Interview Strand

Loving the Pets We Choose

The apartment has the sort of cat smell that’s hard to identify.  It’s not cat pee.  It’s not the litter box stinking up the room.  It’s more the smell of the cat itself—cat hair, cat food, and, well, cat.  The cat in residence is perched like a bird on the back of the tan couch when I walk in.  She looks inquisitively at her owner as if to ask, “What’s this human doing here?”  She’s a small, two-year-old calico with eyes that glow red in a certain light.  I point that out, and I’m quickly assured that I’m crazy.  The cat’s eyes are a beautiful, serene green.

To clear things up, I’m not afraid of cats.  I don’t hate them, but I do enjoy a good “Cats are taking over the world” joke as much as anybody else.  Every time I see a cat’s eyes glare red, I think of a dream my five-year-old brother had a month or two ago about our cat, Toothless.  “Toothless’ eyes got really big and turned all red and then she turned into a alien and ate me to pieces!” Jacob had told me as he hugged the purring feline that had been so terrifying in dream form.

I sit down on the couch, and Alex sits in a chair next to the TV.  The chair she’s sitting in is black, and you can see the cat hair sticking to it.  The cat, Princess Aurora Borealis—Rory, for short—jumps off the back of the couch and promptly begins sharpening her claws on the side of it.  Alex shoos Rory away with a piece of paper.

On the other side of the TV, there’s a little table covered with a blanket, and there’s also a small blanket tucked into the windowsill.  Rory has her own little enclosed bed, complete with a feather toy, a tiara, and a purple flag with a golden sun in the center and a little Disney symbol in the bottom right corner.

“We spoil her,” are Alex’s words.

I think that might be an understatement.  Alex throws Rory’s catnip-filled toy, and Rory pounces at it, and I have to admit—though I typically qualify myself as a dog person—Rory is pretty cute.  Her tail swishes and her eyes get big as she bats at the toy.  Her mouth curves up under her whiskers in a cat smile.

Alex Weiss is a cat owner and volunteer at PAWS Chicago, which is where she, her roommates, and Rory first found each other a few months ago.  They’ve been a happy family ever since.

But Princess Aurora Borealis isn’t Alex’s first experience owning a cat.  “I grew up with cats,” she says, “always having at least two or three around.”  Two or three, I note.  It’s never just one cat that a person owns.  As Hemingway once wrote, “One cat only leads to another.”

The same, I admit, is true at my own house.  When we moved out of my grandparents’ house with my two cats, one of my cats, Simba, was never allowed inside our new house because he had a bad habit of peeing all over the counters.  So we put him outside, and naturally, we put his food outside, too.  And then one day we looked outside and we had another cat.  And another.  And ten more, plus kittens.  But we have to feed my outdoor cat, because he’s actually mine, and I love him.  So we put up with the others… well, I guess we love the others.

One cat only leads to another.

I ask Alex a little more about her relationship with cats over the years.  She tells me, “My cat Garfield used to walk with me to my bus stop as a kid every morning and meet me at the end of the street when the bus dropped me off.  It was the best.”

That surprises me a little bit.  Most evidence I’ve found so far suggests that cats are pretty dumb, and that dogs are the loyal ones.  But all rules, all research, all evidence has exceptions, and Garfield is one.  When I ask Alex about her experiences with dogs, she says, “I had two dogs at my dad’s house.  They were always loud, annoying, and jumped on me.  I got multiple scratches and bites from them as a kid and just never liked them as much as cats.”

I guess the latter supports what I’ve found about cat people being almost exclusively cat people, while people who qualify themselves as dog people are more willing to accept both dogs and cats into their homes.  Cats and dogs just appeal to different personalities.

So I took the question to Facebook.  “Dogs or cats?”  And I had a pretty even split.  I got responses like, “Cats.  Always” in addition to “Cats are evil.”  I had people say, “I miss my dog, but I’ve always wanted a kitten.”  And a friend of mine from kindergarten commented, “Dogs.  You know how I feel about cats!”  The last commenter, Kayla Ballard, is the exception to the “all-loving dog person” rule.  She’s been terrified of my de-clawed cat for as long as I’ve known her.

When asked how she feels about her dog, Kenisha Gransberry, dog owner, says, “I love my dog with my whole heart, like he’s my brother.”  I guess this serves as reinforcement to the evidence I’ve found that shows how people consider their pets to be part of the family, as if the family wouldn’t be complete without that one fur-covered creature.

Further surveying on why people choose cats or dogs led to another interesting discovery that has crossed my mind at points in the writing of this essay, but always dismissed for one reason or another.  Over the past summer, I raised and bottle-fed an abandoned four-week-old kitten named Thor for about a week before he died, and at that point I sort of broke down and never wanted to look at another cat again.  I wouldn’t pet my fourteen-year-old cat, Sassy, for a week after he died.  I was angry with all cats because I couldn’t save my kitten.

And then a month later, Sassy died, and I hated the other cats for a day.  Only a day.  And then I took our kitten Toothless into my room and hugged her while I cried.  I let her sleep in my room, an honor that most animals (and small siblings) are not allowed.  In place of my cat, I needed a cat to hug and share space with and be comforted by.

But at the same time, I didn’t want to be around cats at all.  After the death of two cats, I wasn’t prepared to own another.  I wanted a dog.  Now, I’d lived in a house with dogs for most of my life.  My dog, Midnight, had to live at my grandparents’ house when my family moved into a house whose landlord didn’t allow dogs.  And Midnight’s body had shut down a little less than a year before Sassy’s death, so I was three pets down in a year.  And I wanted a dog.

I remember telling my mom that one day as we were driving into “downtown” Hebron, Indiana.  She was driving.  And I was sitting in the front passenger seat imagining us living in a house that accepted dogs, and I’d want a dog a little older than a puppy, because puppies are a lot of work and older dogs deserve love, too.

Her response, I’ll never forget, was, “I’d rather have a cat.”

I stared out the window at the passing corn fields, the telephone poles whipping by every few seconds.  My mom?  A cat person?  I knew she’d grown up with dogs, just like I had, and maybe there’d been a few cats along the way, but I used to ask my grandma stories about all the animals the family owned since she and my grandpa had been married.  Mostly those animals were dogs.  I do remember one instance, though, where they had a cat.  My grandpa loved this cat with all his heart, and then it died, and then he never allowed another cat in the house again.

Until Sassy.

Now back to my mom.  My mom.  A cat person.  I assure you, again, that I don’t hate cats, but I really don’t see my mom as the type of person who prefers them over dogs.  So I turned away from the window and asked her, “Really?  You like cats more than dogs?”

I remember her nodding and saying something like, “We had a dog when I was a kid, Lady—you knew her.  I was really close to her when I was little.  I played with her all the time, and we did everything together.  And then when I got older, I just didn’t make time for her anymore.”

“Like me and Sassy,” I said, looking out the window again.

Like my grandpa and that one cat whose name I don’t remember.  Like anyone who’s ever suffered the loss of a pet and decided “I’m not ready for another just yet.”  Like anybody who’s suffered the loss of another person they love, so they push away the other people they love.  They push away the people they know will be around to comfort them, care for them, be there for them whatever happens.  I think that same thing happens when we lose a pet.

Still, it’s interesting that people who lose their cats choose dogs, and people who lose a dog might choose a cat as their next companion.  This really doesn’t hold with any evidence I’ve found regarding cat people and dog people.  Except maybe through the concept that death changes people.  The death of a loved one, or maybe even a pet, can have a drastic impact on the way you think and behave, and maybe some of that leaks into your personality.  Maybe it makes you more “catlike” or more “doglike.”  Maybe it makes you not like animals at all.

Since I started this essay, I’ve been noticing a lot of things people say about their pets—how their pets might come up in conversation, or when I’m walking with friends and we pass a puppy straining against his leash, chasing a leaf.  I’ve heard things like, “I was half asleep last night and I thought my blankets were my dog curled up at the end of my bed, like he always does when I’m at home.  I miss my dog.”

People say, “I need to get home to my cat.  She’s going to be mad I’ve been out so late.”

They also say, “Dogs are so much work.  I want a kitten.”

The last two, I think, contradict each other in a way.  A lot of my research has shown that sometimes people prefer cats because they are seen to be less work.  But I’ve been thinking about this, comparing the cat people I know to the dog people I know.  I’ve compared cat accessories to dog accessories.  And I’ve come to the conclusion that accessories in the cat aisle are of vastly greater variety than toys and accessories for dogs.  For a dog, you can get a bed, maybe a bone, a stuffed animal to chew on.  Cats require a bed, a scratching post, a whole home with tunnels and perches for your cat.  Cats can have feather toys, laser pointers, catnip-filled pouches, sticks with a string at the end, toy birds, toy fish, toy everythings.

Yeah, maybe cats do lay around all day.  But cats are so spoiled.

Alright, maybe dogs are too.  Some dogs.  My Aunt had a friend once who used to rescue dogs, and she’d go to McDonald’s just to get a hamburger to feed to her Great Dane.  There’s dogs who have little jackets to match what their owners are wearing in colder weather.  Dogs compete in shows.  They get manicures, they get groomed.  You put a cat in water, and you’ll have a scar across your stomach for the rest of your life.  Trust me on that.

The thing is, in our society it’s more acceptable for cats to be spoiled than dogs.  Somebody goes to McDonald’s to feed their Great Dane a hamburger, and we give them weird looks.  Those people with their little dogs in jackets get a nice, exaggerated eye roll.  And the cat with its palace and a thousand toys, perched on her windowsill throne, with a name like Princess Aurora Borealis?  That’s not unusual at all.  In our society.

I think, in a way, we hold cats and dogs to a double-standard.  There’s become this ideal sort of “cat person” versus “dog person” view.  If you want a pet you don’t really have to take care of, get a cat.  And, while you’re at it, put as much work into caring for your cat as you would for a dog.  Maybe even more work.  Change the litter box every few days.  Have someone hold back the cat so she doesn’t escape outside.  If you want a loyal companion who’s going to be loud and slobber all over you and require so much more attention than you ever dreamed, get a dog.  Lay on the couch with your dog and take a nap.

It’s kind of funny, the way people think, and the way they think about animals, and the way they relate that to themselves.

I know there is a real difference between cats and dogs—I used to watch a bunch of Animal Planet movies, and I remember one of them mentioning that cats evolved from the same place as bears and dogs came from somewhere else.  But maybe it’s a lot more complex than that.  People change their minds.  People change their pets.  Sometimes you just appreciate a dog’s slobbery kiss that welcomes you home from work.  Sometimes you push it away and say, “Yuck!  Down, boy!”  Sometimes you need a small cat curled around your shoulders, or a baby kitten resting over your heart, imagining it as the sound of its mother’s heartbeat.

But maybe if you go further down the evolutionary line, to prehistory, predawn, where the story of our love for animals really begins, maybe dogs and cats really did come from the same place.  Maybe we all do.  Maybe we aren’t as divided, whether internally or as a society, as we make ourselves out to be.  I think we need each other, we need these relationships between species to remind us of the most fundamental human desire that we all have within us: to love and be loved in return.

Question Strand

How Has the Human-Animal Relationship Changed Over History?

My original topic was an exploration of the nature of the relationships that exist between humans and animals, specifically the psychological implications of owning pets as well as the emotional bond between humans and the animals they choose to share their homes with.  That said, a lot of the focus of my research has been oriented toward the most common human companions: cats and dogs.

Upon further reflection of my research, though, I realized that while many of the psychological aspects of human-animal relationships are touched upon, there is little about the historical contributions of pets.  So I made a list of questions to help explore the topics that are, so far, lacking in my exploration to further understand the complex relationships between humans and animals.  Among them were these:

Why do people choose the animals they do?

What do both parties get out of the relationship?

How has the human-animal relationship changed over history?

How has our relationship changed with cats?

Through thoughtful contemplation on these questions, and matching them up with what I’d found so far, I slowly began to realize that the one most drawing my attention, and which touched in some way upon all the other topics I was still left wondering about, was “How has the human-animal relationship changed over history?”

I did know something about the topic—in high school, I wrote some articles about Halloween symbols, specifically cats as demons or witches’ familiars.  And I’d heard somewhere that there’s cultures that eat cats and dogs just like we eat cows and pigs.  And I knew there was an Egyptian god who had the face of a cat, but I never took much time to wonder what that Egyptian god’s name was, or why Egyptians worshipped cats, or why some people are disgusted by eating cat or dog flesh and some people just aren’t.

After further research, though, it seems that the history of cats has been much more controversial than the history of dogs.  They’ve been worshipped.  They’ve been slaughtered.  And these days, it seems like cats the subject of “cat people” links to some immediate psychological thought of, again, worship.  Or cat hoarding.  I guess it depends how you look at it.

At any rate, I think for this portion of the essay, I’ll spend more time looking at the emotional reactions humans have historically had to cats, how cats may have shaped lives and cultures before now, and how cats are viewed in the media and the public eye today.

Commonly, when we think of the history of cats and what they’ve been doing since they first showed up and started killing rats for us, we think of Egypt.  But we’ve found cat fossils in Cyprus that go back to pre-Egyptian times, indicating that cats were domesticated and perhaps worshipped before Egyptians ever discovered them.  “If the cat had not been intentionally buried, then the bones would have become disarticulated and dispersed” (Vigne).  So the history of the cat is actually much deeper and more involved in the tangle of human history than most people realize.  Cats were not only kept around for their hunting abilities—they were loved enough to have their own burial sites.

There has been a constant love-hate relationship with the cat over time.  It has woven itself into literature and fascinated poets and writers alike (Nikolajeva), myself included.  There’s something mystical about the cat, the way it can disappear for weeks and then one morning you’ll wake up and your long-lost pet is sitting on your couch, or on the porch railing, blinking slowly.  Or you’ll be petting your furry friend before you go to sleep, and the instant you turn off the lights, the cat is staring at you with eyes that glow red in the dark.  My little brother thinks cats can magically transform into aliens that might eat him when he’s asleep.  I admit, I might have had some part in making him believe that, but it’s not my fault.  Cats have always been associated with magic.

“The matagot of French folklore, a black tomcat, made his owner wealthy.  Nineteenth-century English sailors’ wives kept a black cat in the house to ensure their husbands’ safety at sea.  An old rhyme assures lasses that they will not lack lovers if the cat in their house is black.  In Wales, black cats keep trouble from the house, and it is lucky when a strange cat strays in and a bad omen when one is lost” (Rogers 59).

Cats were popular subjects for art during the Renaissance, mostly as religious symbols.  “Their decorative value was generally noticed long before their charm as companion, and painters interested in portraying everyday life naturally included a cat sitting on a chair in a bedroom or looking for table scraps in a banquet scene.”  And although cats are usually recognized for their beauty and grace, Renaissance painters usually depicted them as chubby, awkward, and sources for entertainment (Rogers 27).  While it was great to make fun of cats—and it still is—the fact remains that they had some recognition at this point in history, art, and human consciousness.

The love of cats, though, has always had another side to it.  As much as cats have been thought of as godlike, they have also been associated with evil.  “Although we may now view witchcraft as quaint, attractive, or even religious, feline accomplices to witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were by definition agents of Satan” (Rogers 59).  Like witches, cats were often burned for their “crimes.”

Even today, there are about as many cat-haters as there are cat-lovers (or, “cat people”), and I can’t help but wonder if the extreme turns of cats’ history has something to do with that.  Those who love cats are often criticized of being selfish or boring or simply “crazy.  “The degree to which some owners bond with their animals is notorious—anthropomorphizing them to great extent” (MacGregor 18).  But I guess the same can be said about dogs.

Then again, for some reason, dog owners aren’t as criticized for loving their pets as cat owners are.  “Attacks on cats can be more readily adapted to self-righteousness than attacks on dogs.  Because they were perceived as less congenial than dogs, they were more likely to be suspected of practicing magic or conveying poison in their health” (Rogers 153).  I guess no matter how history has shaped or continues to shape the relationships between cats and their humans, cats and dogs will never be viewed equally.  Not even in America.

I think, in reference to the research I’ve already done, the question that still lingers is, “What does this relationship between humans and animals mean?”  Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to support the fact that this relationship does, indeed, exist.  It always has.  Humans have depended on animals since the very point in history when we stopped being animals.

In a study I read about farmers and cats, I found that cats tend to only exist where human settlements have been established.  A theory as to why certain areas are overrun with felines is that the cats come from old farm houses that are being demolished.  I’ve experienced that in my neighborhood.  When the authorities tore down one of the last farms and started building blocks of three-story houses that all shared the same cramped backyards, they put up a tractor crossing sign.  With the corn fields deteriorating, a population jump from small town to civilized society, and more drivers speeding down our little country road, I don’t think the tractor sign is really about all the tractor traffic.  We don’t have tractor traffic anymore, but we do have a problem with cats being run over on that road.

For a cat in a rural area, the ideal place of residency is on a farm, where there are mice to hunt and plenty of small places they can squeeze into for shelter.  Though most farm owners don’t consider these cats to be their pets, the cats seem to consider themselves pets, to some extent.  For whatever reason, cats civilizations are dependent on humans.  Cats only set up their establishments where humans are.  Furthermore, the humans who are, to any extent, bothered by this cat takeover, are statistically unlikely to throw the cats off the property, stop feeding them, or whatever it is people do when they don’t want an animal.  For whatever reason, the cats and humans are willing to coexist, however annoyed both parties may be with one another.

So what does this relationship mean?

To answer that question, I intend to interview pet owners and animal shelter volunteers who not only work closely with pets, but also bear witness to the relationship that exists between humans and their pets, families and their pets, and relationships from one pet to the other, such as instances where a family buys one dog so the other isn’t lonely.  More than that, though, there is the question of why we go about choosing the specific pets we do, what goes into choosing to have a pet in the first place, and why have a pet at all.  I think answering these questions can give us a better understanding of ourselves as humans or animals or whatever we want to consider ourselves as.  I think, too, that any amount of understanding leads to a greater acceptance of compassion, and that’s what the world needs, isn’t it?