Why do we love our pets?
Obviously the almost unconditional love dogs, cats, horses, and most chickens show to anyone who brings them food treats regularly is not the only attraction. We don't love all animals alike. We admire specific qualities in the individual animals we know. We love the big police dog who scares away evildoers while being just a playful puppy at heart, and the tiny Chihuahua who sits at our feet begging to be picked up, and the lap cat who always purrs and cuddles, and the tough old alley cat who occasionally deigns to sniff the hand that feeds him, in different ways, just as we love different friends and relatives.
And what do we love in our friends (human and otherwise) and relatives?
I was thinking about this yesterday. First the chap who does odd jobs for the neighborhood came into town. Nobody was paying him to do anything; he had errands to do, and thought he'd stop and see whether any money could be made along the way. I couldn't go anywhere, I said, because I'd promised to work for someone. Someone who didn't show up, and didn't show up, and finally rolled up the road at 2pm to say it was too late to do the job he'd planned for the day.
As an independent contractor I have a very simple fee system for odd jobs. Fifty dollars a day for scheduled work, a hundred dollars for those who want to pop in when they feel like it and see whether I have time to work for them. Because popping up at the last minute is always more trouble than doing a job as planned and scheduled. Always. Without exception. No matter how much I need the money, or enjoy the work, or even enjoy your company. I do enjoy the company of most of the people for whom I work, but they are a lot more enjoyable when they show enough respect for themselves and for me to make plans and stick to them.
This thought led me to further reflections on the difference between the way introverts naturally, instinctively make friends by showing respect for other people, and the way extroverts try to force friendship by grabbing for control of everyone's moods.
I've been reading, seriously, a trilogy of novels by a Christian who re-visions a man--not Jesus, but a great saint who chooses to serve as a reflection of Jesus--who does what Jesus did, in a modern, mostly Christian society, and, well, the difference is that we no longer crucify people, so this man gets shot. I'm reading these stories with this controversial premise because the author's e-mails have convinced me over the years that she's a serious Christian who wants to provoke serious self-examination in churches and individuals.
In the novel, the people who take the place of Judas and Caiaphas are a family who seem sad more than bad, at first. They were a typical suburban nuclear family: father, mother, son, daughter. Then the mother died. None of the other family members can be blamed for the fatal car crash but, over the years, they've all dumped their bad feelings on each other and failed to make peace afterward. They've formed habits of emotionally abusive conversation that bring out their most unpleasant feelings, under the influence of which they make the bad choices that eventually lead to a conspiracy to murder a friend. Yes. If we take our emotional moods seriously, they can lead us to make bad choices.
So, should Christians, or people of good will generally, try to fix our emotional feelings so that they don't lead us to make bad choices? I don't think that's the best approach. Psychotherapists have traditionally fed attention to buried emotions, to help people who have buried emotions and memories come to terms with what is really troubling them and making them "neurotic." For some people who have in fact buried emotions and memories, that approach has been helpful. For most of us, who remembered all of the major emotional crises in our pasts, who may have "uncovered buried memories" of things that obviously did not happen after using drugs that are known to generate pseudomemories congruent with the damage the drugs do to the sensory-motor nerves, it's not helpful. Someone who really has managed to suppress all memories of having had painful surgical operations as a baby or having lost a parent at age six might really need to feel the emotions that come with those memories (or even with present-time reimaginings of what they might have been) to feel emotionally whole. For more of us, however, the emotions that went with everything from that bad case of flu we had at age four, on up through the school friend telling other people the big secret we told person in grade eight, all the way to the person who thinks person can get away with the ludicrous lawsuit person has filed against us now, have never been buried. They've been felt and faded out of our awareness. Dragging them back up to try to feel those emotions all over again does not fix them, nor does it stop us feeling fear, anger, or grief in new situations. We can't fix our emotions because they're not meant to be fixed. Like our physical sensations, they serve a purpose; they bring things to our attention, and then they fade away, replaced by more current "feelings" about the new conditions around us.
Both sensations and emotions can, of course, be "false," as symptoms of unhealthy conditions, in and of themselves. We feel pain when our sensory nerves deliver the message that our bodies are being damaged. We feel angry when our unconscious brains deliver the message that a situation is harmful and needs to be changed, anxious when the message is that the situation is harmful and we need to flee, depressed when the message is that the situation is harmful and can't be improved by anything we might do. Any of those messages may be inaccurate. Pain may be felt as if it were coming from the foot the surgeon just cut off, not because anything is now being done to the foot, but because the nerves are recovering from having been cut. Anger or anxiety may be felt as if a situation were harmful when it's not. Even happiness might be "false"--when we receive what feels like good news, and it's not true.
It's not easy for most young people, but it is a valuable life skill to develop, to route all "feeling" messages through the logical part of our brains. Think through those "feelings." Identify the facts and deal with them. Merely thinking about the facts will usually do a lot to distract us from unpleasant feelings. The facts may be very unpleasant and the unpleasant feelings may be there to stay for a long time. A broken leg is not going to win any athletic awards for at least a few months. A departed friend is gone forever and, no matter how many other people we like on how many different levels of friendship, But learning to focus on the facts can reduce the intensity of the pain we feel.
The young sometimes fear that learning to focus on the facts will push them prematurely into the future, making them the dreaded Older Person Who Has No Feelings. The physical process of "feeling" does involve hormones. The hormones that dominate most young people's attention are released into the blood at different levels on different days, and those levels drop significantly with age. The hormones associated with other things, like pain, food, nature, music, sleep, and doting on grandchildren, seem to be more reliable. People who have learned to Fix Facts First and let Feelings Follow can consider a situation, conclude that the relevant facts are very nice, just as they are, and choose to wallow in pleasure. Women in the generation before mine might not have admitted they wallowed in the pleasure of sex, and their denial may even extend to not liking the phrase, but most of them did unmistakably wallow in the pleasure of being grandmothers.
The trouble is that some unfortunate people, namely extroverts, want to imagine that whatever other people are feeling is all about them. They are the center of the universe! (They think!) Someone else may have a tooth cracked right along a raw, bare nerve--dental surgery is not always perfect--but that person has no right to be more conscious of per tooth than person is of ME AND MY WONDERFUL SELF!
Part of the twentieth century's attempt to make civilized society over as a support group for people who, in previous ages, probably would have been considered idiots if they survived at all, has been this obsession with good feeling at the expense of good will. It's become positively predictable that people writing about the benefits of kindness, nowadays, urge people to grin and chatter like monkeys rather than advising them to show good will through voluntary behaviors like paying debts, being on time, and doing good work.
"Smile! It makes people feel good!" Oh, those poor people these writers seem to know. What ever would they do without these writers to manage their emotional moods for them? In previous centuries writers on etiquette advised people not to smile or laugh without explaining what they were laughing at. That advice may not sound as cheerful, but it seems to me more helpful, than the exhortations to try to force a "smile." In the first place a forced smile doesn't even look like the real thing. Then there's the genuine smile or laugh that, if not shared or at least explained, looks like a heartless laugh at someone else's distress. And then there's the fact that it's not my business, not even my place, to "make" you feel anything, nor is it appropriate for you to eset out to make me feel anything. Nobody likes being manipulated.
People who are in fact friends tend to smile and laugh easily when they are together. If they were taught not to laugh without explaining what they were laughing at, as C.S. Lewis observed, "some pretext in the way of jokes is usually provided." but the jokes didn't need to be "good" enough to make people laugh when they weren't rejoicing in the company of friends. Or, if a friend is just a bit selfconscious and might think we were laughing at, e.g., her clumsiness with her new prosthetic leg, there might be some pretext in the way of an explanation: "It was the way you said 'beach.' I've missed you and going to the beach with you so much for so long. It's good to see you back here."
I enjoy smiling and laughing with friends as much as anyone else does but I'm annoyed by those exhortations to the ignorant to try to be a manipulator rather than a person who is really worth knowing--someone who pays debts and arrives on time and drives responsibly and doesn't litter and generally shows respect for self and others every day. I need no more monkeylike grinning and chattering in my life. Monkeys aren't even my favorite exhibit in the zoo. If you want to be someone at whom I laugh in sheer delight, saying, "It's so good to see you again," don't take monkeys or even television actors as role models. Take men and women of good character.
Responsibility, which can be expected only from adults, and respect for others, which is normally shown by children and animals too, are part of the good character of anyone a self-respecting introvert wants for a friend. The other things we like about our friends vary. To people of High Sensory Perceptivity every close relationship probably feels different from every other close relationship. If we have six sisters, there might be two or three for whom we have very similar feelings--"the little ones" who came along after we had emotionally or even physically moved out on our own; the ones with whom we grew up are as different from one another as A from B.
And so it is likely to be with animals. Animals who aren't real pets may seem interchangeable. Some people don't give names to chickens; most people don't give names to wild animals that share their homes. Some people don't give names to cats. Almost all people give names to horses and dogs. It seems as if the differences among bigger animals' "personalities" are more easily noticed than the differences among smaller animals.
I suspect this applies even to large animals that don't have a great deal of "personality," like cows. I remember a year when my parents boarded a total of four cows, two or three at a time. They weren't pets but each one seemed to be a distinct "person."
For those who pay attention, it most definitely applies to cats. Serena, who was born a dominant female, and her daughter Silver, who has put up with Serena all these years because she's not at all dominant, are a nice complementary pair. One factor in Silver's having been such a dutiful daughter was probably that for several years, while he was alive, Silver had a real pair bond with the senior cat I called Sommersburr; after he died Silver went to live with another social cat, and when he, too, disappeared Silver came home. She lived with different humans and became accustomed to different arrangements; this has led to some behavior that seems almost like delayed adolescence. Both cats are middle-aged ladies by now, usually polite and decorous, but not altogether above mischief and silliness.
"Where's Serena got to? Oh there you are," I'm likely to say, not every single day but probably on more than half of our days. Serena blinks slowly at me, a gesture that seems to indicate trust and affection. "I love you, Serena," I say, blinking back.
"Gurk," Serena may or may not actually say. It's a sound she makes, not a mew or a meow. It means "Let's have a good fast game."
I may or may not run a few yards up and down the road, or trail a stick around the yard, for Serena to chase. It means "I like you enough to try to tell you I like you in your preferred love language."
Most readers of this web site already live with animals who exchange messages of good will, trust, affection, and yes, even family love with them regularly. Some of you blog about them; some don't. I count several of your animals as e-friends: Mudpie, who started the whole Petfinder photo theme at this web site. Suzy and Toots and Old Buddy at the Meow. Mr. Baby Sir. Link Linker the Stinker. Loulou and her friend the alley cat. Louis the kayak cat, who recently bequeathed his place to a younger Maine Coon cat. Rolf the Campus Cat. Abby Lab, heir of Barkley. Winston of the Scottie Chronicles. And (may he rest in peace) Valentino the handsome hound. They're all privileged pets, Internet celebrities, spokes-creatures for good causes. Then there's Javier Reinoso's social cat colony in Venezuela, which everyone should follow and support to whatever extent their finances allow...
They are all hungry, homeless, deeply lovable social cats who live in peace, on small rations of food, on city streets. Sometimes there are dozens of them. They don't have humans to help groom their coats. They seem to do that for one another. I worry about cat colonies of this size. Social cats are by far more interesting than normal cats, but they are more vulnerable to contagious diseases because they live in family groups who share food and may sleep in heaps. Donations can help buy food to maintain strong immune systems and vaccines against FIV, FLV, and rabies.
So why, you may ask, do I subject these readers to appeals on behalf of animals they can't adopt? Because there are things we can do for the animals we can't adopt. We can help boost their signals by reblogging their stories and sharing their photos on social media. We can even, after careful investigation of a rescue organization, pre-pay part of the adoption fee to make it easier for people to offer them homes.
Mudpie started it with a blog post about a cat her human couldn't adopt. Heather, who was Queen of the Cat Sanctuary before Serena, encouraged me to keep it up. (She didn't really engage with the animal photos but she did purr and cuddle on my lap while I was writing about them.) Serena...developed more tolerance for the laptop computer when she was ill enough to spend days indoors, but it's still more a thing she indulges me in than a thing she actually does with me. She does, as Heather did, seem to hope all these shelter animals find good homes, a good long way from here. For although social cats, like dogs, are able to increase hunting success by hunting as teams, they still instinctively avoid crowded conditions.
Here are some photogenic animals seeking homes in the Eastern States, guaranteed by people who've lived with them to be easy to love.
Zipcode 10101: Tiramisu from NYC
Tira mi su is Italian for "pick me up," often used as a name for a sweet snack, also a name for a friendly kitten. Tiramisu likes to be picked up and petted. Five months old in February, she's only just ready to take over a home of her own. She's not been around children, but she behaves well around other cats and dogs.
Pickles from NYC
https://www.petfinder.com/dog/pickles-e7eefcbc-2600-4b8f-aeab-67c38a798dac/ny/new-york/linus-friends-fl1765/details/
He's a lap dog. Chihuahuas don't need much more space than cats--they can get adequate exercise as indoor pets--and they can live as long as cats do. Pickles is described as just a puppy. He's not yet house trained and they don't know how well he behaves around children, but he gets along with other dogs and cats. He likes to play and explore and snuggle up to his human for a nap, and has been known to lick people's toes. That would be a deal breaker for me, but somebody Out There will love it.
Zipcode 20202: Cordelia from South Carolina by way of DC
They say she's a small, quiet, young cat, probably as big as she's meant to be, looking for a place where she can feel safe. She can ride along with someone from South Carolina who drives up and down the coast weekly, or you can come there to meet her.
Alice from DC
There is still an oldfashioned animal shelter on Oglethorpe Street. Alice is there. Go ask Alice and she'll tell you she wants a good home. She's still a puppy who needs training. She is described as goofy, eager, and affectionate.
Zipcode 30303: Shiraz from Chattanooga
This kitten is a future Queen Cat. They don't insist that she be adopted along with a loyal subject who doesn't need a great deal of attention, but it would probably be a good idea. Shiraz is described as sweet and sassy. She'll snuggle beside you for a nap, and let you know when it's time to play. She does well with other cats ,dogs, and children, if they've been taught to show due respect.
Sasha from Pennsylvania by way of Atlanta
The adoption fee is ridiculous and the organization sound a bit control-freaky, but the pup is adorable. Ten weeks old when photographed, Sasha is thought to be a mix of Labrador Retriever and German Shepherd. Those are large breeds, as indicated by her size in this baby picture. Her ideal home has a big yard with a high fence. Obviously Sasha has a lot to learn. A ten-week-old dog is a baby and can't be considered "trained" in any sense of the word. Really she ought to be with her mother. But she's described as bright, goodnatured, affectionate, eager to please. She could grow up to be an awesome dog.
