Just not that into you

A basic understanding of what's going on inside the head of little Tiddles could save cat 'companions' much heartache.

- PAUL LITTLE

“If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein never met Claude Béata. The latter's book The Interpretation of Cats — with its titular nod to Freud and his The Interpretation of Dreams - has set the scratching post high for books on cat psychology and attracted international media attention because, well, cats are just so weird, aren't they? What is going on in those adorable little heads? And why did she let me pat her then turn around and scratch me?

All perfectly reasonable questions, and among the many to which Béata provides plausible if often surprising answers based on his clinical experience. He is probably the world's best-known cat psychiatrist, albeit these are early days for the specialty.

“In France, we have around 200 vets who have got a diploma in behaviour or psychiatry, though not specialised in cats,” says Béata. “We have also some ‘cat-only’ practices but not specialised in psychology.”

Béata has two - presumably emotionally stable and psychologically resilient - cats, Solo and Flora, and a Rhodesian ridgeback called Ursula. “For 20 years, I was a ‘normal’ vet with a canine and feline practice,” he says. “Then I switched to doing only behavioural cases and now I am a psychiatrist.”

He divides his practice between his hometown Toulon, Lyon and Paris. The day before we speak by Zoom, he had been in the French capital making house calls to troubled animals.

It's important we get our terms right. Béata doesn't talk about “pets”. In fact, the French language doesn't have an equivalent for that word.

“In French, it’s ‘companion animals’, or we can say ‘friends’,” he says. “In the US, it's common to say ‘pet parent’. In France it's not usual to say that.” (At this point the Listener decides not to tell him about New Zealand's large population of fur babies.)