I’ve gained a whole new insight into my personality – from a cat psychiatrist | Emma Beddington

I need my own space and have a limited tolerance for human company … Might I actually be a moggy?

The only time I have ever mentioned my bird-lover’s slight – slight! – ambivalence towards cats in a public forum, it brought me the angriest virtual postbag of my career, so I hesitate to even mention them again. Cats are great! I feed my neighbours’ cat! My niece is a cat! (By which I mean I view my best friend’s cat as a niece-like figure; she is not a child identifying as a cat, a phenomenon some highly suggestible sections of the media got overheated about several news cycles ago.)

But I’m daring to mention felines after reading an interview with a French veterinary psychiatrist in the New York Times. Over “aperitifs in a cafe not far from the Eiffel Tower” (you can see why he chose to specialise in psychiatry – kir royale with the NYT sounds nicer than expressing a pug’s anal glands), Claude Béata explained what cats, who “like to keep themselves to themselves”, went through during lockdown.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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I’ve gained a whole new insight into my personality – from a cat psychiatrist | Emma Beddington

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