Speak Up

It’s a sure sign of desperation when a columnist starts writing about pets, but bear with me for a moment. I have a 14-year-old domestic shorthair cat named Flinch, which is also her personality profile. Flinch obviously had a traumatic kittenhood--spent, I suspect, in a sawmill or room full of flaming rocking chairs--and consequently lives in a perpetual state of low-grade panic. She’s pretty much at Kitty DEFCON 3 all the time. For the first year after I adopted her I never even saw her. The cat food I put out mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear later in the litter box, much the worse for wear.

I’ve owned Flinch lo these many years and she still won’t let me pick her up, which, I confess, I’m starting to take personally. Last week I did what any shunned feline owner might do: I consulted “The Cat Whisperer.”

Claire Bessant is head of the Feline Advisory Bureau (FAB), in Wiltshire, England, and the author of several books on cat behavior with “Whisperer” in their titles. By dint of these credentials I figured she could do for me what celebrity dog whisperer Cesar Millan does for his clients. “Poor thing,” said Bessant from her office at FAB. “The trouble with a cat is, if she’s fearful, she sure she’s saving her life by running away. You need to convince her that if she stays good things will happen.”

Alas, unlike dogs, cats aren’t easily motivated, Bessant said. “They don’t get too excited for food. They might like a lovely prawn now and then.”

Flinch is still under the bed.

Cat Whisperer? Oh yes. And not just one. There are several cat authorities out there who identify themselves as cat whisperers. Cesar Millan isn’t the first dog whisperer, either, though he is the only one who has been on “Oprah” or been the subject of a trenchant profile by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. By virtue of his hit show on the National Geographic Channel, pop culture has knighted him “the” Dog Whisperer. Actually, Millan is being sued by his former publicist, who claims it was she who dubbed him the Dog Whisperer. Too bad she stole the phrase from somebody else.

If there were a stock market for metaphors, you could have made a fortune investing in “whisperer.” Without much trouble, you can find websites for “The Chicken Whisperer,” “The Ferret Whisperer,” “The Cow Whisperer”--the latter beginning with the sentence, “Cows are smart.” Yes, they play a mean game of bridge when no one’s looking.

I know you’re dying to know, so I’ll tell you. Yes, even “The Beaver Whisperer.”

The phrase--I should say, the conceptual franchise--goes back almost two centuries, reportedly to an Irish horse trainer who employed a kind of sympathetic hypnosis to calm and rehabilitate traumatized horses. The techniques of horse “whispering” were passed down with quiet dignity for decades until, of course, Robert Redford discovered the book by Nicholas Evans and made the three-hanky “The Horse Whisperer,” released in 1998. Since then, the phrase has been riffed on by anyone who claims a deep and quasi-mystical rapport with animals--even if he means to kill those animals (“The Deer Whisperer” and “The Bass Whisperer”).

But whispering recently jumped up the evolutionary ladder. The late Tracy Hogg, a British-trained childcare specialist, was “The Baby Whisperer.” With all respect, this usage seems to violate the idea that the whisperer is deciphering inscrutable behaviors. Babies, being nominally human, are perfectly clear in their wants and needs, even at 3 in the morning.

Of course, whispering has been a boon to newspaper headline writers. A recent Boston Herald story about a therapist who specializes is pre-wedding stress carried the headline, “The Bride Whisperer.” (Hint: take them for frequent walks.)

It isn’t absolutely necessary that whatever is being whispered to has ears. If a cop’s traditional junk food acts out, he can consult “The Doughnut Whisperer.” Jittery urbanites: “The Coffee Whisperer.” A blogger on the Amateur Gourmet website admitted that she had not shown her tart dough enough assertive energy. “Tart dough is like a dog,” she writes. “You have to be its master or it will own you.” Now she is the “Tart Whisperer.”

And so we have a new game to play: The Google Whisperer. Plug in any noun to see if you can find someone claiming a spiritual valence with it. There are whisperers for computers, engines, boats, hats, trees, roses, robots. There are, as yet, no whisperers for plywood or pre-emergent herbicides.

The great thing about pop culture is that it can bring to light very powerful ideas that tell us a lot about ourselves and then run these ideas right into the ground. Before it augurs in, we should ask ourselves what all the whispering is about. What we have here is a failure to communicate. And for all our whispering, who’s whispering to us? Seems like we’re still the same aggressive, difficult, barky beings we’ve always been, chasing cars and marking our territory.

I think I’ll hide under the bed.