Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

I have a sort of meaningful relationship with my cat. There. I’ve said it. Now there are many people in this world who, completely without hesitation or irony, will, in public, speak in baby language to their pets, let them lick their faces, and/or talk at great length about the intricacies of the pet’s diet, medical conditions, amusing or incorrigible behaviors, and generally give everybody the impression that they do nothing whatsoever but interact with and think about this animal all the time. When I see/hear somebody doing this I feel a curious mixture of sadness and creepiness, as if I am eavesdropping on something very personal and weird and not altogether healthy—like if a grownup woman were telling you encyclopedically about her My Little Pony collection: all the colors and smells, how long and silky their hair is, and what each one likes and doesn’t like to eat.

And yet, I love my cat. And I have a deep conviction that she is unusually perspicacious among cats: sensitive and clever and wise. And I am inclined to believe that there exists between us some kind of meaningful person/cat bond that is not just food or warmth-related.

Now don’t get me wrong--I’m not saying that my cat and I have conversations, or that I feel that she is telepathic or anything. But I have a bond with this cat—a bond that is somewhat at odds with my intellectual skepticism about the whole pet/human relationship thing.

I have a friend, an anthropologist by undergrad training, who, before he himself acquired a dog at his wife’s behest would look scornfully at pets (mine or anybody’s) whenever he saw one and mutter “familiars.” I haven’t read any anthropological theories of “familiars,” but I took his scorn to mean that he sees the whole thing as a kind of sad, pretend relationship in which the human makes himself feel important by having this little creature that follows him around everywhere, fawning and doting on him.

Objectively speaking, I kind of feel this way too. Dogs, in particular, often disgust me with their obsequiousness—the very quality that makes a lot of people love them. Not all dogs are totally obsequious, of course—partly it depends on the breed and partly on how they are raised, I guess. For example, I used to know an incredibly bright, proud and almost noble Husky that was completely devoted to its owner and yet at the same time totally independent, to the point of disappearing for days at a time, then returning home with a kind of dissipated grin on its face, obviously having really lived. That dog was cool. On the other hand, I know a Golden Retriever that, from the moment you enter the house where it lives, is all over you—licking you, jumping up on you, and knocking you over with its immense, motor-impaired bulk—its entire hindquarters wagging independently of its torso, so that they slam into you repeatedly with incredible force. That dog is very annoying and represents everything that is hateful (to me) about the pet/owner relationship.

The problem, of course, is that cats and dogs don’t talk. They just behave. Ok—actually they kind of talk, too, with the meowing and the barking and the growling and the purring and whatnot, but let’s agree that their vocabularies are very limited. A radically empiricist perspective (that of certain deeply scientifically oriented members of my family, say) would argue that although the cat seems happy when it’s purring, I can’t really know whether what the cat feels bears any relation to what I think of as happiness, or whether the cat can be aware in any metacognitive way that it is happy (I’m not sure where neurology stands on this at the moment—I’m afraid I don’t even know whether cats have frontal lobes…), and if not, whether that makes any difference at all with respect to whether I should be sitting there petting the cat or not (as I write this, my cat has just crossed the length of the apartment to leap up on my lap and started kneading my leg and purring). This empiricist family member might also point out that the only reason the cat wants to sit with me is because a) it’s cold and I’m warm b) I feed it or c) by licking me, it can obtain salt. This might, in turn, make me feel very sad and alienated from the cat with which I had been communing so peacefully just a moment before, but the logic of it is vexing and not easy to refute.

For those adults who have totally unproblematic, giddily childlike relationships with their pets, for example the many hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Korean (and maybe Chinese, but I don’t know, so I won’t say) women who keep those tiny little, well-coiffed terriers (and let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that, in Korea at least, many of these same pet-loving women have their dogs’ voice boxes surgically removed or altered so that they can’t bark and disturb the neighbors in those insane beehive-like apartment buildings they live in) and carry them everywhere, these things, I guess, aren’t even a question. These pet owners, I suppose, simply trust to instinct: they love their pet, their pet shows all the signs of loving them, and that’s that. I kind of envy the simplicity of that perspective, but then again it can lead to carrying said pet around everywhere in a shopping bag, spending ridiculous amounts of money on keeping it silky and beribboned, and (maybe) alienating all reasonable human beings by being at all times in deep communion with something that may or may not even think.

Still, as I look to my left and see my cat sitting faithfully on the arm of my armchair, I must admit I am touched—in part because, although she (the cat) is also close to D--, she is most often to be found sitting or sleeping immediately next to me. The same is true of D—‘s cat. I think to myself (in moments of weakness): here is this creature that I have rescued from a brutal and probably brief life of scavenging in trashcans, and it (the creature) knows that I’m the one who did this and appreciates it deeply and basically thinks of me as its parent/provider/main dude and damn that’s kind of sweet. Then, literally in the next moment, I think: good lord man, come off it. It’s a cat. It knows you so it comes near you. It knew you first, and you pet it and give it food and don’t kick it, so it comes near you. Please spare us with the appreciation and whatnot.

So I’m not sure whether I have succeeded in explaining the deep complexities of this issue, or merely in revealing myself as a guy, like Hamlet, whose purer emotions and instincts are horribly alloyed with thought. “Think less!” my acting teacher was always telling me in college. “You think too much!” certain scientific empiricists in my family were always telling me.

It is possible to overthink things, or to think about them wrong, or at the wrong time—like, for example, while walking on a tightrope, you should not think: “What if a big wind comes and blows me off of here? Or what if the rope breaks? What am I doing up here anyway, like an idiot, five hundred feet above the ground on a wire? Is there something wrong with me? If I were a nutritionist, like my mom wanted me to be, I’d be sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned office right now, in almost no danger of dying a horrible, painful death…”

When you listen to those people on National Geographic talking about their relationship with a lion or an ocelot or a hippopotamus, they are absolutely sincere and unmuddied about the fact that there is a relationship there. They understand and can articulate exactly what you shouldn’t do around the ocelot and what you are communicating to it with your body language and when it is happy and when it is cross and so forth. They seem happy to see the ocelot each morning and it seems happy to see them. It is also, true, I believe I have heard, that a lot of these animal trainers and breeders are not so good at communicating with people, which is why they go into animal-related fields. Maybe the higher-order communication (both verbal and non-verbal) of human beings, if you’re any good at it, trips up your ability to engage in or at least to accept conceptually the relationship you have with your pet.

Anyway, I love my cat, and at the same time I view her from a certain skeptical distance, as a being whose agendas and motivations are obscure and inscrutable to me. Which, is, come to think of it, kind of the way I deal with most people, too.