Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [18]
The Siamese Morgan, on the other hand, only plays with mice. She’s fond of things that move when she pats them, and keeps a supply of pecans under my desk for the purpose. Vacuuming, I gathered them up and put them in a bowl on the desk, and then forgot to put them back. Morgan found them, and had to scoop them all out one by one and knock them to the floor and roll them, muttering crossly to herself, back where they belong. She’s a cat with a strong sense of order and the rightness of things, and would have made an excellent secretary.
She seems to think of mice as an outdoor pecan supply. She’ll chivvy one out into an open space like the gravel driveway and pat it till it runs a few feet and then freezes. She follows it and with velvet paw pats it to make it move again. After a few minutes she begins to lose interest, her mind wanders and she looks away, and the mouse runs like hell. She looks back at the spot where it was, but it is gone, so she yawns and goes off to see if I’ve left the car windows open so she can take a nap.
Granted the mouse’s nerves are probably shattered, but we can’t worry about everything.
Still, the charge of deliberate cruelty is a heavy one, if we can believe the cat understands the mouse’s sufferings, and we’ve all been comforted by cats who understand ours. But we are people, the cats’ people, and a mouse in the cats’ eyes is only a mouse. In Hen’s Teeth and Horses’ Toes Stephen Jay Gould quotes from St. George Mivart’s Genesis of Species; Mivart holds that animals feel little if any pain, because physical suffering “depends greatly upon the mental condition of the sufferer. Only during consciousness does it exist, and only in the most highly organized men does it reach its acme. The author has been assured that the lower races of men appear less keenly sensitive to physical suffering than do more cultivated and refined human beings.”
The British scientist feels himself as far superior, in his delicately nurtured nervous system, to the uneducated races as the cat does to the mouse. If primitive humans feel no pain, how much credit shall a cat give a mere mouse for sensitivity? The only charge we can pin on the cat is that it has advanced in empathy no further than a nineteenth-century scientist.
The defense rests.
And in any case it’s pointless to argue; cat-hating is visceral.
We have a cat around the house in a different sense from having, or owning, a dog. Even the law recognizes this, and considers the dog as property, and subject to property laws of damage and recovery, but no rights attach to cat ownership. Domestic, yes; property, no.
The cat doesn’t bolster our self-esteem, and we can’t pretend it works for us; it is around, in the nonspecific way all animals used to be around. We’ve grown so wildly successful as a race that we’ve managed to set a wide space between ourselves and the rest of the creatures. Pouring cream into our breakfast coffee, we are far, far from the cow, and except for occasional parasites like the pigeon most of the creatures most of us see in our normal rounds are human. A dog, since it’s come to live with us, is hardly an animal at all, but a cat flits across the back of the couch and, in defiance of orders, leaps to the top of the bookcase and flips her tail at us, an animal nearby but not totally under our control. Hardly under our control at all except as she pleases, the way once the plains and forests all around us were full of animals nearby and uncontrolled. Many people dislike being reminded of the past and our humble, sometimes precarious, place in it, but it may be good for us.
Cat-keeping nowadays is almost always pure self-indulgence; very few cats