Tag: cats
Cats Love Us On Their Terms

Cats Love Us On Their Terms

Given the time and money people lavish on their pets, it’s remarkable how little we appear to understand them. Recently at the dog park, for example, I watched a woman with an enormous Great Dane puppy doing everything in her power to turn him into a fear-biter.

Fortunately, she appeared to be failing. The problem was her total inability to speak “dog.” Another large young fellow — a collie/Great Pyrenees mix fond of playing chase — kept inviting her dog to join the game, and she kept misinterpreting his playful feints as threats.

So she’d pull her dog close and call out for help, confusing the Great Dane, who was a bit shy to begin with. Evidently, it was his first visit to the dog park. Hers, too. Fortunately a good Samaritan persuaded her to turn him loose. The dogs quickly sorted things out, and a good time was had by all.

No harm, no foul.

In my experience, however, cats are more commonly misunderstood. Many people find them aloof and mysterious, so much so that a small academic/journalistic industry has sprung up to explain the animals to their owners.

“Why We Think Cats Are Psychopaths” is the title of a recent effort in The Atlantic. We do? As one with some experience with psychopaths of the human variety — I wrote a book entitled “Widow’s Web” that featured a couple, plus a bunch of columns about Donald Trump — I certainly never have. Author Sarah Zhang assures us, however, that “anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a catloaf knows exactly what that means.”

I had to look it up: a “catloaf,” so called, is a housecat sitting with all four feet tucked underneath, hence resembling a loaf of bread. A cat expressing, in other words, comfort, contentment and trust. An uneasy cat would never adopt so defenseless a position — unsuitable for fight or flight.

However, anybody expecting even the most affectionate kitty to gaze longingly into their eyes like a cocker spaniel should probably stick to geraniums.

The problem, of course, isn’t cats, but people. As Zhang points out to the imaginatively impaired: “So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that’s just its face.”

Cats’ faces, she points out, lack the muscle structure to change expressions like a human or a dog. That’s not how the animals communicate. Rather, they speak through body language and vocalization — mainly posture. A cat that approaches you with its tail hoisted straight in the air, for example, is saying as clearly as it knows how: “Hello friend, it’s good to see you.”

Dogs that live with cats understand perfectly; humans not so much.

Yes, cats are stealthy predators. That’s how they came to live among us. With the invention of agriculture came grain-stealing, disease-carrying rodents. Just behind them came cats, independent rodent control contractors spread around the world from their Middle Eastern origins by sailing ships.

People inclined to see cats as pitiless and cruel, I’d suggest, have watched too many cartoons with singing mice.

Take my orange tabby tomcat Albert. Descended from a distinguished line of Arkansas barn cats, Albert exterminated mice from our place and then began commuting a half-mile daily to the neighbor’s hay barn. Yet after I fell off a horse and broke several ribs, he changed his life. From being a 90 percent outdoor cat, Albert became an indoorsman. He’d spend hours perched on the arm of my chair in the catloaf position, watching Red Sox games and purring.

After I healed, Albert returned to rodent patrol. He switched jobs because he could tell I was hurting and wanted to comfort me. There’s no other explanation. His younger friend Martin, another orange tabby the dogs and I found in the woods where somebody had dumped him, had no need to alter his routine. Snuggling and purring have always been his main priorities. Possibly he’s a killer too, but you couldn’t prove it by me.

In my experience, cats rescued from what must have been a terrifying situation — Martin was roughly 12 weeks old, a tiny kitten abandoned a half-mile from the nearest house — never, ever forget. He and his littermate Gigi, who lives on a friend’s cattle farm, remain almost absurdly affectionate. If Gigi can’t find a human to pet her, she will rub-a-dub and sniff noses with her cow friends.

You see, they’re all individuals, cats. Their personalities differ from one another quite as much as dogs, human beings, and every other species of mammal I know anything about.

So never mind the Sphinx-like expression. Or the lack of obedience. You don’t train cats; cats train you. Albert gives me orders all day. Fortunately, his needs are simple: in, out, feed me, pet me.

For the love he gives back, it’s not much to ask.

All Trumped Out? Let’s Talk About Cats Instead

All Trumped Out? Let’s Talk About Cats Instead

I don’t know about you, but I’m all Trumped-out.

The whole country is learning how exhausting it can be to live with a seriously mentally ill person: The constant feeling of apprehension and unease over what kind of manipulative, delusional nonsense is coming next. The uncertainty about how to react. Definitely remove all weapons and secure potentially dangerous drugs. Will calling the police make things better, or worse? Is it too early to seek order of commitment? Or too late? If the judge denies it, then what?

If the analogy makes you angry, tough. You and that scrofulous twit Steve Bannon can both take a hike. He’s the Trump apparatchik who says the press should keep its mouth shut. I’ve been hearing from knuckleheads like him as long as I’ve written this column. Fat chance.

Because crazy people tend to be cunning and tireless, it’s important to take reality breaks. So this is a column about my six year-old orange tabby Albert, the most unusual cat I’ve known. Albert’s had major life adjustments to make over the past year, and he’s handled them with creativity and aplomb.

A little background: Albert came to us at age 12 weeks. He’d spent his infancy on a farmhouse porch surrounded by dogs and free-range chickens. So when our aggressive 110 pound Great Pyrenees Maggie stuck her muzzle in his face, he jumped on her head. She thought it was the best thing that ever happened, and adopted the kitten for life.

Hence Albert’s first nickname: The Orange Dog. Besides spending most of his time among dogs, he appointed himself my personal companion, following me everywhere on our farm. He’d sit on fence posts and let Mount Nebo, the Tennessee walking horse, nuzzle him. He treated adult cows like furniture, but sniffed noses with curious calves under the fence.

One time he climbed in with the chickens and got into a standoff with the rooster—glaring at each other like Mexican prizefighters.

He showed no interest in birds after that.

Most doglike of all, Albert normally obeyed when called. I’d put the big dogs up every night, holler his name, and pick out his orange eyes with a flashlight as he came hustling for bedtime duty. As long as it was covered by a blanket, he’d lie on my chest purring. If not, no way. Did I think he was a pervert?

After we adopted another tiny orange tabby abandoned along our road, Albert learned to let himself into the bathroom towel closet for kitten-free napping. You’d hear the soft thump of the spring-loaded door as he came and went. Otherwise, he and young Martin tussled playfully like the Pink Panther and Kato, the martial arts houseboy.

His second nickname: Inspector Clouseau.

Another time he took my side in a fight with his adoptive mother. I was furious with Maggie for bullying Diane’s elderly basset hound. Albert arched his back, pinned his ears, and stalked the dog with a clear intent to thrash her—all ten pounds of him. She slunk away until I nailed her with a weathered cow’s thighbone she carried around.

Message delivered; crisis averted.

Soon enough, Albert had eradicated mice from the feed room. He began traveling to the neighbor’s hay barn about a half mile away in search of rodents to kill. He’d sometimes stay gone overnight, which worried me for fear of coyotes.

Sometimes the dogs and I would walk over there to fetch him. He’d run to us, rub-a-dub on everybody’s legs, and then follow us home. We must have made a comical sight: three guard dogs, two basset hounds, and a creamsicle-colored tomcat parading across a cow pasture.

Then last spring I took a pratfall from a horse, breaking three ribs and buggering up my hip. I was in serious pain for six weeks. Albert dramatically changed his habits. No more cross-country expeditions. He stayed indoors day and night comforting me. He even appeared to recognize the theme music to Boston Red Sox broadcasts. After I became mobile again, he resumed prowling.

Last October, we moved back to Little Rock. I worried about how Albert would adapt, although our back gate opens on the Arkansas School for the Blind campus, and there’s a steep, wooded ravine behind it. I needn’t have worried. Like many older neighborhoods — our “new” house is 100 years old – -Hillcrest has a lot of rats. These smug city rodents have never met an experienced country cat. There’s a new Sheriff in town. He carries their freshly slain corpses over a rock wall like a small leopard, leaving them for the dogs to admire.

Hence Albert’s new nickname: The Sheriff. As rat-hunting’s best at night, homebody Martin (aka The Deputy) has pretty much inherited sleep aide duties. His own specialty is burrowing under the covers like a ground hog, and snuggling between us all night.

A Cat’s Defense Against Neuroeconomics

A Cat’s Defense Against Neuroeconomics

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines…. [S]uch people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.
–Voltaire

In the popular imagination, there are dog people and cat people, although one rarely encounters them in real life. Me, I’m leery of anybody who dislikes dogs, although it’s necessary to make allowances for people with bad childhood experiences. Cat-haters are almost invariably men. Probably cats are properly spooked around them.

But do domestic animals love us back? Most pet owners find it an absurd question. What could be more obvious than a dog’s joy at welcoming us home after an absence? Than a cat’s curling up and purring in our laps?

For the longest time, strict behaviorists clung to pseudo-scientific fundamentalism claiming that talking about animals’ emotions was sentimental nonsense. Psuedo-science, as Carl Safina points out in his wonderful book “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel,” precisely because it required ignoring almost everything we know about their anatomy, evolutionary history and observed behavior.

“So, do other animals have human emotions?” he asks. “Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes; they’re largely the same. Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries, originated in shared ancestry.”

Enter now one Prof. Paul Zak, advertised as something called a “neuroeconomist”—a term hinting at mumbo-jumbo to me—who recently undertook an experiment to determine which domestic animal loves us best. Dogs? Or cats?

Judging by his Wikipedia profile, Zak is a handsome rascal who makes a handsome living advising corporate clients that we’d be better off if we went around acting like a bunch of Italians, with lots of hugging and kissing each other’s cheeks. He’s probably right too, although your mileage may differ.

Zak’s book, “The Moral Molecule” expounds upon the wonders of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that gives people the warm-fuzzies when people they love (or attractive Italians) embrace them. He goes on TV a lot.

Anyway, at the request of BBC-TV, the professor set out to determine which species got the biggest oxytocin boost after ten minutes of being dandled by their owners, dogs or cats. So he assembled ten of each at his laboratory, took saliva samples, instructed their owners to play with them, and then took more saliva samples, which he analyzed for the happy hormone.

According to Elyse Wanshel’s summary in the Huffington Post, “Canines were proven to love us Homo sapiens five times more than their feline counterparts.”

That’s right, cat lovers, dogs rule!

Except, you know what? I don’t have a Phd in neuroeconomics but I do have an unusual orange tabby cat named Albert. His nickname is “The Orange Dog,” on account of how he’s the smallest member of our security team—consisting of two Great Pyrenees, a German shepherd, and Albert.

Albert has many unusual personality traits. Besides preferring canine company, he’s been known sit atop fence posts to let Mount Nebo the horse nuzzle him. The other horses, no. He wanders among cows as if they were as inert as hay bales. He’s totally devoted to me, perching on the arm of my chair watching ballgames, and lying on my chest at bedtime purring.

Then he retires to the bathroom towel closet, fishes open the spring-loaded door and lets it thump shut behind him. Around 5 AM—thump—he’s up and out the door. Many afternoons he accompanies my wife, five dogs and me on an hour-long walk around the pastures to my neighbor’s hay barn, rubbing on the dogs’ legs and panting like a little lion. Sometimes he stays the night out there hunting mice. A country cat, Albert’s wise to coyotes.

I’m absurdly fond of him, and the feeling’s clearly mutual.

However, Albert has two significant phobias: cars and strangers. He vanishes when company comes, keeps the house under surveillance from an undisclosed location and materializes after they’ve gone.

So carry him to a laboratory, let a stranger take a saliva sample, play with him for ten minutes and then let the stranger mess with him again?

Our basset hound Daisy would be fine with that. She loves riding in the car, has never met a stranger and pretty much drools all day anyway.

Elevated oxytocin levels? Albert would be a week forgiving such an indignity. He might bite. So would most cats.
What a farcical experiment. The moral molecule indeed!

So what does Albert feel when he’s lying there on my chest? I think basically what I feel: security, contentment, and deep affection.

Photo: A cat is seen in a window of a mud house. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

You Don’t Domesticate Cats — Cats Domesticate You

You Don’t Domesticate Cats — Cats Domesticate You

As one who has rarely owned fewer than a half-dozen dogs and cats, people who don’t like pets make me uneasy. Often it’s about control issues. The sheer otherness of domestic animals offends their self-importance. How dare a mere cat ignore them?

Equally common are worries about cleanliness. No, you don’t know where that dog’s nose has been, but probably somewhere you wouldn’t put your own. Dogs, see, have very different opinions about what smells good. Even we country folk sometimes wish they weren’t so fond of fresh cow pies.  

But if you’re too fastidious for dogs, you’re too picky for me. A house without hair on the sofa cushions and scratch marks on the legs is as barren as a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Today’s subject, however, is felis domesticus, the ordinary house cat. Writing in Slate, David Grimm outlines an amusing dispute among academic scientists about whether or not the world’s most popular house pet is a domestic animal. As usual, it’s partly semantic. What exactly does “domestic” mean?

“Our feline companions don’t really need us, after all,” writes Grimm.

They can hunt for themselves, and they go feral without human contact.” Indeed, quite a few cats live wild, a threat to songbird populations that lifestyle commissars like to blame on house pets—at least partly, one suspects, because scolding cats themselves is so futile.

Cats appear quite indifferent to human wishes much of the time. That’s partly because, unlike dogs, they read your body language instead of your face. But it’s that sphinx-like quality that lends resonance to the argument.

Professor Wes Warren is a Washington University biologist who participated in a recent study tracing specific genome changes that distinguish the Near Eastern wildcat from my orange tabby friends, Albert and Martin—aka Inspector Clouseau and Kato the Houseboy.

Professor Warren is of the non-domesticated school, pointing out that house cats hunt small rodents as effectively as their wild ancestors, while dogs can’t fend for themselves in the wild. (Actually, I used to have a three-beagle pack that caught and ate rabbits and field rats all the time, but that’s a quibble.)

Dog breeds are among the oldest and most sophisticated forms of human bio-engineering. Dogs began following hunter-gatherer tribes contemporaneous with the discovery of fire. They’ve been selectively bred for centuries to perform an amazing variety of jobs from guarding livestock (my Great Pyrenees) to holding down couches (the basset hounds).

Cats arrived many thousands of years later with the development of agriculture, volunteering to do pest control in the granaries of ancient Egypt. As they were already awfully good at the one thing humans needed them for, cats have always been treated more like independent contractors—rodent control consultants, if you will.

Cats hunt, therefore they are. Unlike dogs, they’ve pretty much been in control of their own genome. Selective breeding came late, and mainly for cosmetic rather than behavioral reasons.

Even so, other scientists, such as Oxford University’s Greger Larson, think it’s foolish to call cats “semi-domesticated.”

“I’ve got two cats at home, and they’re as domesticated as any animal on earth,” he told Grimm. “There are homes where cats just sit on the couch, ignoring the dogs and primates that should be a major threat to them. That’s asking a lot of a wild carnivore.”

Which brings us back to my cats, Albert and Martin. The first time Albert met Maggie, our aggressive 110-lb. Anatolian-Great Pyrenees cross, she stuck her muzzle in his face and he jumped on her head. He was 12 weeks old. She adopted him as an honorary puppy, and that was that.

Albert’s other nickname is “The Orange Dog,” on account of his spending much of his time with our three-dog security team and other decidedly un-catlike behaviors. Such as following me out into the pasture to check on the cows and coming when he’s called—often on the run.

One time, I got really angry with the big dogs for picking on my wife’s elderly basset hound. I ran at them, intending to give somebody a swift kick. Albert ran with me, fluffed-up, back arched and bouncing sideways—ready to throw down. If there was going to be a fight, The Orange Dog had my back.

Domesticated? Many dogs wouldn’t do that.

Albert gave me a nasty bite the first time he discovered young Martin in my lap—a tiny abandoned kitten the dogs found in the woods. You’d never know it to watch Inspector Clouseau and Kato the Houseboy play-brawling now.

But here’s the thing: it was entirely their decision, an aspect of feline behavior the professors appear to have ignored. Fortunately, their demands are quite simple: in, out, feed me, pet me.

They are largely benign little tyrants, but make no mistake: Cats train people, not the other way around.

Photo courtesy of the author.