South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Can a dog person learn lessons from a cat?
I’ve always been a dog person. Always lived with dogs. Always had one around the house.
I knew all about dogs — and dogs knew all about me. If only by reputation.
They knew because when I was 3 years old, I painted my grandparents’ dog red. (I don’t remember doing it, but so I’ve been told.) I didn’t get into trouble, because my grandparents were impressed I’d somehow gotten their busy dachshund to stand still long enough for me to paint her. That and because the paint, though with a lot of hair, eventually came out.
She wagged her red tail and licked my face as my grandparents cleaned her up. Dogs — and grandparents — are forgiving like that.
I didn’t really know a cat until I
moved to South Florida for my first job. Cats, actually, because my roommate had two: a gray cat named The Rodent and a shaggy white cat named Microwave.
I began to suspect cats were different from dogs the day I was making a sandwich and The Rodent jumped up on the counter to watch. A dog, I thought, would never invade my personal sandwich-making space like that. Dogs know their boundaries, at least if they expect to get fed.
My next revelation came shortly after I attempted to reclaim my sandwich-making space by picking up the cat and carrying her somewhere else, like you can with a dog. You can’t with a cat.
I know because when I picked the cat off the counter and began to carry her out of the kitchen, she turned and sank all 18 claws into my chest and lower abdomen. Whereupon I unconditionally surrendered my hold of the cat, expecting her to fall to the floor. Instead, she just kept hanging there — attached to me by her 18 claws — until, what seemed like hours later, she apparently got bored with me and let go.
I really came to understand cats were different from dogs, though, the morning I found the shaggy white cat, Microwave, had jumped onto my personal bathroom counter space and thrown up in my personal shaving kit. I was not happy with the cat, and I let him know with a stern lecture — from the hallway outside the bathroom, at maximum distance from the claws — on the difference between a Good Cat and a Bad Cat. A dog would have understood the lesson immediately.
The lecture had no effect on Microwave, though, who proceeded to pad off into my bedroom and mark his territory with stream prejudice on the electrical outlet powering the ceiling fan. The outlet popped and sparked, spewing acrid smoke throughout the house.
The shaggy white cat stuck his tail up and hissed at me while I pulled the plug and put out the smoldering sparks. Cats are unforgiving like that.
That’s all I knew about cats. That they can maul you and potentially burn down your house. And that’s all I cared to know, for the past 40 years.
But I’m the editor now of PRIME, a magazine full of stories for anyone older than 50 about how we’re never too old to learn. And when I noticed a cat from the neighborhood had begun to visit my backyard,
I wondered if this might be an opportunity to learn that I’d been all wrong about cats. That maybe we could be friends, too.
At first though, when I opened the sliding glass door, the cat just ran away. I assumed my reputation had preceded me.
I tried slowing down and opening the door at different speeds over the next few weeks, and the cat correspondingly began to slow down — before running away.
I called my old roommate — still a cat person — and asked whether she had advice. She sent over a bottle of food pellets, featuring Catnip Fever™.
The cat still ran away when I opened the door with the bottle, but I sprinkled some of the pellets onto a paper plate and left it. When I checked back a while later, the trademarked pellets were gone!
We played this cat-andhouse game for several more weeks, until she began to become accustomed to me stepping out of the house with food.
Then, one day, a breakthrough. While she was eating her pellets, I slowly reached out and touched the top of her head. And she didn’t run away!
Over the next few days, we expanded our entente — a pat here, a brush there, a few more pellets on her plate. Then, one morning, six weeks to the day after we’d started our pas de chat, she was sitting by the back door waiting for me to come out. Like a dog!
I call her Astrophe (as in catAstrophe). She likes to roll on her back and let me stroke the underside of her chin. My son, who has cats at his house, had said the surest sign you’ve earned a cat’s trust is when they close their eyes in your presence.
And she does!
“I don’t even have to bring her food anymore,” I said to my old roommate. “She’s always there, waiting for me.”
“You’ve made a friend for life,” she said.
I’d always been a dog person, but I must say, it’s a fine thing to make friends with a cat. Especially after the mistakes I’d made, assuming cats are like dogs.
I don’t think this could have happened earlier in my life. We need time to make our mistakes, and time to learn from them. I think back on mine 40 years ago, and hope the affected know I tried to do better.
Maybe. Dogs — and cats, too — are forgiving like that.