Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [16]
Capriciously, we keep them at home as guardian spirits or abandon them as independent. People otherwise decent and kindly throw away countless thousands of cats and kittens to die slowly of hideous hardships; cats, after all, can take care of themselves, cats are not domestic animals at all.
The cat is neither cowboy nor spirit, but flesh and blood, a small predator adrift in a world of garbage cans and highways, domestic now for thousands of years. Unknowable, maybe, but ours. Under modern conditions it survives on its own only briefly, with pain and difficulty. The fact that it treats us as equals rather than gods doesn’t mean it can find its way in our world without help.
We owe them help. In spite of all they’ve suffered at our hands they seem to like us, of their own free will, a compliment our rapacious bullying species can’t afford to ignore. What other animal sits with us because it chose to?
Wild dogs live in groups and give their leader, until the time comes to challenge his leadership, an unquestioning military loyalty; domestic dogs offer the same religious devotion to the human they consider their leader. According to Lorenz, dogs of primarily coyote extraction spread this feeling out over most of the humans that cross their paths, while dogs with more wolf in them concentrate on one. Either way, it’s natural for humans to applaud this taste in idols.
I’ve been lucky in being loved by some cats, but I’ve never had one who seemed to think that, aside from my presumed ability to improve the weather if only I would, I was any bigger, stronger, or smarter than I am. Cat people find it soothing to be loved in spite of their faults; dog people find it even more soothing to be considered faultless.
Because of their instinctive reaction to leadership, dogs are forced to like us, whoever we may be; they have no choice. The cat can choose and, having been chosen, we have a right to be pleased.
Many of us aren’t. Something in the cat’s attitude, or in its eyes, disturbs us, and we invent all sorts of plausible-sounding excuses to explain our uneasiness.
One prime reason cat-haters give for hating cats is that they kill birds. Even people who can’t tell a nuthatch from a raven complain about it. To listen to them, a cat barely needs to stroll outdoors for birds to keel over in midair for miles around. Catching a bird isn’t easy, as anyone knows who has ever chased a loose canary around the living room, and if the canary has the whole outside world to fly around in it’s simply impossible. Let the bird-lover just try it himself and see. Cats may cull the elderly and the genetically incapable, the way wolves weed out the caribou, but this makes life easier for the healthy remainder, since shrinking habitat is much the fiercest pressure on bird populations.
Wildlife managers estimate that birds kill more birds than cats do. I believe it, having watched a blue jay murder a nest full of baby wrens outside my window. The wrens had successfully routed the cats from their whole end of the yard, but they were helpless against the jay. They darted back and forth shrieking; I ran out
yelling and waving my arms. The jay, for no reason but wantonness, pounded the babies to bloody shreds and flew away cawing. I never saw the parent wrens again, and the cats were once more free to walk across that part of the lawn.
Birds know more about cats than bird-lovers do. The sedentary robin, checking the grass for worms, flies only eight or ten feet when he sees the cat approaching and then goes on with his search, removing himself from time to time until the cat gets bored and leaves.
I hung the bird feeder over the back steps, just over the cats’ heads. The old cats enjoyed watching and made no move, but young Morgan wanted one badly. She could hardly stand it, the fluttering toys, just barely out of reach; it was maddening.