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instructions for training your cat to walk down the street like a person are fairy tales; walking from point A merely to get to point B is not a catly concept. We can, however, harness and leash the cat and carry it to a quiet spot or vacant lot or park and let it poke around and smell the interesting smells. We follow it where it wants to go, unwinding the leash from obstacles. A cat outside on the common ground of a city is on very strange territory, territory not its own, land already claimed by total strangers, mostly dogs; it would be an insensitive cat indeed who could simply march through this alien wilderness like a man on his way to the bus stop.

When we get bored with standing around, we pick it up and carry it home again. “Walk” is the wrong word.

Extra cats: They go to the shelters to be gassed. Not out onto the streets to starve or be killed in traffic. Not out to the country to be pushed from the car in some wooded spot where, we tell ourselves, there must be plenty of mice. Not to be pressed on friends who genuinely don’t want them. To the shelters. The shelters won’t be surprised to see us; they kill millions every year.

Yowling: According to the surviving cartoons, it used to be the custom to throw shoes. I suppose shoes were the handiest heavy object in a dark bedroom, and perhaps they used to be cheaper than they are now. It’s unlikely that a sleepy human pitching his footwear at a sound somewhere out in the darkness ever actually hit a cat, or stopped the yowling if he did.

We can stop our own from yowling by having them altered, but little can be done about those alone in the world.

Zero population growth: A goal to strive for. See Extra Cats, above.

When Chateaubriand was French ambassador in Rome, Pope Leo XII, near death, presented him with his own dear cat Micetto. Later Chateaubriand wrote to Mme Récamier, “I have as companion a big greyish-red cat with black stripes across it. It was born in the Vatican, in the Raphael loggia. Leo XII brought it up in a fold of his robes where I had often looked at it enviously when the Pope gave me an audience … I am trying to make it forget exile, the Sistine Chapel, the sun on Michelangelo’s cupola, where it used to walk, far above the earth."

Also by Barbara Holland

The Joy of Drinking

When All the World Was Young

Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling

Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals,

and Malarkey from George W. to George W.

Bingo Night at the Fire Hall

Brief Heroes and Histories

Wasn’t the Grass Greener?

They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors,

Runaways, and Renegades

Endangered Pleasures

Mother’s Day, or The View from in Here

About the Author

BARBARA HOLLAND’S books include Secrets of the Cat, Endangered Pleasures, Hail to the Chiefs, When All the World Was Young, and The Joy of Drinking. Her articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Ms., Seventeen, and Ladies Home Journal, among others. She lives in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains with, at the moment, only two cats.

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Copyright

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1988 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. under the title The Name of the Cat, and a trade paperback edition in 1989 and mass market edition in 1994 by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

SECRETS OF THE CAT. Copyright © 1988 by Barbara Holland.

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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-02501-2