Following Whiskers to Fulfillment
Mikel Delgado and Her Passion for the Cat-Human Connection
“Pet owners love their cats. They want them to be happy. They would like them to stop peeing on their bed… but they also want them to be happy.” — Mikel Delgado
Mikel Delgado arrives at her latest clients’ home, ready to tackle yet another feline quandary. She is greeted by two humans and, soon after, two cats.
“What’s the issue?” she asks.
“Our new kitten has so much energy,” her client responds. “And now our older cat won’t use the litter box.”
“Hmm. Let’s see what’s going on,” Delgado responds. She isn’t worried.
It doesn’t take Delgado long to get at the heart of the matter: a high-energy kitten disrupting the household peace. Delgado's solution—additional litter boxes and structured playtime—once again proves her ability to harmonize cat-human cohabitations.
For the past two decades, Dr. Mikel Delgado has been at the forefront of improving human-cat relationships, combining her expertise as a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and Certified Cat Behavior Consultant with her roles at Rover and Ease. She has a PhD from U.C. Berkeley, has served as a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, and has dedicated her career to exploring the depths of animal behavior and the nuances of human-pet dynamics.
As the co-founder of Feline Minds, a Northern California-based cat consulting business, and the author of Total Cat Mojo and Play With Your Cat, her contributions extend beyond personal pet consultations to influencing the broader discourse on animal behavior. Delgado’s work, fueled by a lifelong fascination with cats and their ‘wild kitty instincts,’ has not only improved countless cat-human relationships — but has also advanced the understanding of animal behavior.
I was introduced to Delgado through my friend John Muldoon, who collaborates with her at Ease, a virtual pet behavior service providing support for pet owners and veterinarians alike. Muldoon, a lifelong animal lover himself, mentioned he’d never met anyone more passionate about cats as Delgado. And within just minutes of meeting her, I knew he was right.
“I’ve always been pretty fascinated with cats,” she says when I ask her what she loves about them. “They’re so beautiful.” Her broad smile, genuine and contagious, lights up her face with an easy warmth.
“I love some of the things that drive people bananas about cats,” she adds. Unlike dogs, she says, which have changed significantly through domestication, cats still have many of their wild kitty instincts.
“I really appreciate that part of them,” she says. “We’re lucky to share our home with this cat that has many of the same instincts that their closest wild relatives have.” But she doesn’t think cats are as mysterious as people make them out to be.
“People say cats are so snobby or hard to read,” she says. “But they’re just more subtle than dogs. Dogs are just in your face, whereas with cats, you have to pay attention.”
Delgado tells me she has always had a thing for cats. “I was definitely obsessed with them from a young age,” she says.
But her mom was allergic. Delgado lived in a rural part of Maine, where, cat-less and as an only child, she spent most of her time reading and thinking by herself. “I definitely wasn’t the person who was going to grow up and be a veterinarian or anything like that,” she recounts.
Throughout her childhood, Delgado begged her parents to let her get a cat, and at 16, she finally got her wish. A friend’s cat had a litter and she got to pick out a kitten. “That was kind of when it all started,” she says, a look of nostalgia in her eyes.
Kittums was a brown tabby with a white chest and paws. They bonded right away. Then, a few years later, Delgado got another cat. She named him Jesus.
“I thought it was funny,” she says. “I was a punk rocker. I thought it would be obnoxious to name my cat Jesus. So that’s what I did.” I can’t help but notice the three guitars, ukulele, and drum set behind her as she speaks.
When Delgado decided to drop out of college to pursue her dream of starting a punk band, Kittums and Jesus went along for the ride. They all made the cross-country trip to California together.
“I was in several bands, none of which you probably would have heard of,” she says. But she loved the punk scene and spent most of her twenties involved in the small punk scene in San Francisco while working at a punk collective record store and health food co-op to make ends meet while she pursued her punk rocker dreams.
This is how she spent most of her 20s. And then, everything shifted when, at 13, Kittums died.
“He died on my birthday,” she says. “He was a little bit of a drama queen, so it was kind of appropriate that he died on my birthday. He was like, ‘You’re never going to forget this one.’”
Time and distance allow her to laugh now, but every pet owner knows how hard it is to lose your furry best friend. Let’s just say it was a bad birthday.
And yet Kittums’s death led to an important turning point in Delgado’s life. Concerned about her, a friend suggested she start volunteering at the San Francisco SPCA, an animal shelter right around the corner from where Delgado lived. He thought it would be good for her. She took his advice.
“That altered my life pretty significantly,” she says. She ended up staying there for eight years, first as a volunteer, then as a cat behavior specialist.
The San Francisco SPCA is known for being one of the best animal shelters in the country. I’ve been there (I also used to live right around the corner from it), and it’s a beautiful shelter. It has tons of resources. At the time Delgado was there, it was also probably the only shelter in the country that had a program dedicated to cat behavior.
This was the work that especially drew her in. Her responsibilities? Assessing the cats she and the rest of the behavior cat department had brought into the shelter or were considering bringing in. Every day, they’d go around the corner to Animal Care and Control and look at their euthanasia list to see how many of the cats they felt like they could save and place safely in a home to give a good quality of life. Then she helped matchmake those cats with the people coming in wanting to adopt a cat.
“Maybe they were adopting a cat who had a history of behavior issues, like not using the litter box consistently or maybe biting or scratching. So we always wanted to make sure people had the information they needed to make sure the behavior didn’t happen in their next home.” Her work was a blend of behavior modification (for the cats) and education (for the humans).
Part of her work included manning a behavior hotline where people would call if they had questions about their cat. They would ask her about a whole range of topics — from tips for introducing a new kitten to their older cats, to their cats keeping them up all night (why do all cats seem to have the most energy at 4 a.m.?), to bringing a new baby home (“Can we help their cat like their baby?”). She would help them as much as she could over the phone.
Delgado found the experience incredibly gratifying. But working at the shelter was also stressful — “you see the best of people and the worst of people,” she says — and then, there’s the bureaucracy to deal with.
“It’s never the animals,” she says. “The animals are great.”
She did this for the better part of a decade — and then, she was done. The inevitable pain of working in a shelter started to take its toll. “I was kind of feeling like if I didn’t want to work at the shelter forever, and I didn’t think it was going to be good for my mental health, that I needed to have some kind of career path… or just a plan,” she says.
That’s when she decided to go back to school. She finished her undergraduate degree, then having fallen in love with research and science, decided she didn’t want to stop there. She went on to receive her PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley, where she spent seven years chasing squirrels studying animal behavior and human-pet relationships. She has continued to blend her love of science, animals, and communication ever since.
But it’s the cats — and their human bonds — that she loves most.
“I just really enjoy helping cat owners and helping cats,” Delgado says. As she says this, a striped tortoiseshell tabby cat jumps up onto her lap.
“Sorry, one of my cats is going to join us,” she says.
“Who is this?” I ask. A lifelong cat lover myself, I can’t help but smile. The cat, her tail now in Delgado’s face, is blissfully unaware she’s just interrupted our interview.
“This is Professor Scribbles,” she says, laughing. “She’s in her own little world.” I can’t help but laugh as well. I ask about her other two cats.
“There’s Ruby,” she says, who, despite being the sister of Professor Scribbles, has a very different personality. “Ruby is lazy and she’s sweet.”
And then, there’s Coriander. “She loves training and she loves food. And she’s very passionate. She should be your next guest.”
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Delgado’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One Lesson: Merging Childhood Passions
Delgado’s journey underscores a powerful lesson: our early passions can be precursors to our life’s work — but it is often the synthesis of these childhood passions with our adult skills and knowledge that lead to true fulfillment later on. As a child, Delgado’s fascination with both cats and learning was evident, but it took decades before she was able to merge these passions into a viable career. It's a powerful reminder that the seeds of our future endeavors are sometimes sown much earlier than we realize, but they require time, experience, and the right conditions to fully blossom into a career that's as rewarding as it is impactful.
One Exercise: Playing With Your Cat
This exercise is mainly for cat owners — although you can certainly apply similar principles to dogs or other furry friends! Delgado says play is key for cats because it helps fulfill their hunting instincts (“instead of killing a bird, they’re pouncing on a feather”) and allows them to express their natural behaviors while still indoors. She’s a big fan of wand toys andsuggests moving the toy to mimic the movement of a bird or mouse — including alternating movements with periods of rest.Even carving out just a few minutes a day for play can have big mental and physical benefits for our cats.
One Curiosity: Teaching Cats Tricks
My last cat, Fishstick, who passed away last month (I miss him every day) used to play fetch. I used to think that this was just a very endearing quirk of his, but Delgado says it’s more common than most people think (she’s actually doing research right now on the prevalence of fetching in both cats and dogs). In fact, Delgado says that “all of those things that we train dogs to do, we can do with cats, too” — like teaching them tricks! I’m already dreaming of what I want to teach my next cat. Shake? Roll over? Toilet training (it’s possible!)?
Links
Does Fluffy Really Want to Be An Adventure Cat? in The New York Times
Now Playing: The (Real) Secret Life of Cats on Science Friday
Why We Think Cats are Psychopaths in The Atlantic