Letting the Cat Out of the Bag About Boxes
Why are cats are so obsessed with sitting in cardboard boxes? There has been some serious scientific muscle behind explaining this strange phenomenon! Also, why do cats chew or eat cardboard and paper products? The answers to these and more purr-plexing cats in boxes-related questions today as Michelle Fern chats cats with Dawn LaFontaine, the creator of Cat in the Box.
BIO:
I'm a mom of two grown children, a wife to my amazing husband, Chris, and a one-woman business owner.
My parents liked to recount how, when I was just an infant in a baby carriage, long before I could speak, I’d vigorously point at every dog and cat on the street.
Knowing how much I loved animals as a child, my folks allowed me to fill our home with a menagerie of rabbits, gerbils, guinea pigs, and birds. I began inventing little toys for my beloved pets almost immediately. We have old family photos of the extensive Habitrail-like warren I’d built out of empty tissue boxes and toilet-paper tubes to amuse my pet gerbils when I was a small girl.
As a grown woman and mother, I felt it was important to instill a sense of love and respect for animals in my children. They, too, became “pet parents” to an ever-growing family of finned, furred and feathered friends. Together, me and my children (and my husband on days off from work) involved ourselves in animal rescue, devoting many summer hours over the years to helping rehabilitate former racing greyhounds and fostering homeless baby rats for a very special non-profit. Today I volunteer weekly at Metrowest Humane Society, a no-kill, cats-only shelter in my hometown of Ashland, Massachusetts.
All along, I continued to design things for my pets when I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for in a store. I turned a plastic salad bowl from Walmart into a removable fleece-covered “pigloo” for our guinea pigs to help them stay extra warm in winter, and sewed a hooded jacket for our 160lb great Dane when I couldn’t find one large enough for her, even though I didn’t know how to sew.
The idea for Cat in the Box came from an article I’d read in Reader’s Digest explaining the science behind cats’ love of cardboard boxes. Coincidentally, I’d just visited an old friend, who happens to be a catsitter, and noticed all the empty Amazon boxes she had cluttering up the otherwise impeccable décor in her living room. “They’re for the cats,” she explained to me.
And so, the idea for Cat in the Box began to ripen in my mind. Wouldn’t it be nice – for both cats and their owners – to have fun, clean, attractive, whimsical, and dedicated boxes for play?Well, I thought it would be. And I hope you and all your cat friends think so, too.