The Cat: Behaviour and Welfare

Anne McBride has a Psychology degree and PhD in animal behavior from University College London. She has had a few cat teachers, notably Corky, named for her corkscrew shaped tail that had been broken in several places. A small, black non-pedigree unwanted kitten brought to the vet to be euthanized, where a young Anne was working as a Saturday helper. Instead, Corky found a home for the next 14 years! An Animal Behavior and Training Council Registered Clinical Animal Behaviorist, she has been practicing since 1987, and developed and ran for 20 years the first postgraduate course in this field at the University of Southampton. She continues to teach about Human-Animal Interactions at Southampton, and elsewhere, including teaching some of Bjarne’s students about animal learning and training – with sessions to help them practice their skills by training new behaviors to cows! Her degree, experience as a clinician, and generally of life and people and her strong interest in the “hows and whys” are central to her main goal in life. Namely, to help others become creative, yet critical thinkers in respect of animal (and human) behavior and welfare. Her second goal is to grow older whilst never truly growing up, by continuing to learn, and laugh all the way to the end! As an aside, you will find Anne has books and papers published as Anne McBride, and as E. Anne McBride.

Ruth C. Newberry is a Professor of Ethology in the Faculty of Biosciences at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her early years were spent on a farm near Ottawa, which had a resident cat colony. Before the cats were neutered, she saw first-hand the communal nursing of Tinkerbell and her adult daughter, and the comings and goings of the resident tomcat. As a zoology student at the University of Edinburgh, she was encouraged by Jane Goodall’s writings to pursue the study of animal behavior, leading to her PhD research in the Edinburgh Pig Park observing communal nursing in pig nests. After several years investigating chicken behavior at the Agassiz Research Station in British Columbia, she journeyed south to join Washington State University’s colleges of veterinary medicine and agriculture. There, she conducted studies on a wide range of animals including cats. Having finally habituated to cowboy hats in her classroom, the northern lights beckoned once more, this time to Norway. Here, since 2013, her research has focused on methods of environmental enrichment that foster harmonious social development and positive welfare. Ruth is a Past-President and Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Applied Ethology, and a member of several scientific advisory committees on animal welfare. A confirmed cat person meeting the personality traits described in Chapter 12, she has shared her home with a succession of beloved cats, Annapurra Katman, Cinnamon Daintree, Siena Kitkatla to name a few, whose unique personalities have provided inspiration during the writing of this book.