Lili Chin on interpreting cats’ body language, the influence of her own cats Mambo and Shimmy, and the problem of anthropomorphizing cats.
By Zazie Todd PhD
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Lili Chin is known for her delightful and informative drawings of dogs and other animals. Kitty Language: An Illustrated Guide to Understanding Your Cat brings her signature style to feline communication. Adorable drawings of all kinds of cats are accompanied by clear, concise text to create a cute, entertaining, and illuminating guide to feline body language. This book will help you understand just how expressive your cat is.
You can hear Lili Chin talk about Kitty Language at Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers. She’s on a panel called Caring for Cats with Lili Chin, Mikel Maria Delgado PhD, and Lucy Hoile.
Kitty Language is available from all good bookstores, including via Bookshop (and Bookshop UK), as well as my Amazon store.
Below, Lili Chin answers my questions about Kitty Language.
Why did you write this book?
There was a surge of requests for a cat version after my book Doggie Language was published in late 2020. When my husband and I adopted our cats Mambo and Shimmy the following year, I was obsessed with observing them and learning about cat behavior. I read cat books – the first of these being Purr – and realized that at the time, there weren’t as many visual resources that focus specifically on cat body language, compared to what was available for dogs. With Kitty Language I wanted to share what I was learning, and also present this information in a fun and accessible way. Also, I enjoy drawing cats!
What are the main themes of your book?
The main purpose of Kitty Language is to inspire people to be more curious and sensitive observers of their cats. There are always memes going around that cats are less human-social, and less expressive compared to dogs – and I want to help debunk these myths. When we pay attention to our cats, recognize their many subtle behaviors, taking whole body movements, specific contexts, species-needs, and individual personalities into consideration, we can see how they are feeling and how their feelings change. In the same spirit as Doggie Language, I focus on our companion animal’s perspective and look at behaviors that may be commonly misinterpreted.
Tell me something about your research process and how it shaped this book.
My own experiences with our cats Mambo and Shimmy were a big influence. In the Scent chapter, for example, the “non-recognition aggression” came literally from seeing Mambo attack Shimmy the first time she came home from the vet. Our cats are a bonded pair, they are often super affectionate with each other, and so this sudden sniff-and-lunge-bite came as a shock to me and to Shimmy! In understanding the event from my cats’ perspectives and learning to manage their environment around vet visits, I could ensure that this incident never happened again.
One of my favorite visual resources was What is my cat saying? Feline Communication 101 by Jacqueline Munera and Carol Byrnes (it is sold in Powerpoint-CD format by Dogwise.com) Another amazing resource was the catFACS manual which comes with a series of video clips. These really helped train my eyes to see subtle changes in cat faces. Friends also sent me photos of their cats who served as models for the cats in this book.
I also learned a lot directly from cat behavior professionals. I sent videos of Mambo and Shimmy to get their expert interpretations – usually when I was unsure if my cats were playing or fighting, or what their conversation might be about. The feedback I received was always enlightening and helped refine my own understanding of what my cats were doing, including nuance and context. Cat behavior professionals also suggested behaviors to include in the book and checked the manuscript for accuracy. As with Doggie Language, I did my best to use everyday language, and to avoid jargon words (e.g., “territorial”, “dominant”) that could be easily misinterpreted.
What surprised you while you were writing the book?
Kitty Language was a bit more of a challenging process than my previous book. Compared to dog resources, most cat resources that I referred to came with fewer pictures, and when I searched Youtube and social media for specific cat videos and photos, it seemed that accurately-labeled cat behaviors were harder to find. (This is the same for other companion animal species like rabbits, guinea pigs etc. There is no standardized terminology for many non-dog behaviors)
I found that people often mislabel their cats as “sad” when they are not sad, “mean” when they are scared, or “aggressive” when they are playing. People tend to anthropomorphize their cats’ poses and expressions. They do this for dogs too, but I think that at this point in time, perhaps a lot more has been debunked in the dog world than in the cat world.
Who will especially enjoy this book?
I hope that any cat-loving or cat-curious person will enjoy this book; including people who are new to cats, or who have recently adopted a cat. The book is fully illustrated – there are lots of pictures and guides for what to look at – so it is an easy introduction to cat body language for readers of all ages and cultures. (To date, Kitty Language has been translated to 17 languages)
What are you working on right now?
After Kitty Language, I started working on my next gift book – Dogs of the World: A Gallery of Pups from Purebreds to Mutts, which features my art of dog breeds and village dogs from around the world. I spent all of 2023 working on this book and am still finessing it, and I cannot wait for it to be published in 2025! In the meantime, I am also working on commissioned animal infographics (eg, Guinea Pig body language, Bunny body language, etc.) preparing for a cat convention – Catcon 2024, and playing a lot of board games.
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