7:42pm April 29, 2012

Oh no, not one of these.

So all the weekend staff people are subs until they hire someone new again. The one who is here right now just fed Fey. Fey didn’t eat until she turned her back. And she just made a comment along the lines of “little stinker doesn’t want me to watch”. And however affectionately she may or may not think she meant that… just no. It never works when someone refers to her as “little stinker” for something totally ordinary for a cat. :-(

But then I already knew something was up when she talked to her in ridiculous baby talk and any time she got any kind of response, squealed about how “cute” she was. Not that cats can’t be cute. But there’s a way some people refer to their cuteness where you can tell that’s what they think a cat’s entire function in life is. It tends to go with a lack of respect and seeing them as glorified stuffed animals or permanent surrogate infants.

It makes me feel literally sick inside, like actual, physical queasiness. My childhood cats suffered and in some cases probably died young because my parents didn’t respect cats in the way they respect dogs. In one case we had a cat getting skinnier and weaker and we never took her to the vet. She died as soon as her kittens were weaned. We never found out how. We once had a kitten who had a minor muscular problem where he could only push poop halfway out. Instead of putting on rubber gloves and helping him, my parents dumped him in a neighborhood that they claimed “would find a good home for him”. I’m not sure if that is what really happened because normally they took cats they didn’t want to animal shelters. Whatever it was, the kitten’s human, my brother’s live-in girlfriend, had to go home from work that day because she was crying so hard she was vomiting. My parents didn’t understand why.

I remember how they viewed people who actually took fully responsible care of animals. They thought they were not quite right in the head. One of my mom’s friends had house rabbits and she marveled that she’d go to the trouble of having rabbits in the house. Instead of intellectually, emotionally, and socially neglected in backyard hutches, which is how our rabbits lived. Always one at a time so not even any company from other bunnies. And when my brother and his girlfriend adopted a bird, my parents couldn’t wrap their head around the idea of taking a bird to the vet and thought that they were like… overly attached to “just a bird”.

They were happy to spend thousands of dollars on a dog’s vet bills. Well not happy. But they got on a payment plan with the vet and did it. I was even able to even talk them into not euthanizing a dog so they got an extra week with her before her pain got too bad (from a nasty form of cancer that was so rapid acting that she was fine one week and dead three weeks later).

With a cat they would never have bothered saying goodbye or even figuring out it was cancer. They marveled that a friend knew her rabbit died of cancer and thought it was because her mom was a doctor and doctors go overboard with diagnosing pets who don’t really need diagnoses. Several of our rats died painfully of cancer without seeing a vet in their entire lives. We almost never knew why most of our cats died because they never bothered to find out. Vets were for getting cats shots and (sometimes) spay/neuter services, not for giving them medical care.

And it’s not like they never knew our cats were sick. There was China, who barely lived to see her kittens weaned. She got thinner and weaker and mostly what they cared about was hoping the neighbors didn’t think we weren’t feeding her. There was Teala, who my parents told me to stop putting my cheek against the top of her head because she was sick (as if cats can normally pass things to humans), but they never even tried to find out why. There was Jenny, who developed an intense, nasty cough for years without them ever taking him to a vet. Then they put him to sleep eventually, I wasn’t ever told why. And it goes on and on. I read all about feline diseases in my cat books as a child but I don’t remember one single diagnosis ever in one of our sick cats. The attitude was if they died they died and if they got better they got better.

But even if my parents never felt bad about any of this, I felt horrible. I didn’t understand enough about feelings and their sources to know what was happening. But I went around all the time with that horrible, nauseated feeling when it came to how they treated our cats. People tell me their generation and cultural backgrounds came into it. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. I just know that nobody around me taught me to view cats the way I view them, and yet I felt sick about these things when they didn’t.

I also remember them being a little alarmed at times at how attached to cats I was. My mom tried to force me to admit I valued humans over cats. She said “If there was a baby and a kitten and you could only save one which would you save?” I felt there was something horribly unfair about that entire premise, but when I couldn’t answer she insisted I’d save the baby and just didn’t know it. I can’t convey the depth of horror and rage I felt that she was even creating the question in that way.

She also tried to inform me that human beings could not form deep, important connections to cats. Not like we could to dogs. She said the reason I thought I could was I’d never had a dog. Dogs were special in a way that cats weren’t. I have had three dogs now. I loved them. I could not connect to them as well as I did with cats. But unlike my mother, I recognized this was because I connect better to cats. Not because dogs lack depth or the ability to form deep, intense relationships with humans.

When cats died, there was often no effort to even find out where they crawled off to, or to prevent them from needing to crawl off and die at all. When dogs died, there was family-wide mourning. I think they really didn’t understand why my brother’s girlfriend cried until she threw up because they dumped Claude against her wishes. (He was far from the only pet they dumped.)

She recognizes my connection to cats now but she views it in terms of something special. Like I “always had a special connection to cats”. She remembers how I couldn’t take walks with her as a child without getting on all fours and sniffing noses with every cat I met. Even if it meant running into people’s yards. She doesn’t remember, because she was never aware of it, the agony of living in a household where any animal who wasn’t a dog was barely worth the vet care. I think it was actually traumatic, but in a different way than in-your-face trauma.

They do understand the level of vet care I give Fey. But I think they see it as good mostly because of my level of attachment to her. They like her, and she likes them, especially my dad who has a serious respect for her need to be the one initiating contact. When he visits, she snuggles up near his face while he sleeps, something she only otherwise does with me. She sleeps on my mom in other positions. She loves sitting in between me and my parents, or sprawling over both of us. She misses them when they leave. When they sent me holiday gifts, I put them on the couch and she snuggled up to them for a whole month.

They’re capable of certain kinds of loving relationships with cats, and of certain kinds of respect. If a cat is special to them, they will mourn when she dies. But obviously something is missing because the kind of care they gave cats versus dogs is night and day. And the level and kind of love and respect is very different.

I know it seems like a long jump from my staff person today to all these unpleasant memories. But it’s not. I worry whenever I see people treating an animal like she is a thing. Or like something midway between a thing and a person. Because it may seem little in a social interaction, but when someone like that is given responsibility for the care of an animal, you never know what will happen. And I’ve seen what can happen. It’s not the worst kind of neglect I’ve ever seen, but it’s still pretty damn awful if you’re the animal in question.

Cats aren’t things. They’re not midway between things and people. They’re not walking talking stuffed animals. They can be cute, but cuteness is not their only or main attribute, and it’s often mis-assigned to them when what they need is the full respect of the person they’re trying to communicate with. They’re capable of intense, meaningful connections with humans who take them seriously. And they have lives in their own right, apart from how humans think of them. They have important relationships with each other and the world around them in ways that most humans, even those who want to, can’t even begin to comprehend. (And any human claiming to have anywhere near full comprehension is lying or fooling themselves.)

I’m so happy that I live with Fey right now. And that she is lying back to back with me. I love her so much. And if anything happens to me, she goes to feliscorvus, who will find a good home for her. Even today I wouldn’t trust my family with her.

And even with all I do with her, and all my efforts to understand what she means by things, I still know that I’m missing a lot of important stuff about her that she very much wants me to know. So I’m not claiming to know everything. I’m just claiming to have more ethics than I was raised with when it comes to cats. I love the cats I was raised with but their membership in our family often came with an awful price. And I don’t think my family’s mentality was uniquely bad.

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