Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [30]
Cats give up quickly. It is not in the nature of the cat to struggle for accomplishment against heavy odds. A cat that has tried a difficult jump and fallen, or failed to make sense of television, or to play the piano properly, will not persevere. It will turn its attention elsewhere. Cats dislike failure, especially in public, and prefer doing the things they’re good at and dealing with things they understand; the incomprehensible they simply turn their backs on, and wash. Perhaps the human race would be in more peaceful circumstances today if we weren’t so proud of our passion for solving riddles and conquering obstacles.
There are usually enough things to do that a cat is good at to keep it busy, and many more things for two cats. If we keep our cat closed in, in house or apartment, and especially if we’re often away, it’s only humane to have two or more to ward off boredom and loneliness and too much communing with the spirits of the wall. Two cats take up very little more room than one, and the games of two cats are more fun for humans as well as for cats.
To the restless, ambitious human mind the normal occupations of a house cat seem idle and frivolous. Except for persuading people to open doors and cans, they are not what career counselors call goal-oriented. They include lying in the sun, eating house plants, many of which are poisonous, squeezing into boxes too small for them so that folds of cat hang over the edges, looking out the window, rummaging in bureau drawers, and watching their humans.
How do we appear to our cats, that so many seem so interested in and even so deeply attached to their people? In Cat Behavior, Paul Leyhausen says that the cat’s dependent life with people is a kind of extended kittenhood, so that it transfers its affection from its mother to us, and we stand to it in her place while it accepts our care, though from time to time it’s seized by a fit of adulthood and asserts its independence. Living, in short, like a permanently thirteen-year-old human, an appalling thought. I’ve been pushing this theory around for a while, but I’m still not sure about it. It doesn’t quite ring true; it’s too easy. All right, once in a while a cat will behave like an adolescent person, but only under stress.
When I had pneumonia, Boy, the black supercat, the major cat of my life, spent his days and nights by my side, watching me. Then I went away, to the hospital, for ten days. There can be no connection in a cat’s mind, unless just possibly death, between a person’s illness and subsequent disappearance. For ten days he lived an apparently normal life in his own home among familiar things and people; he was fed regularly and ate his food. When I came home he refused to greet me or even meet my eyes. I reached down with an apologetic pat, and pulled back my hand: his fur was disgusting. He was filthy. He was so dirty he was almost sticky to the touch. Always a vain cat, he burnished his slick black coat till it flashed blue glints in the sunlight, but since my disappearance he obviously hadn’t given even the most cursory lick. Now he walked a few feet away and sat down with his back to me. He was very angry, but I had finally come home, and he began to wash. He spent the remainder of the day washing; it was a long, disagreeable job—he was a perfect Augean stable of a cat; he even smelled bad, my flower-scented Boy—but when he was finished he glittered as before. He still didn’t speak to me, though. It was days before he forgave me and things were the same between us.
That was adolescent of him, a thoroughly adolescent revenge, not washing because I’d abandoned him. But who among us, caught in a painful and incomprehensible position with no way to fight back,