Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [32]
They don’t expect us to eat what they bring, apparently, any more than the gods of primitive religions are expected to actually eat the sacrificed sheep or bullock or virgin. Cats show no other sign of regarding us as gods, and religion, even primitive religion, is held to be one of the immovable barriers separating humanity from the lowly beast, but what are these offerings? I have heard of a cat, rescued in wintertime as a stray, who was deeply concerned with keeping warm. His house had a basement furnace that sent heat up through a floor grating, on which he luxuriated. When the furnace went off he anxiously rounded up all his toys and carried them to the grating and laid them out. A sacrifice? A trade? A bribe?
Sometimes there’s a sexual element in the relationship, and cats attached to a human of the opposite sex will be sharply jealous of a spouse or lover. With Barney, in the beginning, the relationship was obviously sexual, but then, life as a cattery stud doesn’t teach a cat much about other ways of feeling. From time to time he would scramble onto my back and try to hold me by the neck with his jaws, as he used to do with his Persian clients. He had strong feelings about me, and this was the only thing he knew to do about feelings. Later, after he’d had a chance to watch other cats with people, he learned the sadly limited repertoire at his disposal: the flexed paw, the purr, the stomach exposed for rubbing, the half-closed eyes. Dogs can show their devotion by a glad submission, but cats and people can only signal a little to each other across the gulf, like lovers in adjacent prisons.
Cats enjoy our company, compete for our attention, and often seem to love us deeply, and we don’t know why; we don’t even understand their simplest expression.
Take the matter of purring, a mystery so impenetrable that entire books are written about cats without mentioning it. We assume that purring means affection, but a number of authorities say no, and cite the fact that cats will purr when frightened. I don’t think this reaction is all that common; in a long life among cats I’ve heard it only once, from a vet’s examining table; I thought the cat had gone mad. Perhaps it was a plea for clemency. Perhaps it was a kind of hysteria; laughter in humans is supposed to mean pleasure, but a frightened human may laugh from pure nervousness.
How can we doubt, with the Britannica, that purring means what we think it means? Recently at the zoo I watched a pair of tigers in amorous dalliance; between matings the male threw himself down on his side with a thud and gazed at the female and purred until the sidewalk shook under my feet. An affectionate cat purrs when patted or spoken to by its human or nestled into a lap, and a cross cat will refuse to purr. Paul Gallico in The Silent Meow calls this The Withheld Purr, a useful form of communication. You speak kindly to the cat and rub gently under its jaw with your finger, and the cat should purr; you expect it to purr; you can almost hear it purr; but it doesn’t. The silence bursts on you with its information: you have displeased this cat somehow.
From a scientific viewpoint the problem of the purr is that by the time the investigator gets inside to search out the mechanism, the cat has stopped purring. The great naturalist Gilbert White said parts of its windpipe are “formed for sound.” The Encyclopedia Americana offers two theories—vibrations of the false vocal chords that lie above the true ones, or of the hyoid apparatus, which are small bones between the skull and larynx. The World Book Encyclopedia leans toward a theory of blood vessels with vibrating walls inside the chest, while Elizabeth Keifer in Wholly Cats says