2025 reads, #10-13. Big news -- for the first time in my entire life, I’m a cat owner! There’s a long story behind the circumstances, but the TLDR version is that I rescued an abandoned cat, and had him in my possession (and inside my room at the 20-person co-op where I live) before I actually knew anything whatsoever about cats or how to take care of them. That led me quickly to YouTube for a search on beginner’s guides to owning a cat, which led me quickly to Jackson Galaxy, a brilliant cat behaviorist who most people know through his long-running popular cable show My Cat From Hell. (He’s also had another TV show entitled Total Cat Mojo, and has been maintaining a popular YouTube channel for years too, mostly consisting of internet-exclusive content.) I ended up getting sucked in quickly and totally like a religious zealot, and in the last three weeks have watched maybe 20 hours of YouTube videos now and the first five seasons of My Cat From Hell, so I decided to officially bite the bullet at that point and also acquire all four of the books he’s written over the years. Today’s writeup is a review of all four of them, which I’m simultaneously posting on all four of the book pages.
I started with 2014’s Catification, which interestingly only deals with just one small topic from his otherwise comprehensive TV shows about cat behavior and what to do about it; it’s essentially a glossy point-of-purchase book devoted just to how to build out your living space so that it’s both cat-friendly and fits within your overall tasteful decor. That’s certainly an important part of making your cat happy, and the book is interesting as a flip-through physical Pinterest board, showcasing some really inventive and cool-looking wall steps and other vertical spaces inside upper-middle-class people’s homes; but it simply doesn’t scratch the itch the TV show does, which is a more general complaint I have about the TV show itself as well. Basically, whoever the frat-bro money people are behind Galaxy’s projects, they fundamentally misunderstand what the most interesting part of Galaxy’s job is, constantly slapping this silly reality-show nonsense onto the top of the inherently fascinating way Galaxy can seemingly communicate directly with cats, because he has such a thorough understanding now of what makes a cat’s brain tick. 2015’s Catify to Satisfy, then, is essentially a sequel to Catification, and is so exactly like the first book that they can safely be considered a two-book set.
It wasn’t until 2017, however, that Galaxy got the chance to publish the book he was meant to write all along, a comprehensive and exhaustive guide to cat ownership once again entitled Total Cat Mojo (unsurprisingly a tie-in to the TV show of the same name), which at over 400 pages and covering every subject about cat ownership you could possibly think of is a book that every single cat guardian in the world should own. We’ll be here all day if I start going into the details, but almost all of Galaxy’s advice boils down to a pretty amazing fact I had never realized before -- that despite cats’ long and storied reputation for living alongside humans for thousands of years (it’s well documented, for example, that they were venerated in ancient Egypt), they didn’t start living indoors as domesticated pets for the very first time until the late 1800s (spurred, as were many trends back then, by Queen Victoria). Dogs, on the other hand, have been the domesticated pets of humans for at least 5,000 verified years; and humans have been breeding dogs for all those 5,000 years too, resulting in generation after generation that is more and more obedient, more and more loyal, more and more friendly to humans, have more and more traits humans can easily understand, etc.
What genetic testing has proven, though, is that even the cat currently in your home still shares 96% of the DNA of its wild ancestor 10,000 years ago; so all of Galaxy’s advice can be boiled down in one way or another to respecting and honoring this 96% wild mindset, and understanding that replicating this mindset indoors as much as possible is what will keep a cat happy and calm, while most “bad” behavior we see from housecats is attributable to there being a disconnect between their wild nature and their current living situation. That’s what makes My Cat From Hell so incredibly watchable, because sometimes it seems like magic -- he’ll go into a house where a cat is peeing all over everything, getting into fights with everyone, and stalking under the bed all day, and he’s able to say, “Oh, this cat’s merely feeling like his territory is being threatened,” then can have the owners do a few things like add some vertical spaces, block off their back yard from neighbor cat visits, and vigorously play with the cat several times a day using a wand toy, and in just a few weeks the cat is a completely different creature, calm and loving and back to always peeing in its litterbox. Total Cat Mojo is the book that collects up every bit of information he’s ever learned about cats over his decades now of field work, and it’s a must-have for any fellow cat guardian.
Then finally I ended my Galaxy binge this week with his autobiography, Cat Daddy, telling the complicated and often checkered story of how he became one of the most insightful cat behaviorists that fairly new industry has ever seen. Interestingly, this was the first book he published out of all of them, put out right at the end of the first season of My Cat From Hell in 2012; and I say “interestingly” here because it doesn’t have the tone of the TV shows, his YouTube videos, or his other books at all, but instead is a sometimes harrowing and always graphically NSFW story about drug addiction and all the weird events and dysfunctional lovers that come with it. Turns out, before he was the kid-friendly, quasi-cartoon character we see on the show (over 300 pounds when the show began, Galaxy is bald, shaves his facial hair in these weird, showy patterns, and dresses like the Disney version of a rockabilly musician circa 1992), Galaxy actually started his time in the animal world back in his mid-twenties, when he was a svelte, good-looking, dreadlock-sporting indie musician in Boulder, Colorado, who accidentally ended up at an animal shelter as part of a rotating door of crappy minimum-wage jobs he was holding back in the day, while semi-squatting in an unconverted warehouse with his bandmates and fellow addicts.
It’s a really fascinating story, a tale of a young slacker fuckup whose life started falling apart right as he began noticing how good he was at observing cats and understanding what they were complaining about, and how more and more of a concentration on that led to finally getting sober, pulling his act together, becoming somewhat of a small-pond celebrity within the insular world of vets and animal trainers, and then seizing an opportunity to host a television show that came from that earlier notoriety. But for sure, it’s a tale for grown-ups only; and given what a passionate following of eager vet-wannabe kids his popular shows have inspired over the decades, it’s certainly not the kind of book you should be letting your eight-year-old pick up at Barnes & Noble, despite the cutesy kid-friendly cover. (Again, corporate marketing staffs, you are badly misunderstanding what makes Jackson Galaxy such an interesting and popular person.) It’s for completists only (absolutely buy Total Cat Mojo if you’re only going to buy one of these four books), but it’s an interesting and well-written read for those interested in knowing more about him, or those into the more general subject of artist sobriety memoirs.