Understanding and Training Your Cat or Kitten

Of obsessive-compulsive disorder among cats, Whiteley ( Women in Veterinary Medicine: Profiles of Success ) writes, ``MeeMee, a female Siamese looked around with a weird look in her eyes, swung her head to one side, and licked at her left paw in the sort of rhythm that you could set a metronome by. Nothing seemed to distract her when she entered one of her compulsive licking periods.'' The syndrome? ``Displacement grooming''; Valium solved it. Whiteley gets to the point, too, on a range of other problems and issues in feline behavior--anorexia; the insatiable appetite for grass or houseplants; the challenges posed by air travel, w/owner or w/o; and the meaning of purring (cats are not necessarily happy, she says, when they do it). And she discusses training your pet, whether or not you believe it will work at the outset, maintaining that it really is possible to instruct cats in the arts of sitting, stopping, fetching, jumping, and in shaking hands/paws. They can also, she says, learn to ring the doorbell. (But, wait--is that really an advantage?) The proof is in trying all of this stuff out; meanwhile, it's amusing. (Feb.)