ArcaMax

In many neighborhoods, there is at least one dog who seems to believe it has been officially appointed Chief of Security. It watches the street from the window, alerts the household to passing pedestrians, inspects every unfamiliar sound, and positions itself strategically near doors and fences. To owners, this constant vigilance can appear ...Read more

Few sights in the animal world are as universally associated with happiness as a wagging dog’s tail. To many owners, it seems like a simple emotional barometer: wagging means happy, still means sad, tucked means afraid. Yet canine tail language is far more complex than that familiar shorthand suggests. A dog’s tail operates as a ...Read more

For most of feline history, survival depended on sharp senses, territorial awareness, and the ability to hunt small prey efficiently. Modern indoor cats, by contrast, may never stalk anything more threatening than a dust particle drifting through sunlight. Yet beneath the calm surface of domestic life, the ancient architecture of the hunter ...Read more

To a human, a living room is a horizontal experience. There is floor space, furniture, perhaps a table or a couch. To a cat, that same room is a layered ecosystem of perches, escape routes, observation towers and strategic ambush points. What looks like ordinary domestic space to us is, to them, an intricate vertical territory map.

Cats evolved...Read more

Dear Cathy,

Our five-year-old dog barks at everything and even things my husband and I can’t hear, which makes me think it’s anxiety. Lately, he will start to bark, then it goes higher in pitch, and then ends with high pitch loud howling. At first, we were scolding him by yelling at him and then decided to ignore it and he eventually would ...Read more

Valentine’s Day tends to come with a lot of expectations.

There are the cards. The flowers. The chocolates. The pressure to plan something meaningful, romantic, and ideally Instagram-worthy. But if you live with pets, you already know something important: You wake up every day with a creature who thinks you are the greatest love of their life...Read more

Dear Cathy,

My newspaper recently started running your column. You had a question about how to teach a puppy not to bite by using butter on your fingers. Do you have any advice on how to teach a 12-year-old cat to stop biting? You would think they would understand that biting hurts! She was already declawed when I got her.

—Carey, Chicago, ...Read more

Dear Cathy,

My son adopted a nine-year-old female cat this past October, after losing his previous cat to cancer. After spending the day in the bathroom to acclimate, she indicated she was anxious to come out. At first, she jumped on everything, including a tall armoire and the refrigerator. Each time, my son helped her down and said, “No ...Read more

Dear Cathy, One of your readers wrote to you about having trouble with an aggressive male toy poodle after many years with a King Charles spaniel. To me, this sounds like another case of people buying expensive “designer” dogs. In the foster/rescue world, we have strong feelings about the purchase of pricey purebreds, especially since poor ...Read more