Classical music helps Portuguese cats get peacefully spayed

There's a veterinary clinic called Handel with Care, but it turns out that Dr. Eugene Handel of Derry, New Hampshire isn't the only person with that surname to have a special way with household pets. Portuguese veterinarian Miguel Carreira has discovered that "most cats like classical music, particularly George Handel compositions."

Because Dr. Carreira and his colleagues are scientists, they didn't rely on a simple hunch: they put tiny little cat headphones on a dozen female cats and played different music for the cats while they were going under for the kind of surgery that you wake up from and then don't have to worry about having kittens any more.

The results? "Most individuals exhibited lower values for RR and PD when exposed to CM, intermediate values to PM and higher values to HM." That's how the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery says that classical music ("CM") calms cats, while pop music ("PM") has neutral effects—and heavy metal ("HM") creates the opposite of calm.

Perhaps surmising that the "Hallelujah" chorus wasn't what his furry patients needed at that sensitive moment, Carreira didn't use Handel for the study; instead, he used Barber's Adagio for Strings. For pop music, the researchers selected Natalie Imbruglia's 1997 hit "Torn."

This all supports what we—and Dr. Carreira—had intuited about the calming effects of classical music, but you have to feel for those poor Portuguese cats who had to go under the knife while wearing headphones blaring AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

Photo: A cat is gently restrained, without benefit of music, during rescue training for firefighters in Minneapolis. Photo by Greta Cunningham/MPR.