“You’re getting very—mreow—sleepy… You want to give me your shoes to vomit in as I please—mreow… You suddenly want to let me have my way with the goldfish, shed all over your favorite jacket and use your mattress as a scratching post…”
If cats could hypnotize us, we’d all be in trouble. They already have the entire family under their control to some extent in most households, and if there’s anything that a cat wants most, it’s world domination—and, according to Disney, the baby’s milk.
(Does it seem to you that they have a bit of a bias against cats? Sure, they tried to redeem themselves a bit in The Aristocats, but most other Disney felines seem like they’re evil compared to Disney dogs.)
And as much as I’m against using cats in animal testing—particularly those heinous studies in which kittens’ eyes are sewn shut to test cosmetics and such—I have to admit this test was pretty funny.
George, a lovely orange tabby from the UK, was recently used in an experiment of sorts. In order to prove that the regulation for hypnotherapists in the country is too slack, Chris Jackson, the presenter of Inside Out, registered George as a hypnotherapist.
Three industries accepted the cat’s credentials, which included a fake certificate from the Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists. To understand just how fake these credentials are, one should know that such a society does not even exist.
That’s pretty bad.
Such lax regulations are also happening in the United States. Dr. Steve Eichel, who suspected that organizations in America were not checking the backgrounds and credentials of prospective hypnotherapists either, got his own cat certified by many industries as well. “It was a frighteningly simple process,” he admits.
George the cat himself was recognized as a certified hypnotherapist by the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists, the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming, and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association.
And though the organizations made their atonements and excuses—one saying it’s since corrected the error, another saying it basically did its best, and a third claiming that they don’t have to check credentials, only provide benefits—it’s still pretty laughable that a cat was able to pass through so easily.
If you’re in the market for a good hypnotherapist, you might want to do a bit of background checking on your own since the Board isn’t about to do it for you. You could get saddled with some creep right out of prison with no other credentials than knowing the hypnotic refrain of The Cell Block Tango. Of course, if you’d rather be hypnotized by a cat, more power to you.