not exactly mellower – Katz maintains strong, often provocative and sometimes unexpectedly humorous points of view – Dog Days strikes a new, slightly more philosophical chord. Like his previous books, which include The Dogs of Bedlam Farm (2004) and A Good Dog (2006), his latest work is rooted in the daily challenges of running his farm – interacting with his dogs Rose and Izzy, tending his 30 sheep, four donkeys, various and sundry chickens and barnyard cats, and restoring his 1862 farmhouse and its barns and outbuildings. But while focusing on the specific activities of a single season (the " dog days," Katz discovered, begin on July 3 and end on August 11, the period when Sirius, named "the Dog Star" by the Romans, rises with the sun), Katz is a natural storyteller and the topics covered in his new book range widely. He considers his friendship with the "farm goddess" Annie, who manages his farm. He observes the comically truncated, "grunt and grumble" conversations of local farmers. He ruminates on his lifelong sense of alienation, of being a "citizen of nowhere." He thinks long and hard about his moral responsibility to his animals.

Katz is quick to acknowledge that his farm isn’t exactly like the other farms in the neighborhood. "I have all the issues of a real farm and it is a working farm. I make a living from it, but I do it indirectly," he says. "The other farmers come by here and say, what are you doing here exactly? And I say, well, I grow stories. That’s my crop."

"I always try to write from the heart," Katz continues. "Whether it’s something difficult, something beautiful, or something surprising, I try to find the emotional geography that exists between me and the place or between me and my animals."

He works "very religiously" from early morning until early afternoon in a small room at the back of his farmhouse that looks out over the pig barn and the dairy barn. "The animals all come and stare at me when they’re hungry. I’ll look up and there will be sheep and donkeys and cows staring at me. There’s a lot of groaning and baaing and get out here and feed us. It’s very unnerving," Katz exclaims.

But these sorts of interruptions seem to lie at the center of Katz’s ongoing transformation. "Talk about humility," he says. "A writer gets pulled off his high horse every day here. This idea that you can just hole up and work in a pristine and pure environment? Forget it. I have people pulling into the driveway all day long. I have animals escaping, animals getting sick, pipes bursting, I don’t know when the shearer will show up or when the hay will be delivered because these people don’t make appointments. I looked out the other day and my 2,400-pound cow Elvis had gotten a little lonely and had strolled right through the fence and was underneath my window staring up at me. Elvis loves donuts. So I went out with my donut and walked him back and we bonded a bit. Then I called somebody to fix the fence and while I waited – and this is new to me – I realized that these distractions, interruptions and crises inform what I do and give me things to write about. They are not intrusions on my work. They are my work."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

The smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that’s hard to swallow when the animals become breakfast or dinner.

"All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain," she writes. All sentient beings—from wildlife and zoo residents to farm animals and family pets—deserve greater understanding, humane treatment and respect, according to Grandin, who has targeted massive industrial farming companies and meat plants as well as the average pet owner with her award-winning animal welfare work.

"I feel strongly we have to give animals a decent life," she says by phone from Fort Collins, where she is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Grandin’s work with animals has been strongly influenced by her own autism, a condition that has helped her understand how animals perceive the world. She has explored the connection in two best-selling books, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Her extraordinary new book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals makes a connection between the humane treatment of farm animals and the physically and emotionally healthy life that household pets deserve. 

Most animal behavior—pleasant or obnoxious—is driven by "the blue ribbon emotions," according to Grandin, which include seeking (searching, investigating and making sense of the environment); rage (frustration sparked by mental and/or physical restraint); fear; lust; care (maternal love and caring); and play.

She identifies the primary emotions motivating animals in various locations: the wild, the "enriched environments" of zoos, industrial farms, ranches and homes. Then she explains how to recognize the physical and behavioral signs of both stress and satisfaction to bring out the best in any species.

"Usually—but not always—the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions," she writes.

Grandin’s interest in animal welfare dates back to her childhood, when she can recall happy, emotionally healthy dogs wandering her childhood neighborhood ("We never had leash aggression," Grandin says), which contrasts with her current observations of lonely dogs barking and whining in isolated backyards.

But the "normal" behaviors for a dog—roaming the countryside for miles per day—usually aren’t possible for the modern pet owner, so Grandin identifies good substitute behaviors like off-leash romps, plenty of games with humans and a rotating stash of toys which stimulate the play and seeking drives.

"Dominance aggression" or leash aggression has become extremely common in modern dogs. But Grandin suggests that aggression—which isn’t an animal emotion—has its basis in fear and anxiety, which are painful emotions that can be addressed through frustration tolerance and obedience training.

Her own childhood struggles with autism and her perception in pictures rather than words helped Grandin comprehend how animals see the world. Observing how cattle became calm in the "squeeze" chutes used to perform veterinary procedures on her aunt’s ranch, she discovered the same calming sensation for her own hyper-awareness and anxiety. After earning degrees in animal science at Arizona State and the University of Illinois she then designed a similar, humane chute now used by more than half of the beef processing plants in America.

In Animals Make Us Human, her anecdotes about working with the meat industry, zoo keepers, ranchers, farmers and other animal owners make for fascinating reading. She helps cowboys shoo "riperian loafers" grazing on protected land by getting them to work with the cattle’s nature instead of against it. She explores why cats are trained effectively with a clicker. ("A cat . . . hasn’t evolved to read people, and he isn’t motivated to scrutinize his owner for signs. You know a cat is going to hear a click.") She helps a horse owner figure out why his mare went "berserk" when a carriage harness was put on after discovering that a previous owner had made his harnesses out of rubber, snapping the horse’s skin like a big rubber band. And she stares at the flip side of abuse, the farm workers too tenderhearted to put runts or sick animals down. "When employees repeatedly go through the pain of holding onto an animal and watching it suffer and then finally euthanizing it or watching it die, eventually they’re going to become desensitized to animal suffering. That’s how habituation works."

Grandin has dedicated her entire career to meat-industry reform and animal welfare, designing plant audits for huge corporate buyers like McDonald’s, and showing often-reluctant CEOs that animals can be processed quickly and humanely with a few often inexpensive modifications, as well as better training and monitoring of staff.

"I would have liked that they just stopped being mean to the animals," Grandin says. "But if you want change to happen, you have to do it on business terms."

She encourages her students to enter the animal welfare field, and encourages ordinary animal lovers to find out where their food comes from, then consider writing a hand-crafted note to big corporations rather than a form letter or e-mail ("Those count," Grandin says). And she hopes that her insights into horses, dogs and cats in the book will perhaps turn a "mere" pet owner into a gentle agitator, bringing "real change on the ground."

"You have to be consistently insistent," Grandin says of her tireless and unsentimental work on behalf of animals. "Activists soften the steel, then I bend it into pretty grill work."

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

Author photo by Joel Benjamin.

How does a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter overcome a lifelong fear of animals? By writing a captivating newspaper series about Tampa Bay’s Lowry Park Zoo, to begin with. Then by transforming that series into a remarkable book about life and work inside a zoo and the difficult questions zoos raise about how humans relate to nature.

“I had some bad experiences as a paperboy and I never really got over them,” says Thomas French, discussing the origins of his animal angst. “But I had to get over them because to do this project I was going to be spending a lot of time around a lot of animals. The animals were so interesting and their keepers were so wonderfully open in allowing me into this world that I really grew. This project was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve had as a journalist.”

That’s saying a lot. French spent three decades as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, winning his Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1997, and a host of other awards along the way. He recently accepted a buyout offer and now teaches at the journalism school at Indiana University, flying to Bloomington to teach classes in narrative journalism midweek, then returning home to “St. Pete” for the weekends. “I empathize with the George Clooney character in Up in the Air,” French says. “Not with his disengagement from humanity, but with his tips on how to like working on a plane and how to deal with all the travel.” French’s wife, Kelley Benham, is enterprise editor at the St. Petersburg Times and part of a team that was a Pulitzer finalist this year. French’s sons, a high school senior and a college junior, are both interested in playwriting. “Yeah,” French says, “we’re a family of writers.”

And it is a writer, rather than some therapeutic urge, that French credits with inspiring what became his marvelous book Zoo Story. “I read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi in the summer of 2003, and I was totally enchanted by that book. I was drawn as a reporter to a passage where the narrator talks about the misconceptions people have about life inside a zoo. It wasn’t the heart of what the book was about, but it drew me because as a narrative reporter I’ve spent a lot of time reporting inside other institutions— courthouses, police stations, public schools—and when I read that passage, I realized I’d never read a detailed, in-depth look inside the institution of the zoo. I sent the passage to Lowry Park Zoo and asked if that is what it’s really like. They emailed me saying it was actually more complicated than that.”

Complicated indeed. French began his reporting as Lowry Park Zoo was embroiled in a controversial effort to import 11 elephants from Swaziland. Elephants, as French shows so clearly, are remarkable animals, intelligent, highly sensitive to their environs and perhaps even self-aware. But their habitat is shrinking and, like humans, they “have the ability to alter their surrounding ecosystem.” This leaves Africa’s nature parks and game reserves with hard choices—cull the herds or transport the animals elsewhere. But moving elephants, especially long distances, has its own complex set of issues. In French’s remarkable narration, the story of moving and settling these elephants—one of the through lines of Zoo Story—is filled with drama and surprise.

“That’s what narrative reporting is,” French says. “You look for what a friend of mine calls fault lines, where good intentions clash with other aspects of reality. Or where the need to make a profit runs up against other questions, such as the issue of conservation. This is really a story that takes place at the intersection of conservation and commerce.”

Thus another side of French’s Zoo Story is the tale of the zoo as an organization of management and staff. Management in this case is Lex Salisbury, Lowry Park’s CEO and an alpha among alphas. “Lex is an interesting guy to write about,” French says. “He’s very admirable in many ways. He’s a visionary. He brings a lot of joy and passion to this enterprise. But he’s very, very complicated. The arc of his ambition and his passion gets tangled up with his leadership style. There are a lot of people who do not like him.”

Some of the people who do not like Salisbury are current and former staff. “Lowry Park for a long time has not paid their keepers very much money,” French says. “Part of the calculus is that this is a job that many, many people long to do. People love to work with animals. So realistically, they don’t have to pay their keepers very much money. No zoo does. But it’s a physically demanding job, it requires a lot of expertise, and it is dangerous.”

The conflict between a passionate, knowledgeable, underpaid staff and an equally passionate, dictatorial boss creates an explosive situation. And it is a drama that continued to unfold beyond the printing of the book’s first galleys. “I’ve been reporting on that and revising until much later than is healthy, just trying to keep up with the story,” French says.

Still, the primary focus of Zoo Story is on the animals. French has done a considerable amount of research and writes interestingly on animals ranging from orangutans to dart frogs and on issues ranging from the Machiavellian behavior of chimpanzees to Lowry Park’s groundbreaking efforts to save endangered manatees. He writes with passion and sympathy about a regal Sumatran tiger called Enshalla and a tragically mixed-up chimpanzee named Herman. But in writing so well about these animals in the zoo, French raises fundamental questions.

“From the very beginning I had in mind this question of freedom. What does freedom mean to humans? What does it mean to other species? What are the limits of freedom in a world that is so crowded that many species are becoming extinct every year?” French says. “A zoo is one of the frontiers where we confront these issues . . . where we see the fault line between wildness and civilization. Just watch people standing in front of tigers, the way they behave confronting an animal with such lethal potential. It’s stunning. It brings something out in people.

“Zoos are here,” French says. “They’ve been a part of human culture for centuries. A zoo is a laboratory not just for the study of animals but for the study of the human animal. As time went on, I felt I was learning as much about people as about any other species.”

In Zoo Story, French opens a window on the inner workings of a zoo, and it turns out to be a mirror in which we see something new about ourselves. 

Dr. Marty Becker, "America's Veterinarian," is the popular veterinary contributor to ABC-TV's "Good Morning America" and the resident veterinarian on "The Dr. Oz Show," where he is also the only veterinary member of the Dr. Oz Medical Advisory Board. He is also the lead veterinary expert for VetStreet.com and the author of a brand new book, Your Cat: The Owner's Manual. In it, he explains some of the most common feline mysteries and teaches cat owners what they need to know to keep their pet happy and healthy with advice on everything from treats to toys to litter box mishaps.

BookPage editors Kate Pritchard and Trisha Ping took the opportunity to ask him a few questions about their own cats' more unusual habits. 

Trisha: Sometimes when my cats (Walter, 3, and Willie, 7) groom each other, the licks turn to ear bites and a little bit of wrestling. Why is that? I thought mutual grooming was a sign of affection.
Cats are easily overstimulated, and some have more of  hair-trigger than others. We’ve all known cats who turned “mean” during a petting session, especially when tickled on their bellies. The reaction is fleeting, typically: They grab with teeth and claws but often never press in to hurt. It’s more of a “Wow! Stop that! It tickles!” reaction, and I suspect that’s part of the interaction between your cats. 

Trisha's cats, Willie and Walter

Trisha: Walter has been known to occasionally spend his evenings running around the house like a wild thing, emitting weird noises and periodically climbing the doorframes or bouncing off the sides of furniture. Why does he do this? Is there a way to prevent this behavior, or should I just sign him up for Parkour classes?
Classic Kitty Crazies! Cats are night hunters, equipped with senses that allow them to track rodents in low-light conditions (cats don’t need goggles for superior night vision: They are born with it!). Dusk and early evening is when the mousies come out for dinner, and that means cats do, too. With no mice around to stalk, your cat still has energy to burn.

Walter burns off some energy

Channel that energy into activities that are fun for you both, such as playing an interactive toy such as a “fishing pole” or a laser pointer.  Cats aren’t endurance runners; they’re sprinters. Once your cat gets the crazies out of his system, he’ll be into his next cat nap.

Trisha: I have heard that it is not healthy to play with one cat while the other is watching and doing nothing. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, do you have any suggestions for how one person can play with two cats at the same time? Should I shut Walter in a different part of the house when I play with Willie, and vice versa?
It depends on the cats. Some cats share and some cats don’t. If yours don’t mind sharing you while you play, they’re no harm.  If play sessions lead to fights, though, then it probably is best to separate for play sessions.

Kate's cats, Worthington and Chesterfield

Kate: My husband and I have two cats, both male. Worthington is nine years old and Chesterfield is not quite two. We introduced them slowly, but a year and a half later they still have the occasional serious-sounding fight. Worthington, who is a little high-strung, is almost always the aggressor. I don’t believe they have ever really injured one another, but the fights worry me. What can we do?
Given enough time, most cats will eventually learn to at least tolerate each other, but there will always be some who won’t. For the cats who won’t interact, it’s perfectly fine to allow them to establish their own territories with separate food, water and litter-box arrangements. It’s not even uncommon to do so: I’ve known more than a few cat-lovers with “upstairs cats” and “downstairs cats.”

Other cats will happily share space as long as they don’t have to share litterboxes—general guidelines say one litterbox per cat, plus one more to avoid messy conflicts over potty space. Other resources such as food can additionally be a source of conflict.

Yours may be as blended as they will ever be, or you might be able to fully integrate them by backing up a little.  Before you start, take them to your veterinarian to be sure there are no physical issues in either cat. Illness can make anyone cranky, and you’ll to resolve and health problems before you deal with problem behavior.

Worthington doesn't seem too happy with his sofa companion!

To ease the stress levels, add Feliway to your home environment. This pheromone mimics the soothing smell given off by nursing mothers, and it’s so effective that we used it for the cover shoot of Your Cat: The Owner’s Manual to help our feline models relax and get along. I use so much Feliway when working with cats in practice that my family jokes that it’s my most popular aftershave! For your situation, try it in a whole-house diffuser.

You should also establish separate areas for litter box, food and water, and sleeping. These may need to be permanent.

Allow your cats to avoid each other or interact as they choose, with no forcing them together.  When they seem to have settled into their territories, you can experiment with moving their dishes slowly and gradually closer together, or by playing active games such a with a cat “fishing pole” or laser pointer. The idea is that sharing good experiences makes the cats more likely to enjoy being with each other.

Your cats may never interact like a closely bonded pair, but they likely will be able to cohabitate with little conflict if they’re more relaxed and comfortable. Beyond that, time will tell. If you find the situation getting worse or just plain intolerable, check in with your veterinarian for a referral to a behaviorist.

Kate: For the hour or so immediately preceding breakfast and dinner, Chesterfield will not stop chirping and meowing loudly and plaintively for his food. It’s making us crazy, especially in the mornings. I feel fairly certain that we are feeding him an adequate amount of food. How can we get him to keep quiet as mealtimes approach? We’re about to have a baby, so this question has taken on extra importance!
Switch to food puzzles! It’s not natural to eat twice a day (or worse: To have an open Kitty Buffet leading to obesity) for cats and dogs. These are animals designed to spend their waking hours finding their own meals, and working for their food. 

You can turn your cat back into the hunter he was born to be by purchasing a variety of a new generation of toys that are designed to be filled with food that a pet can’t get to unless he works out how with his brain and his body. Introduce your cat to these puzzles by showing how to roll or otherwise manipulate them to get kibble out, and then may the game harder by placing them in gradually more difficult places, such as in the cubby of the cat tree.

Your cat will be mentally and physically more satisfied because of these challenges you’ve introduced, and the pestering should end because your cat is no longer relying on you to “dish it out.”

Kate: Chesterfield has suddenly discovered that the kitchen counter is where the food comes from, and he now jumps up there regularly. We chase him off and sometimes spray him with a water bottle when we catch him up there, but so far nothing has deterred him. How can we stop him from getting up on the counters?
Teach yourself to keep food off the counter, at least while you’re raising or training your cat. If your cat gets rewarded with a nibble every few times he gets on the counter, that reinforces the behavior very strongly. So first, remove the rewards.

Chesterfield enjoys perching on the sink as well

With the rewards gone, turn the countertop into an unwelcome environment by putting cardboard covered with double-sided tape, sticky side up. Cats hate to have their paws stick to anything, and they’ll avoid an area that’s sticky.

Don’t punish your cat in any way that associates you with the penalty—it can damage your relationship with your pet. Use a squirt bottle in a sneaky way, so your cat associates the counter with the shot of water, not you.

If you’re patient and consistent, your cat should eventually decide the counter just isn’t a great place to be.