5:01pm July 19, 2015

Fey is not an unusual cat.

Or rather, Fey is somewhat of an unusual cat, but when people say she’s unusual, that’s not what they’re talking about. They usually comment on how much she communicates with me, and say they wish they had “a cat like Fey”, and then describe their own cats in terms that make it very clear that the issue isn’t the type of cat, but the type of relationship they have with their cat.

[Image description: Fey in bed with me and a lot of yarn while I hold a crochet project in one hand and she touches her paw to my other hand while we look at each other.]

Which is not necessarily their fault, but which is a completely different situation from Fey just being an unusual cat.

If Fey lived with them, they would rapidly discover that they didn’t have “a cat like Fey” either. They would probably decide she was mean and standoffish and uncommunicative. Because it’s not her, it’s them.

I can’t explain to anyone how to have a deep relationship with a cat or any other being.(1)

But I can say that if you take any cat, and try really hard to listen to them and understand them and engage with them on the same level of emotional complexity that you would engage with a human being on, then you’re likely to get better results, and a better relationship with your cat, than if you treat them as food-devouring mousing machines who only like you because you feed them and are probably just faking affection to manipulate you. Or even just if you treat them better than that, but not really taking them all that seriously.

Taking a cat seriously is the first step to having the kind of relationship I have with Fey. And I can tell you right now that it’s not Fey that’s unusual about our relationship. It’s our relationship that’s unusual. Put Fey in a context where she isn’t being respected or understood or seen as emotionally complex and a real actual being with thoughts and feelings about the world, and she’ll look like “just any other cat” to you, and possibly like a particularly mean cat at that.

Which is why it’s sad but almost funny to me when people tell me “I wish I had a cat like Fey, my cat is so mean.” And then describe a situation where Fey would be twenty times as mean if she had to live in it, than their cat is being (when their cat is being mean at all, which isn’t always).

Mind you, I’m not a cat whisperer. People try and call me that but I find that pretty offensive (to cats). I do not understand all of what Fey tells me. I don’t even understand a quarter of what Fey tells me. Fey and I fight on a regular basis, we misunderstand each other constantly, and we get frustrated about our inability to get basic information across to each other in both directions, and sometimes that ends up as frustration with each other.

But seriously?

If you start with respecting the intellectual and emotional complexity of your cat, and the fact that your cat is your equal in terms of worth and value (equal doesn’t mean alike, so nobody blast me for using that word, I find that really irritating and I’m especially irritable at the moment because I’m sick).

And if you make a serious long-term good-faith effort to understand and communicate with your cat as who the cat is, not as who you want or imagine the cat to be. (2) (This may take a lot of time if you’ve been projecting your own fantasies over the top of your cat, because your cat has doubtless noticed and responded to you in kind, and it will possibly take a long while to build trust.)

Then you have a good chance of, if not “having a cat like Fey”, having an amazing, fulfilling, complex, and demanding relationship with your cat, in ways you didn’t dream were possible. Which is what people seem to mean when they say they “want a cat like Fey”.

[Important but somewhat lengthy footnotes below cut.]

(1) Although the book First Contact: Charting Inner Space by Dave Hingsburger has a lot of good ideas for how to approach communication with anyone, human or not. But especially people who aren’t generally considered to have any life or communication at all by most people – that’s who the book’s written about. And animals certainly fall under the same broad category in terms of the amount of respect given them. Although even animals usually get more respect than the people with (presumed) severe and profound cognitive impairments that HIngsburger writes about. But nonetheless, his ideas about communication in that book should apply to all communication situations, especially those with anyone where the basic assumption is usually that the other person don’t have much if anything to communicate and couldn’t possibly understand needs or desires beyond food and the like, if that.

His biggest piece of advice is to get out of the way – don’t imagine what it’s like to “be you, as the other person” (which is what most people do when they try to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, Hingsburger refers to this as “like masturbation but without the stickiness”) but instead imagine what it’s like to actually be someone else. As in, get out of the mirror and look at who’s in front of you instead of seeing them as a version of yourself. Unfortunately, very few people do this in life, ever, with anyone, which prevents authentic relationships from happening. But it gets especially hard to do this when the person is very different from you, and I’d say another species is pretty different (but surprisingly similar in many ways – differences between species as far as emotional reality are often greatly exaggerated by humans believing we’re exceptional, and animals pick up on our condescension loud and clear).

Also a hint: If you don’t ever think you disagree with or fight with your cat, you’re probably engaging in fantasy. Because it’s damn near impossible to be in an authentic relationship with someone and never disagree or fight. Dave Hingsburger often says that if you think you like every disabled person you meet, you’re a bigot, because it means you don’t see individual differences. Think about that for awhile. It applies to cats (or any other group of beings) as well. Unless you just like all people indiscriminately, which is a different thing altogether. But on a basic interpersonal level if you’re not ever getting frustrated or angry or disagreeing or something negative, then you’re probably not engaging with the person as a genuine complex person who is not just your imaginary expectations for them.

(2) Yes, this includes those sickening “cat as perpetual infant for you to mother” fantasies, although I think my cat thinks of me as a kitten who refuses to move out of her house even when she’s elderly and doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Unfortunately, when most people try to get people to give up such bizarre human fantasies about cats, they say things like “don’t anthropmorphize” cats and then proceed to tell you that cats don’t “really” feel any love for you beyond what they feel towards you for feeding them, and lots of other bullshit. The reality is that cats are neither miniature humans nor manipulative but ultimately empty food-eating robots.

They’re cats. That means they have a lot in common with humans emotionally (they’re mammals, after all, and mammals that have done well living with humans and communicating successfully with us for millenia), and a lot different from us as well, and each individual cat is different from ever other individual cat. You have to get to know your cat as an individual, not discount some idea because it’s”too human” (very little about human emotional experience is exclusively human), but also not project weird human cultural concepts onto them. It’s a balancing act. If you’re really in earnest, you’ll get used to it.