There are outdoor cats and there are indoor cats. When I brought home Mac, a 4-year-old orange tabby, from a shelter in 2010, I realized I had acquired a demanding combination of the two.  

While he liked a cosy bed and two squares a day, Mac had a style that was apparently cramped by my one-bedroom apartment, and he dashed outside whenever I opened the door to my deck, returning hours later.  

The idea of walking him on a leash came after a series of unleashed mishaps. He killed a mourning dove, wounded a pigeon, tore a drumstick off a turkey that a neighbour had left cooling in his window and hung from another neighbour’s screen door close to midnight so that she awoke in terror.  

Mac wasn’t winning any friends in the apartment building. And I realized that letting a cat get into trouble seven stories above New York City’s streets was dangerous.  

But when I cut off his access to the great outdoors, my cat, usually spunky and friendly, threw himself against the door, yowled and attacked my legs with frustration and sharp claws. I’d heard about cat walking on “My Cat From Hell,” a show on the American TV channel Animal Planet, starring a cat behaviourist named Jackson Galaxy. In one episode, he advised an owner to leash-walk his cat as a way to burn off extra feline energy. So I bought a Chihuahua harness and fastened it onto a writhing Mac. He keeled over and refused to budge until I removed it.  

Clearly, we both needed professional help.  

Galaxy is one of a growing number of animal behaviourists who believe that training and walking cats is not only possible, but good for the cat. They say that cats need lots of human attention, and are not the solitary, selfish creatures they’re often thought to be: less Mr. Bigglesworth and more Bustopher Jones, the cat about town.  

Because cats don’t learn by discipline, owners have only recently begun to see them respond to training as positive reinforcement has become popular, said Stephen Zawistowski, science adviser for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The antecedent is old, he said: Edward Thorndike’s circa-1900 puzzle-box experiments, proving animals could learn behaviours, were performed on cats.  

“People are developing a broader, more deep bond with their pets, and want to do things with them,” Zawistowski said.  

Walking a cat on a leash strikes a good balance between having an indoor cat that lives to old age but in an unstimulating environment, and an outdoor cat that can kill birds or get killed itself.  

“Here’s a way for your cat to go outside and enjoy the outdoors, but under a protective umbrella,” he said.  

I scheduled a visit with Galaxy and set out to make Mac into a pedicat.  

Galaxy worked at cat shelters for nine years before becoming a professional animal behaviourist and believes that almost all cat problems can be solved.  

But Galaxy said cat owners also need some behaviour modification.  

“We don’t say, it’s OK to leave a cat for 14 hours at a stretch with an automatic feeder and an automatic litter box,” he said. “That doesn’t work. My advice to people like that is, get fish.”  

We started by settling on Mac’s reward: his favourite treats, meat-flavoured biscuits called Greenies. From now on, “the only time you’re ever going to give that treat is when you’re working the harness,” he said.  

I also had to make sure Mac was hungry when we started each session, so he would respond to the treats. Cats will not do what you want just to please you, unlike dogs, Galaxy said.  

Galaxy left me with directions to break the walking-outside goal into small steps before finally going out on the street.  

“For every cat, this side of the line is comfort and on this side of the line is challenge,” he said. “Every day, your job is to keep him at that line and then put one paw over it.”  

By the next day, Mac started purring when I took out the harness and the treats.  

We did take it slow, though. Day 4, out on the deck, Mac would walk a meter or so, then sink to the ground. Day 14, he would walk a meter or so, then sink to the ground. Day 30, we had made it to the lobby, where he would walk a meter, then sink to the ground. Or, for variation, he would run up the lobby stairs and hide. How to feel like a chump: standing in an apartment lobby with a clearly terrified cat, one that is wearing a leash.  

Galaxy advised I make Mac walk a little longer between treats. And if he freaked out, I was to return to the previous setting until he was confident there again. Finally, Galaxy said, I needed to stop picking up the cat when he seemed nervous, an act that would undermine the cat and teach him to be too dependent on me.  

On the street, he was still timid. He would flatten himself when he saw a skateboarder, a cement truck or a dog.  

I figured if Mac couldn’t relax on city streets, he might in a park. So I put Mac into his carrier, took the subway and, inside Prospect Park in Brooklyn, attached his leash before letting him out of his carrier.  

The cat was black-eyed with fear and climbed up my jeans. I tried again, in a no-dogs-allowed area that was wooded and hilly. There, Mac pushed his head out of his carrier, looked around and took a few tentative steps. Then he was off. Tail up, head up, he ran along trails, stepped on logs and crashed through twigs. That cat was walking.  

Six months after I started, I have a relaxed cat, a new admiration for his pluck and agility and, probably, a growing reputation as the weird cat lady. Taking my cat to the park is a great outing, and if Mac is never going to trot alongside me as I walk to brunch, that’s OK. He is a cat, after all, and I’ve learned that means he’ll only do what he wants to do.  

He’s trained me pretty well, I’d say.