Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [66]
Sometimes the object of their love proves unworthy. I met a woman at a party, and we fell to talking of those cats. She had one; it had been her constant companion for six years, until she got another cat. When the new cat came, the black cat went down to the boiler room in the cellar and stayed there. The woman hopes she will die soon, as it’s a nuisance going down there in the musty dark to feed it and change the litter. It’s been eight years.
To the Siamese cat person the Persian is bland; to the Persian person the Siamese is noisy, demanding, and neurotic. Persians are noninvasive, and never shout. While the Siamese is bellowing for your attention, springing onto your shoulder and biting your cheek to get noticed, the Persian simply pats at your arm, over and over and over, and looks pained. They’re gentle, though not nearly as gentle as they look: round eyes and long fur impress people immediately as the essence of gentleness, though the genetic connection would be hard to work out. People who dislike cats or are slightly afraid of them like Persians. Strong, great, lumbering men come to my house carrying refrigerators and such on their backs, and pause nervously on seeing the other cats. Then, on seeing Barney, snow-white and blue-eyed, they melt at once; now, there’s a cat they could like. A gentle cat. From the emphasis, you’d think the average shorthair was a leopard balanced on the branch overhead.
Actually, even without claws Barney has strong jaws and sharp teeth and can use them to good effect when needed. When he was first mine, and we lived together in a ground-floor apartment, he attacked a police dog he thought was trespassing. The back door was accidentally ajar; the dog, attached to a policeman, was patrolling the alley, and Barney shot out and sprang on him without hesitation. I rushed after him; dog and policeman were both in shock. I apologized, I tried to detach Barney, and he turned and bit deeply into my hand. He was sorry about it, of course, but I was interfering in his guard duties.
Other cats aren’t fooled by those cream puff looks. A friend of mine in difficulties parked her cat, an enormous black tom named Butcher, on me while she straightened out her life. Barney knew at once that this wasn’t an addition to the family, only a passing guest. He never growled or hissed at Butcher, he never raised a paw, he simply sat on the bottom step of the staircase that led to the room where he and I slept and he looked at Butcher with his round pale eyes, and Butcher understood. The message was that Butcher could stay, as long as he stayed under the couch in the living room. All the way under the couch, out of sight. Since the litter pan was upstairs, and Butcher was under no circumstances to use the stairs, when he needed toilet facilities he could creep out at night while Barney was asleep and use the flowerpots in the kitchen. He could eat, but only if his bowl was shoved under the couch for him. All these instructions passed soundlessly through the air, and Butcher, his whiskers full of dust-mice, obeyed.
Persians are fond of their homes and defend them, don’t pine for adventure, and make good apartment cats.
The usual confusion obscures their roots. For a long time, “Angora” was considered a rather ignorant synonym for Persian, but current thinking holds them to be two separate cats, and the Turkish Angora one of the oldest recognized natural breeds, the name being a corruption of “Ankhara,” and once the privileged pets of the harems of Constantinople. The Persian is variously claimed to be a mix of Angora and a longhair from Afghanistan, or the descendant of the central Asian Pallas’s cat, or manul. One source mentions them in India. Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and even the near edge of India spread out in a long contiguous reach, and nationality can’t have made much difference to native longhaired cats prowling through the centuries looking for mice and sex. Perhaps what we’ve come to consider local varieties would depend on what was