INTERVIEW: Jackson Galaxy works toward bipetual world on Animal Planet series

Jackson Galaxy, host of My Cat From Hell on Animal Planet, is ready to push the limit on the new season of the hit reality TV series. Determined to promote positive cat awareness across the United States, Galaxy heads to households where there are some human-feline issues and tries to use his skills to find a workable solution. However, after many episodes and adventures on the road, the TV host also finds himself pushing the “bipetual” message, essentially letting animal lovers know it’s OK to be both a cat person and a dog person.

“I mean every season that we’re on, the submissions that we get from people who need help really push the boundary of what can be ‘fixed,’ and also just the family dynamics are just getting crazier and crazier every year,” Galaxy said recently during a phone interview. “To be quite honest, there were a number of times this season where I was like, oh, boy, this is the cat that ate me. This is the one that I’m not going to be able to help out, and fortunately not only did these problems work out, but we’re redefining what it is to ‘work out.’ We’re moving away from this sort of, it’s solved, it’s fixed. And we’re looking at, what does success mean?”

Galaxy noted that cat caretakers need to embrace a simple, but sometimes difficult, concept: compromise.

“Cats are not on this planet to do as they are told,” he said. “I would say half the time, if not more, the lessons that I’m teaching are much more human-based. They’re much more about acceptance and empathy and living together with a cat and creating unity, and not so much ‘fixing a problem.’ I think you’re going to see a lot more of that. You’re going to see a lot problems that are solved in ways that you probably didn’t think they were going to be solved.”

Animal Planet airs new episodes of the hit series 8 p.m. Saturdays. On the show, Galaxy offers helpful solutions that audience members may be able to fit into their own lives.

“My number one priority is the well-being of the cat, and if that means that this cat really shouldn’t be living in this home, so be it,” he said. “If the solution is that you deal with a certain behavior and find creative ways to work that into your life, then that’s what we do. I think that it’s always an opportunity for me to expand what you think fixing is. I’m ready. Any blow-back I get from that perspective that I didn’t work magic, I’m more than happy to take that because it’s an opportunity for me to teach you about what successful living with animals is about.”

Galaxy touched upon the common cat stigma that still exists in the world. Sometimes people may have had a bad experience with a cat as a child, say like a scratching incident. This memory informs their view on the cuddly felines, so much so that they build an entire life as an anti-cat person. Hand in hand with this perspective is the eternal debate over dogs and cats. In popular culture, these two household pets are seen as polar opposites, sometimes bitter villains who never get along. Galaxy wants to dispel these falsities.

“We get dogs,” he said. “Dogs are just right there on the surface. They are here to a certain degree, and we’ve bred [them] to do stuff for us — to love us, the sun and the moon. And cats are just not that way, and my job is to teach you to appreciate them for who you are. … Listen, you can call yourself a dog person. You can say you’re not into cats. I take that challenge. I can find a cat for any non-cat person, but the thing is that we still are nowhere near finding homes for every cat that is currently homeless in shelters or on the streets. And in order to get those cats home, in order to stop killing them in shelters, it’s my job to convert the non-believers, and I take that very seriously. I am up for that challenge.”

With cat awareness comes a new spotlight on the need to rescue cats in shelters. The TV host, who has been working on animal welfare issues for years, said that in the past two decades the number of euthanized pets has decreased. The American Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, known as the ASPCA, estimates that 2.7 million pets are euthanized every year, with 1.4 million of them being cats.

“The words adoption, rescue, these things are very squarely in the public eye now,” Galaxy said. “People are always talking about my rescue dog, my rescue cat. It’s now becoming kind of a thing to rescue, and I couldn’t be more pleased. I just launched my foundation, the Jackson Galaxy Foundation. It’s our job to obviously push the conversation along so that we can get to a no-kill reality, but I wouldn’t have started it if I didn’t think we were actually getting around that home stretch and partially what I could do to help push us to the finish line. We’re getting there. We are totally getting there.”

As Galaxy spoke, the purrs of Barry could be heard in the background. He’s the “resident critic,” as Galaxy noted.

Barry, like so many cats in the world, are “like Zen Buddhists,” the TV host said. “They are loving, but they are not attached to the outcome of that love. They don’t depend on that love the way the dogs do, but they give you just a different flavor of the same thing.”

Because of these differences, Galaxy said he hopes more people will be “bipetual.”

“I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to spend my day with cats every day and not come home to a dog,” he said. “I mean it’s beautiful to come home to an animal who demonstrates their love the way dogs do, but then there’s that moment that you just want a cat lying on your chest, nuzzling up to you, or what Barry is doing right now.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• My Cat From Hell airs new episodes 8 p.m. Saturdays on Animal Planet. Click here for more information.