S27D - Do Cats Consent to Anything? How Cat Consent Supports Veterinary Visits & The Human Animal Bond

Consent has become a buzzword for elevating force-free dog training to a new level; a dog’s willing participating in training and then merged into daily life and veterinary care. Why not utilize consent concepts for cats? Clearly, cats are sentient beings as dogs. Arguably, a human-cat communication gap may be vast, not quite understanding what cats are attempting to communicate. Understanding cat consent can help to close that gap. If captive tigers can be taught to voluntarily offer a paw for a vaccine, why can’t household cats? The timing appears right; millennials are eager to reinvent how we think about cats.  However, cats are fundamentally hard-wired to think about the world differently than dogs, and typically there are no “cat trainers” teaching cat classes - so how does practicing consent happen?