Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [24]
Oh, well. It’s a fairly simple operation, and routinely performed now by all veterinarians, even those who hate it.
Tidy people make another problem for themselves from the matter of cats getting up onto tables and kitchen counters. The easiest way to deal with this is to tell ourselves the cat washes itself as diligently as we wash the table, and then throw it off only when we need the space for our own purposes. Perhaps our mothers won’t agree, and it may not even be true, but it’s certainly convenient to believe, and we aren’t the first to hold a conviction from convenience.
My own cats sit on the dinner table, which I use—or try to use, among the cats—more for working than for dinner anyway, and when I bring out the plates and forks they get down, grumbling. Even cats who customarily sit on the table and watch while their person dines alone seem to realize that company alters the case. Or else company crowds the table unacceptably, or else they just don’t like the company. In France, the cats of many famous statesmen and literary luminaries have always been welcome on the table, some of them with places regularly set for them. Germs are not a French obsession.
The uncharitable tell us that cats get up on counters because they want to steal food, but a properly treated cat who is fond of its people isn’t anxious to steal their food. A purely functional cat, barely on speaking terms with its people and scrambling for enough to eat, might feel all food is fair game, but a personal cat will usually leave your chicken for you and wait by its dish. A cat knows the uses of food: when I tried to introduce a kitten into Blueberry’s household she tried to starve him right back out again. A naturally dainty and desultory eater, she took to wolfing her dinner and then shoving the kitten aside and eating his too. She was going to get rid of that kitten if it choked her; as one’s parents used to say, “If you don’t feed it, dear, it won’t hang around.” What happy cat wants to starve out its people?
As the feline narrator of Paul Gallico’s The Silent Meow says, “Stealing is for dogs. We are above it.”
Exception must be made for cats that have conceived an unreasonable passion for food not on the ordinary menu. Jenny stole hot biscuits; Mai Tai snatched mushrooms from the refrigerator; Shibui will grab an ear of corn even from the diner’s hand. The new black cat is frantic for pistachio nuts and French bread. Colette’s mother’s Long-Cat raided the garden for strawberries, asparagus, and melons, which last he slashed open with his claws. The literature also mentions freshly ground coffee, olives, broccoli, grape jelly, and cinnamon Danish. Probably these exotic items aren’t considered nourishment in the ordinary sense, and a cat that will steal our olives wouldn’t steal our steak, or our mouse.
Why, then, if not to steal food, would a cat go up on the counter? Why did George Mallory try to go up on Mount Everest, which was quite a lot more trouble? Because it is there. Because of the view from the kitchen window. To lick the drips from the tap in the sink. To try to pry open the cupboards and see what’s inside them, maybe to squeeze in among the glassware. Or, on a rainy day, to look for small objects to knock off onto the floor and see if they roll. And because it is in the nature of the cat to get up on things. Cats enjoy height. It makes them feel safer from nonclimbing things, and superior, and they can see farther. If our eyes were only six inches from ground level, we’d want to get up on something, too.
If we have a decent sort of cat to begin with, and have always treated it courteously, and aren’t cursed with meddling, bullying natures, it’s a pleasure to let it do as it pleases. With