‘Cats are an oddity’, says Dr Emily Blackwell, who should know: she’s Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare at Bristol Veterinary School and Director of the Bristol Cats Study. Dr Blackwell discusses matters canine and (mostly) feline, and how her work can sometimes require skills associated with a certain fictional Victorian detective. She begins with two ‘career origin stories’, in the interests of balance: a dog one and a cat one.
When I was a child, our school playing fields backed onto our garden and I used to hear my dog howling sometimes if Mum had gone out and left her at home. At the time, I didn’t know that dogs could have separation issues, but it got me interested in the different ways our pets behave, especially ways that make life uncomfortable – both for us and for them.
My grandma had a rescue cat called Rusty who would hide under the bed, and if you had bare feet, she would come out and attack them. My brother and I were desperate to stroke her and play with her, but she was just too frightened. Feeling sympathy for Rusty probably sparked my interest in cats and their psychological needs.
When I started my research into companion animal behaviour and welfare, it was mainly with dogs, because the Dogs Trust funded my first lectureship. Then about seven years ago I began managing the Bristol Cats Study. I don’t have much time for clinical work these days, but in my spare time I treat pets with various behaviour problems, and I teach on our veterinary and vet nursing courses.
Kittens of the 2010s
The Bristol Cats Study is ‘the cat version of Children of the 90s’. It was set up in 2010 on a shoestring, then Cats Protection started funding it, and now we also have funding from Waltham Petcare Science Institute. We recruited kittens aged between eight and 16 weeks – 2,400 of them in the end, quite impressive before social media was a thing – and we have just under a thousand left, which isn’t bad. Some, sadly, have died, others’ owners have dropped out of the study or moved.
Everyone involved in the cat world always says that cat owners go above and beyond, so if you’re interviewing a cat owner, allow double the amount of time you would a dog owner. But they’re amazing – without them we couldn’t do the study.
Bristol Cats has had a direct impact on policy: for instance, Cats Protection want to find out whether early neutering impacts upon a range of health issues, including obesity, and the results of that study will be published soon. Also, we’ve characterised the feline gut microbiome for the first time, and two papers on that are due this year.
Sanity claws
Cats are an oddity. Their ancestral species is the African Wildcat, which is solitary, but through domestication they’ve developed an ability to form social groups. Pet cats can live relatively harmoniously, providing they’ve got the right household environment and resources, but there are things that owners might not notice – for example, that one cat might be sitting staring in a doorway and blocking the other cat’s access.
The biggest cause of stress for pet cats is probably other cats. We usually do home visits for cat behaviour problems, and we ask questions about how they interact or react to different things: how do they react to strangers, to familiar people, to dogs in the household? Do other cats stare at them through the window? My favourite thing about being a clinician is that you’re a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, looking for clues and trying to work out how certain behaviour has developed, and how we can unpick that.
If you’re leading an observational study rather than doing clinical work, it can be a little frustrating: you’re observing what happens in the natural time course of the cats, and it’s really important that you don’t intervene. Owners will often say ‘There’s something going on between our cats’, and I’ll be longing to get in there and work it out. Obviously, if there’s a serious problem, we’ll direct them to an appropriate place, but we have to refrain from stepping in.
Moving furward
I’ve done quite a lot of TV work, which has been fantastic: I can see clients one-on-one in the clinic, which is really rewarding, but I can only see so many, whereas the first programme that I did – for a Channel 4 series called Dogs: Their Secret Lives – had two million viewers, and I had a full inbox the next day. A bit overwhelming, but it really opened my eyes to the impact you can have as an expert by working with the media.
Anyone can call themselves a behaviourist, but I’ve spent most of my career trying to establish recognised ‘gold standard’ qualifications, and now our Veterinary Nursing degree is accredited with a professional body for clinical animal behaviourists. I sit on the committee for that organisation and help to set standards, which has been really gratifying.
With Bristol Cats, what we want to do next is follow kittens from birth. That’s trickier, but early-life environment is critical to later behaviour. We also plan to look at rescue cats that are rehomed: what makes for a successful rehoming, and if it goes wrong, why? I’m quite excited about that side of things.