Cat Tales

“Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words.”

• John Gray, “Feline Philosophy - Cats and the Meaning of Life”

Of my nearly 1 million subscribers (free subscribers, you bastards), the small number who personally know me knew that this was coming. A post about cats and particularly my cats. But there's a bit of a history here and I think I'll tell you about it. It was a long and arduous journey to cat enlightenment. And it started in my sophomore year of college when my roommates and I got a kitten named Lola, after the Kinks song of the same name. Lola was so socially adapted to the multitude of people coming in and out of our student suite that she was likened to a dog in personality.

Shortly after Lola joined us, I started getting migraine type headaches and ended up at student health where the student health physician took a careful history and declared me allergic to cats, given the temporal association of my headaches and getting a kitten. There was no testing and his conclusion was absolutely ridiculous since I had no other allergic symptoms, but I didn't know any better at the time so Lola ended up at a new home. Which turned out pretty good for her because she ended up with Liz and Graham Allison, two of my favorite professors, and lived a long and happy life with them. We probably would have lost her since it was against the rules for us to have a pet anyway.

But the experience unfortunately made me a cat person who couldn't have a cat. I've spent a considerable part of my life making fun of ‘cat people’ (partly due to cat envy, at least subliminally), but ultimately I became one for real.

Interestingly, I was always aware that some of my favorite writers and artists were cat people. I just didn't get it. Some people do and some people don't. There are dog people, cat people, dog and cat people, and no pet people. Pretty much sums up all people. Excepting bird people I guess. And yes, I really like birds despite the whole cat versus bird thing that is constantly in the media and always absurdly misrepresented. I happen to love dogs, having grown up with a boxer, but unfortunately I really am extremely allergic to dogs, which saddens me greatly. I would have loved to have had two big ones.

One of my favorite writers is Mark Twain. The ultimate cat person. A well-known cat lover who had many cats throughout his life and was so attached to them that when he traveled the US and the world, he would actually ‘rent’ cats to have in his hotel rooms because he needed to be around them. He often incorporated them into his writing. My kind of guy.

Hemingway also was a cat lover with a lifelong relationship with them, having over 50 cats in his home in Cuba and his famous cat Snow White, a polydactyl cat with six digits of which there are numerous descendants roaming the grounds of the museum bearing his name in Key West, most with extra toes.

Other cat loving writers include: T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Alice Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith, William Burroughs, Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Chandler, Charlotte Bronte, and many others. There's clearly something going on here and while I may not write as well as any of these people, I feel a certain kinship with them when it comes to cats. As my good friend Tom Shaffer once said, “Cats are magical.”

My all-time favorite book about cats is entitled “Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life” by John Gray. That would be John Gray, the Emeritus Professor of European Thought from the University of London, NOT the John Gray who wrote the absurd pop psychology book, “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus”. It's actually a fascinating short philosophy book, and can be enjoyed by both cat lovers and cat haters. It's really not a book about cats specifically. But it does employ the unique personality attributes of cats to make a variety of observations about how humans live their lives in less than optimal fashion and how they could improve their lives if they lived them more like cats. A very entertaining and wry perspective. I highly recommend it.

So anyway, I spent most of my life believing that I was allergic to cats until about 7 years ago. That was when one of the scariest looking feral cats I've ever seen decided to move into our shed in the back of our house. And she brought along one of her offspring who wasn't that small. The mother was absolutely huge and was not a friendly and cuddly persona. We kept our distance. She would go cruising the neighborhood and leave her 3 or 4-month-old kitten in the shed and come back with her hunting rewards from the day or night to share. And then she started taking her along, presumably to train her to hunt. We were pleased to see that she hunted almost exclusively for rodents and brought back dead destructive pack rats, mice, rock squirrels and other wood rats. She wasn't a bird hunter.

While her mother was gone for periods of time, we became a little bit friendly with the rather large kitten who we ended up naming Lola again. Lola #2 was pretty intimidating as well and not a cat you really wanted to try to pick up but she would at least let you pet her and gradually we started feeding her and she would even eat out of our hands. One day her mom left and never came back and now we had a feral shed cat. Who had learned to hunt and take care of herself and had no interest whatsoever in becoming even a partial house cat.

Lola was a bit of a slut, and was constantly entertaining local tomcats, behaving promiscuously and sharing her food and drinks with these local rogues. I thought she was putting on weight, but my wife, who is more experienced in these things (cats, not being a slut), simply said, “she's pregnant.” And then one day all of a sudden, Lola became the most affectionate and adorable cat you could imagine in the backyard. She wouldn't leave my side and kept rubbing up against me and meowing in complete friendliness and bliss. A few hours later in the shed she delivered three kittens, two of whom survived. So now we had three cats. And I of course began to notice that no matter how much I was around her or in the shed or touching any of them, I didn't seem to have any allergic problems whatsoever.

Very slowly, under the precarious watchful eye of Lola, we began to interact with the kittens and she seemed okay with it. They partook of the food and drink that we put out and Lola even let me pick them up and play with them after a few weeks, but of course never letting them out of her sight.

Then one really horrific day, I inadvertently backed up on the patio and stepped on the tail of one of the kittens (Lester and Luther), who of course screamed in pain. One of my major mistakes. Lola attacked me like a leopard and I was literally throwing lawn furniture at her trying to get her off me. She tore the shit out of my leg since I was wearing shorts and I was overwhelmed at her speed and aggressiveness. This seemed like a real jungle cat and she was.

While I was dressing my wounds, it became fairly apparent that we would not be able to have Lola around the backyard if she went berserk like this, particularly for the safety of our son who could have easily been the one to step on the tail. But we had grown very fond of Lola and had to come up with a humane solution.

So we contacted the No-Kill Animal Control and explained the situation, and after describing her and her hunting abilities, they told us that she might be eligible for the Barn Program. This is sort of the equivalent of the Ivy League schools of pet rescues. It turns out that not everybody wants a lap cat or a shed cat, but rather a hunting cat to keep their barns and outbuildings free from rodents.

So they came out and got her and after checking her out, declared her an outstanding candidate for the Barn Program. We had prepped her for her SATs and behavioral evaluation testing so that she would score high, which is not an easy thing to do for a cat that doesn't pay attention and is sort of scary to be around. But apparently she made the grade and ultimately moved to a lovely ranch in the Altar Valley, not far from Tucson.

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Her kittens, Lester and Luther, became sort of indoor/outdoor cats. They would come into our house to eat and drink and hang out for a few hours and watch a little TV, but frankly most of the time they wanted to be cruising the neighborhood, hunting and being freewheeling cats as they had been raised by their mother. We really didn't want that because that generally results in a short lifespan, which it did. But there's really no way you can change the mind of a cat, as everybody knows. They became fixtures in the neighborhood for a couple of years and had eating stops along the way from many neighbors.

Luther was an all black cat, somewhat autistic, who would only sit in my lap at midnight, outdoors on a lawn chair. And he would wait for me every night at midnight to come out no matter what the temperature or weather conditions. A very strange dude. But he trained me well and I went out every midnight to sit with him for about a half hour. Sadly, Luther got poisoned either by eating poison put out by a neighbor to kill pack rats or by eating a pack rat that had already been poisoned and we had to euthanize him because he could no longer walk.

Lester was a huge cat and actually incredibly friendly and spent significant hours sleeping in my wife's lap. But he was devastated when his brother was gone and left for about a week. We were distraught but there was nothing we could do about it. When he came back he just wasn't the same cat and a few weeks later he left again, never to come back. We make believe that someone else adopted him or some other cool thing happened, but likely the coyotes got him.

As my good friend Patrick once said, “Having pets is just future grief.”

But to me, it's not only still worth it, but actually essential to my psychological well-being. So now we have three more typical house cats, affectionate when they want to be and completely disinterested in us when that spirit moves them. They begrudgingly share their territory with us, which includes our home, backyard, and particularly our bed, which can get pretty crowded some nights. But no neighborhood roaming, which is sad to me, because I think that's their natural state. Just too dangerous these days.

John Gray gets it and says it quite eloquently. And so did Mark Twain.