Owning a cat is like saying, I want a pet, but also I want it to hate me. So, owning a cat that you heal entirely with holistic medicine is like saying I want a pet, but I also want it to hate me and be extremely ill.
I’m not here to tell you that holistic medicine is total bullshit. I’m sure it’s just as effective as writing “I hope I get better” on a piece of paper, setting it on fire, and throwing it in the garbage, but oh no, that’s not a garbage can; it’s a barrel of gasoline, and now your arm is on fire a little bit. That’s exactly how effective I think holistic medicine is– leaving you probably a little bit worse off than before you tried to treat yourself.
The fact that Heal Your Cat The Natural Way is written by a respected veterinarian is proof that the term “respected” is relative. Like, I’m highly respected among the butt and weiner joke community, but that doesn’t mean anyone should listen to anything I say.
For ease of discussion, I would divide this book into two categories:
1.) Things A Cat Will Absolutely Never Let You Do To It or “Un-paw-nted Meow-lestation!”
At the top of this section is cat acupuncture. I can’t even begin to imagine the iron cast genitals on a man who would try to give acupuncture to a cat. After listing the main advantages of acupuncture, the author notes, “Disadvantages are few, mainly some cats are anxious when needles are inserted,” which seems like a pretty big disadvantage to sticking needles all over your cat’s body.
Included in this section is a diagram of acupuncture points for cats. Please pay special attention to number’s 31, 18, and 20.
Go stick a needle in a cats butthole is going to be my new way of telling people to fuck off.
Cats are known for looking uncooperative in advertising photos. For example, there’s this fluffy cat bed whose occupant is planning your murder.
This cute lil police officer who just ominously turned his body cam off.
But no cat is as miserable and angry as the model for kitty electro crystal therapy. Electro Crystal Therapy is “a technique pioneered by scientist Harry Oldfield of diagnosing and treating energy imbalances in the body.” Don’t worry. The cat is not being electrocuted. It just wishes it were.
Electro Crystal Therapy simply sends electricity through the headband to create an energy field that interacts with the energy field of the patient, aka your cat, to stabilize energy imbalances. It’s a dumb hat full of electrified rocks that your cat has to wear for ten to twenty minutes. Anyone who has ever tried to put a Santa hat on their cat for a Christmas card knows how well that shit is going to go down.
The entire book is filled with vague references to “energy.” You should have energy but not too much, and if it gets out of balance, hoo boy, you better lookout. There’s no explanation of what is being referenced by the extremely vague term “energy,” but then, I wouldn’t expect a lot of specifics from a book that prescribes the color blue to cure diarrhea. We all know if that worked, every Taco Bell on earth would be preventatively painted blue.
The color therapy section fucking rules because it does have to mention halfway through that cats don’t actually see color.
It’s like the author wrote this entire section, then remembered that cats couldn’t see color and didn’t want to delete it for word count reasons.
The final thing the book tells you to do, which I don’t think your cat will ever let you, is tape random shit to it to make it feel better. Suppose it has a wart? Tape a banana peel to it.
Cat got a wound? Tape some Geranium leaves to it!
Look how sad this cat is. He’s clearly battled his master for the right to his dignity and lost. Now all of the other cats in the neighborhood are going to call him Geranium legs for the rest of his life (which will be mercifully short because his owner taped some leaves to his gaping holes instead of taking him to the vet).
I was going to say the second part of this book is stuff your cat will let you do to it because it is nothing, like placing some amethyst stones nearby as a pain reliever or locking it in a room with a lavender aromatherapy candle to make it less horny. However, this article can’t be five thousand words long, and I want to talk about the many discussions of cat horniness in this book.
2.) Much Ado About Cat Balls or “Pseudoscience: The XXX Purr Parody!”
There are little side stories in each section called homeopathy case studies. They each contain a fun little anecdote about a cat successfully treated by cat sorcery author, Richard Allport. The longest one is the tale of a cat who was so angry about getting neutered that his hair fell out.
Imagine the seething rage of this terrible cat. It was so angry; its own hair ran away from it. Then it just sniffed a plant and was like, you know what? Balls are overrated. I need a prescription for Staphisagria because that shit must be good.
Richard Allport didn’t always make terrible cats less terrible, though. At least once he took a cat that had become briefly more agreeable thanks to an injury to its balls and stupidly fixed its balls, releasing the terror once again on the world.
It sounds like someone did their civic duty by kicking this cat in the balls, and this nerd went and fixed them. This is not an adorable anecdote about how homeopathy worked. It’s a crime!
Under the subheading of Male Reproductive Issues- Hypersexuality, there’s a little section full of a bunch of different homeopathic remedies for cats I call the “Oh God I’ll do anything just, please make him stop” section. My favorite of these is the suggestion to massage your super horny cat with lavender oil. What!? He’s totally going to think you’re hitting on him!
A LOT of research has obviously gone into this topic. There’s way more about cat balls in this book than cat cancer. Cat cancer gets two pages that basically say, wow, cancer is a bummer. Maybe have your cat sniff some Rosemary? Also, how are its balls?
Please don’t ask Lydia about cat balls on Twitter.
