The New York Cat Film Festival for this year starts tomorrow. The dog version starts at the same time. Just to be fair ✔️. Although the cat film festival is a more recent innovation. Both were founded by Tracie Hotchner, a leading authority on cats and dogs (and human pregnancy 👍). She said: “I didn’t understand this [but] cat lovers are much more passionate than dog lovers. No one’s talking to them. They are eager for an audience. The cat festival sells twice as many tickets as the dog festival.”

I guess she was saying that the news media where hovering around the dog lovers and avoiding the shunning people. This did not reflect the popularity of the cat films at this year’s festival.
It is nice to know as cats often get a bad rap. There are more studies on dog behaviour as they are more manageable. This means people understand dogs better than cats and cats are seen as aloof and ‘weird’. No, they are not weird. Every feline behaviour is entirely logical and has a sensible cause.
The film festivals start in NYC and tour the country. Hotchner says that one of the festival’s highlights this year is “and extraordinary documentary with no subtitles and dialogue, about a man in Turkey who drives into the middle of nowhere and feeds wild dogs”. She said that the dogs “are magnificent. They are Anatolian shepherds. They follow his truck and be puts out big bags of stale loves.”
The cat festival includes a film by Chilean director called “L’ Histoire de Liliput”. According to The Times journalist, Will Pavia, it is shot in the style of French film noire, and it is about his cat. Hotchner said that “it is artistic and hilarious”.
Hotchner got the idea for the film festivals when 10 years ago she watched cat videos at an art gallery in Minneapolis. It attracted ten thousand people. She watched with interest and decided that people wanted this kind of experience.
Although I am pleased to see that she did not like some of the videos! Me too. The so called “funny cat videos” can be a little abusive of the cats which I don’t find so funny. She did not approve of the videos showing cats falling off shelves or getting stuck in a dog door. Or a cat with a Kleenex tissue box stuck on their head.
She thinks these videos don’t do much for the animal-human bond. My point exactly.
But the idea was firmly implanted in her head and she became the founder of this annual cat and dog film gala.
Hotchner has written cat and dog books such as The Dog Bible: Everything Your Dog Wants You To Know and The Cat Bible: Everything Your Cat Expects You To Know. She was encouraged to write them by her father after she wrote the highly successful Pregnancy and Child Birth.
Her father said to her “Why don’t you do for dogs what you do for people with human children?”
The flim festival is a further extension of that process. There is a clear appetite for cat and dog films on the big screen in cinemas and cats are more popular than dogs because cat lovers are more passionate than dog lovers ✔️😉💓.
I will speculate that this is because more women like cats than men and women are more passionate than men. Dangerous words. But I can’t think of any other obvious reason.
Salma Hayek put catnip in her boots to attract cats while filming House of Gucci scene