Roughly one in three Americans have a cat at home. But they’re kind of misunderstood in the veterinary world – especially compared to their canine peers.
The Insight team hit the road recently and visited Cat Tales in Davis, which is a health center created solely for felines. They also opened Tabby Tea Cat Lounge and Adoption Center, where the public can make a reservation to hang with shelter cats. Chris “Shac” Shacoski is a veterinarian who opened Cat Tales with his wife Julie Cole, who serves as the medical director. He spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about how the lounge started and why specialized care is necessary for cats.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
How did this all start?
The cat lounge was dreamed up by my wife. My wife and I and some of our kids would go to cat lounges when we travel. We had been to Salt Lake City, Utah and been to one in St. Augustine, Fl., and really loved how it felt to sit around cats while you're having a cup of coffee. Because we're a veterinary hospital as well, we decided that we didn't want to go through having to run a full-service cafe. So, we call it a cat lounge. And what we've done is created a space inside of our veterinary hospital where people can come hang out with cats and for a small fee they can spend an hour with them.
These cats are all from shelters or from people who are helping to save them and they all need homes. So we do a lot of adoptions out of here and we offer everybody who comes into the cat lounge a free beverage.
What has the response been like?
The response has been amazing. Everybody got excited.
An important piece to this cat lounge is that these kittens and cats can get adopted. How successful have you been?
We've adopted well over 12 and we've been open only two months. And we've had some cats that had medical issues that were able to find their person. There was a cat here named Sunny who had a heart murmur. He was older and somebody met Sunny and they fell in love and he was adopted.
So we get to watch these miracle cat adoptions happen where people and their cat get to meet each other. In fact, our tagline on our logo is ‘serving cats and the people they own.’ The cats here get to find someone that they get to own at home.
What goes into the environment that you created in this cat lounge to ensure that they're not overstimulated, not overwhelmed, and they're enjoying life?
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Cats like windows. They love looking out at things. We can't let them run free, but they like to be able to look at, you know, trees blowing in the breeze. They like seeing birds go by. They probably enjoy the people coming by too.
We have places where they can hide if they're feeling a little bit overstimulated. The colors of the room are actually picked because they're cat-friendly and known to actually help them relax. We try to have things in here, like the fuzzy carpet, that are comfortable for them. We have this cat fountain because cats like fresh water and they like aerated water. So we have this going all the time, and you'd be surprised how often they get up here and have a sip of water because it tastes great.
We've just tried to think of everything that would make their life pleasant. And right now, as you see, they're up on these balconies almost on these cat trees and on a window platform, getting up high. Cats are always looking for a way to get a vantage point, whether they're looking in the room or looking out.
How do you manage the flow of people so that the kittens and the cats also get their space and their downtime when they need it?
We book appointments every hour, but we'll often have some hours where somebody isn't coming in. Usually people will stay for most of the hour, but sometimes people leave after 35 or 45 minutes.
Because they're younger and we're trying to socialize them, it's really great to have them exposed to a lot of people, different types of people. We've never really seen times where they've been overstimulated.
Your veterinary practice – Cat Tales – is all cats, right? How did this come to be? What was your background in the veterinary sciences that led you to hone in on felines?
I'm a cat lover. Always have been my whole life. I grew up with cats.
I was an emergency veterinarian for a very long time. Oftentimes, emergency medicine is more about dogs than cats. And I was always so excited whenever a cat came in because I just love working with them.
I actually retired a few years ago. My wife had worked in large animal veterinary medicine with horses and cows. She'd also done small animals and worked as a corporate rep where she worked with a lot of practices. And both of us have seen veterinary medicine from a 30-year career.
We saw the need for a place that was designed with intent; built and planned with just cats in mind. There are a lot of people out there that love cats and they have wonderful vet practices, but they're serving dogs and cats. And cats don't really enjoy places where there's noise. They don't like buzzers. They don't like the barking, the smells.
And cats have an issue with anxiety that dogs often don't. And it's very hard to get a cat to come back to a second veterinary visit because their first one went so bad. So what we want to do is create a place that really gets cats. Our number one word is ‘calm.’
Talk a little bit about the choices that you made when designing and decorating this place.
We wanted it to be fun for clientele and for us to be in, but we also wanted something that cats would feel okay and peaceful with. Cats do not like having eyes looking out of artwork at them. They're very visual creatures. And they don't like having things looking at them, so we had to make sure our artwork didn't have eyes in it looking out.
Cats actually have preferred colors. There's aIt national organization which publishes some wonderful information on how certain colors can help make cats feel. You can’t go wrong with pastels. No excessively bright colors because it's alarming to cats.
Cats surprisingly don't like white, so if you wear a white coat as a vet, it's actually seen as kind of neon by cats and kind of alarming to them. So, my wife never wears a white coat when she's at work.
What kind of advice do you have for a cat owner to help make that experience less disruptive and stressful for their animal?
I think it's important to talk to your vet about your concerns. Say that you'd like to make it less stressful and ask about things that can be done ahead of time. The biggest thing is some cats need to be sedated at home before they go so that they're less anxious.
If you have them in a car, a cat carrier in the car, maybe put a blanket over it. You can buy pheromones that you can spray on the blanket, which will help make them more comfortable. Avoid loud noises, don't turn up the radio super loud.
Given that you've been in the veterinary field for 30 years now, how have the demand and the needs for veterinary services changed?
It was quite common [a decade or two ago] that people took their dog or cat to the vet to get vaccines. That was what was seen as the value, but not much else unless it got really bad. It was very uncommon to have them treated for other things. If they got really sick, a lot of times people would just say, “Oh well, not much you can do.”
During my lifetime, I've seen cats go from being this thing that's around the house that adopted them to a part of the family. I have friends that plan their lives and vacations around their dogs, and people are doing that around cats. And that has really resulted in a big change in veterinary medicine. It's been good and bad.
The good part about it is that veterinary medicine has grown to handle oncology and specialty work. We can save cats and dogs that have diseases that we never would have been able to do before. The hard part is the cost. I always recommend that all of our clients get pet insurance because it'll cost a little bit up front, but it'll really make a huge difference if you have a major medical issue.
One of the biggest problems in veterinary medicine today is the difference between the access to care for cats versus dogs. Dogs have amazing access to care because they're not afraid most of the time going to the vet and clients are really willing to take them.
But because of the history of cats having being stressed out and losing it at the vet clinic or losing it at home after a visit, people will often not seek a veterinarian for their cats because it's too stressful and so many times people don't bring their cat unless their cat is super super sick. One of the things that we think that our practice is going to do is lower the bar for cats to have access to care because this is a place where they can come repeatedly and not suffer those huge anxiety bouts that cause them and their owners not to want to bring them back.
