You Can’t Get Mad at a Cat for Being a Cat
Luna above, Ripley below.
I get most of my better thoughts from books I’ve read or had read to me. When we were kids, my mother would often use the tape deck in the van, later the CD player, to put on audiobooks from the library. Sometimes they were her books, sometimes they were books for us kids, either was better than Rush Limbaugh and NPR. I never heard so much real hate from a book villain as I did with Limbaugh’s constant screaming. One line from one audiobook in particular has become a reflex for me. I’d forgotten the name of the book and had to look it up- Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Covill. And the line that I internalized was something Jeremy’s father said: “You can’t get mad at a cat for being a cat.”
Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville (original cover)
The story itself was enjoyable- good enough that parts of the plot have stuck with me for twenty-five years, but it’s that one line from the protagonist’s father that’s really effected me. The Abrahamic faiths say that God put man above the animals to do with them as we saw fit. A less ambiguous guiding post for me has been an ecologist and humanist inspired respect for life and living things and the acknowledgement that humans are capable of much more than any other animal on earth. The broad interpretation of Genesis gives a man justification through the text. “God made me and the animal, and God said I’m in charge.” Which is a good start, but when you’re knee deep in uncut jungle or in the middle of a desert with no surface water for hundreds of kilometers, you’ll find man is not in charge. Animals adapt to their environment over time, and humans adapt the environment to suit them instead. So what is man’s responsibility to animal? What does a man care for a housecat?
I’ll start with the larger scale and spiral down, as is my habit. I think in order to evolve we must do so in a way that’s symbiotic with our environment. Part of that environment is the flora and fauna, housecats included. A person can build a house after dreaming it up in their head and putting it to paper. From thought, to paper, to actualization. If the person builds house after house with sprawling green bald yards, cutting down all the trees and leveling all the ground all around, the environment pushes back. There are no bees to pollinate and the flora starts to die off. The herbivores have to range further for food and the carnivores have to take whatever small animals they can find and also range farther. There’s a common attitude in the city of Buffalo when people see raccoons or turkey and go “Look at that! What’s that doing here?” That reactions kind of bums me out. The raccoons and turkeys were here first, mate. We live in a dense concrete cluster with very little green. Whatever the scavengers and the spookeasies are doing in the city, it boils down to trying to continue living.
Of course praying for an apocalyptic solar flare isn’t going to help anyone. It’s beyond my power to shut down the crypto farms and AI servers now poisoning our planet at an even faster pace. I don’t feel like joining a group of ecology activists would help me or the environment, not if the extent of our work is a oneupsman’s echo chamber and the occasional government-sanctioned protest where we stand at the side of the road. I can push for those things to go away, encourage people to actually get in the way of giants, but I think the best thing anyone can do as a human is start being humane. And that’s a micro to macro transition.
A pet is a wonderful thing. I’m fond of dogs, but cats were always much more appealing to me. You can beat a dog and it’ll still love you, still wag its tail even as its trying not to lose control of its bladder and still blinking rapidly in anticipation of another hit. If you strike a cat, it’s likely that cat will give you a wide berth forever after. A cat knows its worth, knows its God’s perfect killing machine and knows you should be grateful its only eight pounds. But there’s a comfort when you build a relationship with a cat. They go to bed when you do, even if they like to stay out of arm’s reach. They deign to mew at you to communicate. They permit you to give them tummy rubs.
But again, a cat’s a killer. A predator. Our fond relationship with cats over the span of human history has been mutually beneficial. Cats keep the mice and small things out of the house and away from the grain, and the cat has a full belly and a safe place to sleep. And yet for the sake of not having ten million feral cats ruling North America, we are very mindful of spaying and neutering our pets. Yet the very act of depriving another living thing of its reproductive rights sits strangely with me. Is it human responsibility? Is it diminishing the quality of the pets life? Most of the arguments I’ve heard argue that it means your pets will roam less frequently, you don’t have to worry about male cats spraying, you don’t have to put up with the yowling when they’re in heat.
To keep the cat indoors permanently seemed a step too far. My cat, Luna, is very good about doing her own thing and coming home when she wants. I get home, I let the cat out, the cat comes back in the next 1-3 hours. Occasionally, she stays out longer. Luna comes home covered in burs or cobwebs, smelling earthy or else like a cellar. But she prances right up to me when she sees me, very visibly pleased. Sometimes I can’t help but screw with the cat, giving her tail a gentle tug so she turns around and just as gently bites my hand. Sometimes I’m brushing her and she gets angry and she scratches me a good one. If I get home to work and the cat is not immediately paid attention to, she yowls morosely and wanders the apartment.
When she gets outside, she still hunts. She brought me an adolescent robin that had fallen out of the back tree just a few weeks back. I heaped praise on the cat, put her inside, and gave her some treats. I put the robin back up in the tree it fell from, the mama bird and all the aunties screaming a fit from the telephone wires above.
Just this morning I went out to bring Luna back inside. As soon as I stepped onto my front porch, a squirrel starts chittering at me wildly. From above my head. I look up to see a squirrel clinging to the apartment brickwork on the second story. The squirrel wasn’t yelling until I walked out. When I looked around for Luna, I found her chittering in the front lawn, stalking low, watching something. There was another squirrel, and Luna was moving in for the pounce.
I threw on my boots, collected the cat, and waved off the squirrels. Luna hissed at me as I brought her inside. She does that sometimes, an annoyed “I’m not done yet damn you.” but no flashing claws and teeth. My partner started to all Luna a bad cat for “bullying” the squirrels. I immediately defended the cat. “You can’t get mad at a cat for being a cat” is an expression that if made solid, my partner might gladly beat me to death with those words. But it’s true. As people, we have choices- flashes of instinct that we can respond to or ignore. Animals don’t really have as much of that. House pets particularly are kept to comfort the owner, rather than to enhance the lives of both parties. You can’t get mad at a cat for being a cat. You could even try to wonder at what the cat wants and empathize. A human has discretion, a cat has guile.
If you want the world to be more godly, more eco-friendly, more natural, more good- start small. Start with patience for the little things before you set your mind to slaying the dragons at the top. Don’t get mad at cats for being cats. Don’t get mad at kids for being kids. Don’t get mad at yourself for being human. Remind yourself, and do a little bit better for the living things around you.
Luna not being helpful
