Why Cats Drink

At first they hated alcohol, refused to touch it. They never really developed a taste for it. But as their neuroses grew, they took to steady tippling. They frisked about unsteadily, waved their paws erratically, grew belligerent, at length fell into a drunken stupor. These drunkards enforced were cats, and their scientifically controlled behavior, according to the man who made them drunkards (Psychiatrist Jules H. Masserman of the University of Chicago), helps explain why men take to drink.

Cats in general have no reason to like Dr. Masserman: he has been engaged for some time in making them neurotic and then trying to cure them (TIME, June 8, 1942). In his latest experiment, using his standard method of confusing and frightening the animals by sudden blasts of air in their cages, he got a group of 16 cats into such a state of nerves that some of them even recoiled from a caged mouse. Then he gave them alcohol by injection or stomach tube. It quickly cured their jitters. They went back into their cages and, despite their alcoholic befuddlement, they boldly tackled and opened food boxes they had been taught to fear. Submissive cats took food away from domineering ones.

But when the jag wore off, the jitters came back. Dr. Masserman then gave them, at mealtimes, a choice of plain milk or milk laced with 5% alcohol (in a cocktail glass). After a few days or weeks, most of the neurotic cats learned that the alcoholic milk made them feel better, invariably chose the cocktail. Dr. Masserman, who can put two & two together, deduced from this fact that the alcohol evidently removed their inhibitions and dulled their senses, making them less sensitive to shocks. He found that usually he could cure their taste for liquor only by curing their neuroses through psychotherapy. In very rare cases, a cat gradually worked itself out of its fears after repeated drinking. When it began to feel its normal self while sober, it usually went on the wagon.

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