Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [25]
A cat is our relief and reward.
4
Cats with People
It’s part of the great body of cat lore that cats like their homes more than they like their people. If we move and take our cat along with us, tradition holds that its paws must be buttered to keep it from going back to the old place; the cat licks the butter off and decides to stay, perhaps because nobody ever buttered its paws in the old place.
The purely utilitarian cat, kept for reasons other than personal, might well feel more attached to place than to family, and find familiar faces and voices a poor substitute for familiar hunting grounds, but mostly a personal cat makes do with wherever its person takes it.
I move a lot, and no cat of mine ever suggested going back. They inspect the new quarters warily, checking baseboards and marking the edges of doors with their cheeks, and then curl up in their accustomed places on the accustomed furniture. Still, Sidney, in the move before last, was disappointed in the outside of the new house. It was in no way equal to the old outside; it had streets and cars instead of woods and fields, and he asked to have the door opened twenty times a day for weeks, and looked out, and then up at me, hoping that presently I would surround the new in with the old out. The others clearly understood that new houses mean new yards, but Sidney kept waiting and asking. With such a confused notion of place, it’s doubtful he could ever find his way back home or much of anywhere.
Some cats do find their way. They do this by means that are totally mysterious and clearly superhuman, and consequently pretty annoying. Salmon and hummingbirds find their way too, but they’re retracing, in the company of other salmon and hummingbirds, a journey they’ve made before under their own powers. A cat that was taken away by car or plane, locked up in a carrying case, can make its own way back again if it wants to badly enough, sometimes dying of exhaustion shortly after arrival. We don’t know how it’s done. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has some curious notions about cats, thinks it’s done by purring; a cat’s purr, which has “no specific emotional connotations, … seems merely to be a homing device.” They don’t explain how it works, though, nor why a cat half asleep in its own living room would need a homing device. The Britannica may have cats confused with bats, who use a kind of sonar to find their way around.
Another theory holds that it’s done by the position of the sun in relation to the exact time, which sounds more reasonable, especially if the differential is east-west and not north-south, and the cat is wearing a really accurate watch.
An investigator anesthetized a quantity of cats and put them in a car and drove them, completely unconscious, far away and dumped them; when they woke up they all went back home. Another investigator, however, proved they don’t do any such thing. Under the auspices of Yale University, Donald Keith Adams conducted a series of experiments on eighteen cats that were kept, when not being investigated, in a bare stable and fed on a paste made principally of flour and water and alfalfa meal. He took one of them, in a box, two and a half miles from the laboratory and turned it loose to see if it could find its way back. The cat inspected the immediate area for a few minutes, and then moved quickly and purposefully off in a direction at right angles to the correct one and was never seen again. Some homes are hardly worth finding.
Every cat person knows a tale of a returning cat. Friends of mine were in a car accident while driving back from the New Jersey shore with their cat, and in the ensuing confusion the cat escaped into the woods; the people were treated for minor