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By Root 534 0

presumably by imitation, which is much the easiest way to teach things to a cat. To explain the matter to the cat, first you put the litter box beside the toilet for a week so the cat gets used to the area. Then you start slipping things under the box to raise it an inch or so at a time, until it’s on a level with the toilet seat. Now you replace it with a box designed to clip underneath the toilet seat; nobody says where to find such a thing, and I suppose you have to create it yourself. Obviously, you have to leave it in place there, since cats take care of these matters on erratic schedules of their own. The books don’t say what the humans are using in the meantime or how to explain it to visitors. Anyway, once the cat is using this device regularly you replace the box with one-inch wire mesh, to keep the cat from falling in. No cat likes to crouch on one-inch wire mesh, so it crouches, they say, on the toilet seat instead. Remove mesh. Mission accomplished.

I think it’s on the last step that I’d lose my own cats; they would simply find it uncongenial and use the floor or the bathtub instead. Also they’re in the habit of drinking from the toilet, and the dual-purpose aspect would be abhorrent to any right-thinking animal. But who knows? It might appeal to some, and certainly it’s a swell conversation piece, and most cats would enjoy the cries of surprise and admiration from passersby.

The really basic books on educating cats begin with teaching him to use the litter box itself (hold his paw and make scratching motions in the litter; lock him in the room with the box), but I’ve never had to do that, merely show him where the thing is located, as one would with any guest. His mother taught him.

Most of the books say that a cat should know its name and come when called, and that would indeed be convenient. Kittens, unless they’re very busy, come when their mother calls, especially if they’re hungry, but then a hungry cat comes even when it isn’t called. If you have nothing to offer that interests it, it doesn’t, but this doesn’t mean it doesn’t know who it is.

I walk into a room where three cats are sleeping and speak the name of one, and it opens its eyes. It doesn’t jump to attention, exactly, but it opens its eyes, cross at being waked for nothing.

We “train” it to know its name by using its name when we speak to it, especially while opening a can of cat food. Committed dog people will insist that unless it comes running when we say, “Charles, come here,” then it can’t actually know its name, but that is the way committed dog people think, or “think,” confusing obedience with understanding.

Sometimes a name for a cat will spring to mind at once and stick with the cat forever; sometimes you can’t decide, or the family disagrees and everyone calls it by a different name; sometimes you pick a name that sounds good at the moment but somehow slips off the cat later and falls into disuse, leaving it to go through life as The Siamese or The Black Cat. Children are easier, as we have to keep filling out tax forms and applications and documents with their names, and even if we’re dissatisfied it’s too late from day one.

From the cat’s point of view, strong vowels are useful. It’s a mistake to have Morgan and Corvo in the same house here; while they can distinguish between them, they both look up at the “or” sound. I’m trying to call the black kitten Spider, which won’t fit her if she fills out later, but we need the long “i” sound in a house full of soft-vowel cats. This is no reflection on the cats’ powers of discrimination. English is not their native tongue; even those of us who have studied a bit of French and can read it printed down may have trouble sorting out the Parisian taxi driver’s opinions from his flow of sounds.

They know their names. They do not come when called. Cats are not just not obedient, they are actively disobedient. Gillette Grilhé, in The Cat and Man, says, “His pride forbids him to obey, or—if he does—he will do so only when a sufficient amount of time has passed after the order to make the full