Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [20]
It is the nature of a cat to do as it pleases. In the days before we met each other, the cat made up its own mind and took orders from no one, and obedience was never built into it. Many of the books on cat-keeping find this alarming, and warn us that a cat that gets its own way will grow up spoiled and disagreeable.
Certainly some cats, like some people, are disagreeable, but not because they’re spoiled. I know a woman with a cat that bites her savagely if she infringes on its space or sleeps on the wrong side of the bed or breaks its rules, which it keeps changing. This is just not a nice cat. It may not have all its marbles. Any attempt at discipline might turn it totally savage, and I would give it away to my worst enemy and get a better cat. There are too many deserving kittens in need of homes to waste food and shelter on a monster. On the other hand, she’s had this cat for many years and it’s been biting her all along, so maybe they’ve worked out some sort of neurotic symbiosis; maybe we get the cats we want.
There are various books on the subject of “training” cats, and if you read too many you get the unsettling feeling that the authors have never laid eyes on a cat and are making the whole thing up, or else don’t recognize a cat when they see one and are actually working with a kind of horizontal monkey or meowing dog. One book describes teaching a cat to roll over on command by harnessing it with a leash to a hook on the wall and pulling until the cat is dragged over onto its side, repeating the words “roll over” all the while. After an unspecified interval, the book claims, the cat will roll over when told to do so, instead of laying back its ears and leaving the room, and the house if possible, with all deliberate speed. This is clearly not a real cat of which he speaks. It may look like a cat to him, but closer inspection will reveal the slot where you push in two C batteries.
By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog. Once, though, there was an Englishman named Leoni Clarke who made quite a good thing from a troupe of fifty performing cats. They walked across the stage on tightropes, stepping carefully over arrangements of mice, rats, and canaries, and they jumped through flaming hoops and parachuted down from the ceiling. Clarke billed himself as “The King of the Cats,” and he must certainly have had some peculiar rapport with them. Perhaps he’d cracked the language barrier. It doesn’t happen often.
There’s a kind of elegance and poetry to the trained horse or dog, the Lippizaner and the working sheepdog, and the relationship between horse and rider, dog and shepherd, is enhanced until it glows, and illuminates the animals’ lives by realizing their natural talents in a higher form. This simply isn’t true for cats. We do not train a cat in anything that is useful to us or natural to the cat; you don’t teach a cat to catch mice any more than you teach a hen to lay eggs. Teaching the useless and unnatural isn’t training, it’s pure trickery, and despicable in a way. Mr. Leoni’s cats weren’t herding sheep or carrying riders, they were entertaining paying customers with purposeless and undignified antics, and this is an unpleasant way to use an animal.
If we are to be friends with a cat, we must treat it with an egalitarian courtesy inappropriate for the dog and the horse, and make room in our lives for what is natural to the cat.
Philosophical exception could be made for showing the cat how to use the toilet instead of the litter box, since it’s useful to us and no more unnatural than using a litter box instead of a flower bed. Instructions are available, and several cats, all of them Siamese, turn up in the literature as having figured it out for themselves,