Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [38]
For years Barney never had to prove a thing. His cockiness was so immense that no cat questioned it. Before he was neutered and set down among common cats he lived like a sultan in his cattery; not for him the wearisome searches and the pleading serenade from the fence, the backyard skirmish and the torn ear. He never knew the meaning of failure or even competition, and year after year beautiful eager females were put into his cage without his even needing to ask. No other cat challenged his right to them. Success followed success. A life like that gets into the blood, literally. In groups of apes with a dominant male who gets all the best females, the subordinate male grows more and more subordinate, his confidence withers, and the testosterone in his blood sinks lower and lower. But take away the leader and he perks right up, his testosterone leaps, he beats his chest, chooses the prettiest mates, snatches everyone else’s bananas, and becomes dominant himself. Barney, always the one and only, must have been pure testosterone by the time he retired.
He was castrated and disarmed into impotence, and it made no difference at all. In The Fur Person, castration reduces May Sarton’s cat to humility overnight, but Barney’s supercharged blood took years to cool down. Past the same line where Mehitabel’s burning gaze kept Morgan at bay, Barney sauntered unconcerned. He kept right on going, through the garden bristling with astonished cats on their own property, and up to the front door, where he stared at the nearest human to open it. He rarely uses his voice; he has rarely needed to. He walked into the house and through the kitchen, and the resident cats parted for him like the Red Sea. He never even glanced at them. God knows what they thought; perhaps they felt like the unfortunate Aztecs at the time of the Spanish invasion: they had always had a legend that invincible white gods were going to show up one of these days, and by golly, here they were.
It was an appalling piece of effrontery, walking in like that without asking, but he clearly didn’t feel the need to ask: does the sultan ask? His assumption of invulnerability stunned the others into belief, and he came and went when it pleased him, looking neither to left nor right.
Very slowly the elixir drained from his blood. It seemed to be a natural chemical process; there was no evidence that any other cat ever challenged his godlike status. Vulnerability crept up on him little by little. Within two years he stopped going there unless I went with him, and then he stopped going even with me. He began to defer occasionally to others, and sometimes even foolish Sidney pushed him away from his dinner. The world was no longer his; he stayed closer to home. When the kitten Morgan bothered him, instead of grandly ignoring her or staring her down, he stooped to hissing and sometimes backed away or changed his path.
Deposed by his own chemistry, the sultan had become just another one of the eunuchs. Still, he had had a grand time while it lasted.
He has made no friends, though. Friendship in a cattery is complicated by sex and the currents of protectiveness and territoriality among so many unaltered cats and kittens, and studs live in cages. For Barney, learning human friendship came quickly and easily, but cat friendship never came; no cat snuggles up to him, and he washes no cat’s ears. He avoids interaction, and if he finds a cat in his favorite place, instead of asking permission to join it, or cuffing its head, or squeezing in on top of it, he simply walks away.
While challenge and strife may spring up among equals, in groups the hopelessly incompetent like Snipe are hors de combat, and the young or unfortunate are often tenderly protected. Derek Tangye describes a moving father-and-son relationship, with the father licking and cuddling his kitten and taking it for instructive walks. In My Five Tigers Lloyd Alexander documents the painstaking education of a new kitten by his two older,