TED Talks Daily - How to make your cat happier — in 3 minutes | Nicky Trevorrow

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

There's a simple way to increase your cat's happiness, says animal behaviorist Nicky Trevorrow. She explains the importance of play for our feline friends — and for basically any species (looking at you, dog lovers!) — and shares specific, actionable strategies to boost your cat's mental and physical health.

TED Audio Collective over the years, and my current cat, Abe, is really special to me. He plays fetch. So I was delighted to learn from her 2023 talk that cat behaviorist Nikki Trevorrow totally supports this kind of interactive play. She takes us through how to best play with our cats to make a positive impact on their happiness. It's coming up after the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty.

Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. And now, our TED Talk of the day. When I was asked to do this TED Talk, I sat down with my cat, as you do, and I thought, what's going to make the biggest difference to as many cats as possible? What could it be?

And I looked at my cat for inspiration and thought, yes, that's it. Yes, Kato. That's his name. Let's tell everybody about the power of play. If some people seem to be the cat people like me, hands up. Yes. Welcome. Other people seem to be dog people. Hands up. You're also welcome. It doesn't matter if you're not really a cat person, if cats aren't really your thing. That's fine. Just take the word cat in this talk and replace it with dog. Or horse, goat, child.

Whatever your species of choice is. And that's because play is so fundamental to happiness that it affects so many different types of animals. In fact, there's research to show that even fish like to play. They actually jump into streams of bubbles and ride them to the top and jump out and do it again, in case you were wondering. Now, when I tell people that I'm a cat behaviorist, other than the confused looks I get, as you can imagine, and people saying, a cat? A cat what? Then they really are

quite confused by it. Then if they don't have a cat themselves, then they'll soon tell me that, oh yes, my mother's neighbour's friend's sister has a cat. And they'll often ask me questions about that cat's behaviour. It's a bit like those of you that are nurses and you get everybody's medical questions. Now, invariably, I'm often recommending interactive play and feeding enrichment. And that's because it has such a positive difference, such a big impact on their happiness. Play is not only fun, it gets the grey matter working. It's a great way to connect with your cat.

And it has lots of physical benefits as well, because all that extra exercise is an excellent tool for helping overweight cats shed those extra pounds. This is the very gorgeous Moodles, and she came into Cats Protection's care weighing 6.7 kilograms. Now, her very fantastic owner not only continued the diet that was already in place, but she also implemented a program of interactive play and feed enrichment.

It certainly made dieting a lot more fun. And this is Moodles today at her target weight of four kilograms. And she's a much happier and healthier cat for it. Play is important for every cat, young or old, all around the world. Now, I know what you might be thinking. I know how to play with my cat. That's fine. But if your cat were to give you a review, what's it going to say? Now, it might not say, could try harder. But it might say, could try smarter. I often act as a bit of a translator between cats and their caregivers. This cat, for example, is saying, what is this? This mouse is dead. Bring it to me alive. And that's where the interactive play comes. Because if you just

put it there in front of the cat, it's not interesting. You need to make it move. You need to bring it to life. And so you bring the mouse to the cat and the cat goes, no, no, no, no, not like that. Make it run away from me. Because let's face it, no self-respecting mouse would ever go up to a cat and go, hiya, here I am. So yeah, so we need to be thinking about how prey species actually move. Okay. And then we need to be thinking about the fact that cats have got different play styles. Some cats prefer a game of rabbit, and that's where they grab the toy with their front claws and they bunny kick with the back legs.

Other cats prefer a game where you move the toy across the floor and maybe it makes a little quiver over here and a mad dash across the floor, just it makes like a little quiver over here and a mad dash across the floor, just like a mouse might. And then others prefer the toy to be moved up in the air. So this is a game like an erratic moth. Now cats haven't evolved to show an awful lot in their faces. If you find them hard to read, that's okay, they've evolved that way. But if you look at this cat, you can see that the claws are out, the whiskers have come forwards, and the mouth's open, and they're so engaged and focused on that toy. This is a cat showing the face of joy. You can also make it a lot more fun like this by just having it disappear out of sight,

like under a newspaper or magazine, and that makes it much more interesting. It's really important that the cat's actually allowed to catch and kill the toy. It makes the cat feel good. It's those happy hormones. So very, very important. Catch and kill the toy. And that's where, spoiler alert, the laser pens can be a bit of a problem because it can cause frustration where the cat can't ever catch the red dot. So if you do have a laser toy at home, fear not, you just need to end the game always on a physical toy so they can actually catch and kill the toy. And now back to the episode. You may be concerned perhaps that you know maybe all of this play is just training our cats to become more proficient hunters but you'll be very pleased and relieved to hear that the latest research shows that if you just play with

your cat for a few minutes several times a day, it actually reduces hunting behaviour. Okay, now some people might think it's all very well and good, but my cat doesn't really like to play. They're too old, they're too lazy, that won't work for my cat. And some people really think that their cat doesn't play at all. I had one client who said, no, my cat doesn't play. And yet during the conversation, I found out that her cat does play, but only for five minutes. This is play. It's just that the owner expected her cat to play for half an hour or more, much like a dog would. But cats are not small dogs.

Now, as children, we were taught not to play with their food. And I'm here to ask all of you to not only play with your cat's food, but more importantly, get your cat to play with their food. Feeding cats in a way that's more interesting gets their minds working. It's mentally stimulating. In short, for very little effort, you can actually change your cat's happiness and you can change their life in just three minutes. Because that's how long it takes to show a cat feeding enrichment, also known as puzzle feeders. And it simply just means feeding a cat in a way

that's much more interesting than just in a bowl. Now, some people may have dabbled in feeding enrichment, probably accidentally, when they've gone down the pet shop and picked up a puzzle board and they've given it to their cat, And then they've got frustrated and thought, it doesn't work. Because the cat's disinterest has left them disheartened. But fear not, because I have a few handy tips up my sleeve. And that is to keep it simple. Now, as much as I love, I do love the puzzle balls, they are brilliant, but these are medium level toys. We need to start off really simple with something

like this. You can find this online and then you want to start everybody off in an egg box. It's brilliant because they're free and you just put in the biscuits where the cats would, you know, where the eggs would normally sit. And you need to pour it out with your fingers and show the cats how to use it. And then for the next level up, you can cover the biscuits with a bit of paper. If you want to make it really difficult, you can then shut the lid. And it's so much fun watching these cats hunt for their food. Once they've mastered the egg box, they can move on to the toilet roll pyramid. This one is fantastic for children, a great one I'd like to see done in schools,

particularly because there's no sharp scissors involved. And you just need to sellotape all the joins front and back, and then put the biscuits in where the toilet roll tubes are and then allow the cat to get them out. So you can say very simple ideas, they're free and a lot of fun. So those are my two tips. Keep it simple and show the cats how to do it. Many years ago I helped a caregiver and I was explaining how to introduce a puzzle ball to the cat. So we talked through it and she rung me up a while later, quite exasperated, and said, Nikki, I've done what you said. I got down on my hands and knees and I've been batting around this puzzle ball now for two hours. And the cat still doesn't understand. She just follows me and eats all the biscuits. Yep, that cat knows what she's doing.

And that cat knows how to use a puzzle ball, but she's getting the caregiver to do all the hard work. And you get pairs of cats like this as well, where one cat does all the hard work and the other cat swoops on in and eats the biscuits. I particularly like this puzzle board because it's got four different sections on there. So it's different ways for the cat to think and use their brain and figure out how they're going to get the food. So you can see that really,

we're not teaching cats how to play. They're teaching us. We just have to listen to them and we need to learn their preferences. Because once you get the basic principles of feeding enrichment, the world is your oyster. And you're only limited by your imagination. So you just need to take the feeding enrichment and build up really slowly in complexity over time to your own individual cat's pace. I think that feeding enrichment is just as fun for us as it is for cats. So go ahead. Give it a go.

It's fun, it's easy, and it takes very little effort. You've got three minutes, right? It may not change the world, but it will change the world for your cat. Thank you very much. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home.

As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Nikki Trevorrow speaking at TEDxCardiff in 2023.

If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back

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