Michele Tilford, Cat-Assisted Therapy Advocate

05/26/18 • 23 min

Interview! Michele Tilford, Cat-Assisted Therapy Advocate

Michele Tilford has over five years of experience as a cat-assisted therapy handler—but when she first became interested in cat-assisted therapy, the only programs she could find were for dogs. Eventually she connected up with a service dog trainer who also happened to be a Ragdoll breeder. The woman agreed to help Michele train one of her own kittens, later adopted by Michele, and the rest is history.

Michele explains that one of the biggest keys in deciding whether or not your cat might be a good therapy cat is his or her personality. A therapy cat should ideally be calm, curious and outgoing. The cat can then be trained to become comfortable with unfamiliar surroundings and with wearing a harness, being in a carrier, and traveling.

There are three different groups of therapy animals, Michele explains. One is what are called emotional support or comfort animals. These can be any kind of animal and are generally just a personal pet that receives no training. All that is needed to certify a comfort animal is generally a doctor’s note.

An animal-assisted therapy animal is one that has some basic training and works as part of a human-animal team. Cats in this category—like Michele’s cat Kokoro—need to be able to understand a couple of commands, be leash and carrier trained, and be comfortable with loud noises and being touched.

The third category is service animals. These are highly trained animals who are trained to assist people with specific tasks. Right now in the United States, only dogs and miniature horses can be registered as service animals.

Michele explains that many other countries use cat-assisted therapy far more than we do here in the United States, where cats still seem to be maligned as therapy animals. Michele and others are working hard to change that mindset, however, by bringing cats to a variety of institutions like retirement homes, schools, and even libraries, where cats assist with reading programs for kids. Michele is a firm believer that cats can bring a huge benefit to the people they visit!

If you are interested in training your cat as a therapy cat, Michele encourages people to look up Love on a Leash and Pet Partners to check out their requirements for certification. Any cat can be a therapy cat; they don’t need to be purebred or have any extraordinary characteristics. In fact, Michele states that 98% of the therapy cats she knows were rescued from shelters! Getting your cat certified does require a bit of commitment, but Michele assures those interested that you will get every bit as much from the experience as the people you and your cat visit!

To learn more, visit facebook.com/TherapyCats, or you can join the invite-only Facebook that Michele helped found at facebook.com/groups/TherapyCats.of.the.world.

Interview! Michele Tilford, Cat-Assisted Therapy Advocate

To learn more, visit facebook.com/TherapyCats, or you can join the invite-only Facebook that Michele helped found at facebook.com/groups/TherapyCats.of.the.world.

Previous Episode

Kim Freeman, Professional Missing Cat Finder

“I would really like anyone who has anything to do with lost cats to realize how important it is not to give up, and not to assume anything.”

Kim Freeman turned her lifelong love for cats into a career as a professional missing cat finder. When her own cat Mr. Purr went missing in 2008, Kim realized how little support families with a missing cat receive, and what bad advice they tend to be given. She set out to change this and today has developed a very specific process to help people all over the world find their missing cats.

Kim starts by educating the cat’s owners using a downloadable online booklet and videos on her website. She then asks the owners to fill out an extensive cat profile questionnaire so that she can determine a search strategy. Kim tells us that there are eight probabilities of what could have happened to a missing cat, and her questionnaire, which asks about indoor behavior patterns, helps determine which of those probabilities is most likely. Based on the results of the questionnaire, Kim then coaches the owner on what they need to do to try to find their cat.

When Kim does in-person searches, her cat Henry sometimes accompanies her. Henry is trained to track scent, and she often uses him in cases where an indoor-only cat has escaped outside. Kim knows of only one other trained search cat out there, but she believes that it is a great way to go, as search dogs are more likely to scare off a missing cat than find it.

Kim is also passionate about the role shelters play in reuniting lost cats and their families. Nationally, the return to owner rate once a cat reaches a shelter is a dismal 2%. Kim feels shelters can help get this rate up by becoming a resource for the community around best practices for searching for a lost cat—or by directing the community to resources that can help. She believes strongly in Return to Field, and in microchipping as well. She would love to see shelters offer mobile, low-cost, in-home microchipping! Kim has a presentation on simple system that shelters can use to organize their lost and found data that she is glad to share if folks want to get in touch via her website.

Finally, Kim would like to spread the word about the “litter box myth”—the idea that if your cat goes missing, you should put out her used kitty litter box to attract her back to the area. Not only does it not work, Kim tells us, it is actually a bad idea because it can attract wildlife and predators, as well as territorial bully cats who may chase your cat farther away. As Kim puts it, “your house smells more like home than a kitty litter box!”

Learn more about Kim and her services at lostcatfinder.com. You can also stay up to date on her happy reunion stories on her Facebook page, facebook.com/LostCatFinder.

Next Episode

Dr. Philip Bushby, Professor of Humane Ethics and Animal Welfare at Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine

Interview! Dr. Philip Bushby, Professor of Humane Ethics and Animal Welfare at Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine

“I long for the day when I can walk into a shelter and not find any cats in the shelter — and it’s achievable.”

Dr. Philip Bushby, a veterinarian and well-known advocate for early age spay/neuter, can’t remember a time that he didn’t want to be a veterinarian. He became interested in veterinary medicine at a very early age by helping nurse sick puppies back to health, and then, at veterinary school, he fell in love with surgery. It wasn’t until Dr. Bushby did an internship at an ASPCA (then animal control) animal hospital in New York City in the 1970s, however, that he began to learn about the staggering pet overpopulation problem this country was facing.

Today, as Professor of Humane Ethics and Animal Welfare atMississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Bushby is passing on his passion for spay/neuter – especially pediatric spay/neuter and how it can help end pet overpopulation – to students through the school’s innovative programs. Beginning in the early 1990s, Dr. Bushby began bringing veterinary students into animal shelters around Mississippi to perform spay/neuter surgeries, and today the program has grown to include two mobile surgical units. Most of the surgeries are done by the students, under proper supervision, and most students graduate having performed at least 75-85 spay/neuter surgeries through the program—far more than a typical veterinary school graduate. Dr. Bushby hopes that his students leave his program with an understanding of the issues shelters face and the issue of pet overpopulation — things Dr. Bushby himself was never exposed to as a veterinary student.

Dr. Bushby is also a very strong advocate of the Feline Fix by Five program, which encourages private practice veterinarians to spay/neuter cats by the age of five months, rather than the old standard of after six months of age. He feels that if everyone began following this program, and if everyone was supportive of TNR programs, we could fix the feline overpopulation problem.

Many groups, from professional veterinary associations to animal welfare organizations, have endorsed the concept of early-age spay/neuter, and while Dr. Bushby understands that embracing this idea means a major change in mindset for many veterinarians, he hopes that eventually, we will all realize that not only is there no harm in spaying/neutering cats by the age of five months, the benefits are enormous. If vets — or the general public — aren’t able to change their mindset, however, and get on board with helping actively solve the pet overpopulation problem, Dr. Bushby feels that the least they can do is to stop working against those whoareactively working to solve it through high-volume spay/neuter and TNR programs.

To learn more about the Feline Fix by Five program, visit felinefixbyfive.org. To learn more about Dr. Bushby’s work and his programs at Mississippi state, visit the Facebook page for Humane Ethics in Animal Welfare at facebook.com/msuethicswelfare or email Dr. Bushby at [email protected].