A: More humans around the Cat Sanctuary! More human food treats! Also, in our part of the world, around the time of the winter solstice we usually get a thaw, which is a great time to catch mice and crickets. We like all Winter Holidays! We wish there were more of them!
Q: So you agree with the humans who are in town today, wailing that they wish their vacations had been longer?
A: We would be in favor of more and longer vacations for all humans, except for hunters who make annoying noises and odors, scare away all the prey animals we hunt, and don't even give us any of whatever they catch--not that that kind usually catch anything. They shouldn't get any vacations. They should be kept indoors in city apartments.
PK: Actually, Samantha, Serena, and Traveller didn't protest my return to work as energetically as Heather, Irene, and company used to do. If I give them breakfast just before leaving the house, they seldom protest my leaving at all.
They enjoyed the thaw. Though bigger than some adult cats ever grow, they're all still growing kittens (Samantha is now the smallest), and they bounced and pounced, raced and chased, got in the way of my cutting up winter-killed wood and tried to warn me off going up to the barn.
Prezzies, including sardines, helped reconcile them to having human visitors. Even Burr came up to me to get a sardine out of the tin!
 |
| This is the way Burr looked during the last few weeks I got close enough to snap his picture or pet him. Many years have come and gone. |
For a Manx-mix he's not really big--Manx being one of the breeds in which some individuals revert to the thirty-pound size of their wild ancestors. Burr's healthy weight might be twelve pounds, but he looks as if he's been playing the "If you overfeed me constantly I might stay home more, maybe" game, and might now weigh as much as fifteen pounds. He's not been an involved father for Serena, the way his great-grand-uncle Mackerel was for his kittens, hanging out with the family and bringing them food treats.
He is social enough to be kind to kittens, though. Serena and Traveller showed by their behavior that this was the first time he'd come close to them. They were wary. I wondered whether he might try to molest Serena or attack Traveller. He did neither. In fact he and Trav ate sardines out of the same tin.
The morning after they had the ice cream, Samantha ate almost all of it. I wanted them to have some relatively healthy food first, so Samantha growled to her daughter and foster son, "Over there! The human is serving your breakfast! Go and eat it!" while she slurped up ice cream. Many adult cats develop lactose intolerance, as humans do, so a little later Samantha came to the office door complaining, "I feel sick."
 |
| Samantha, saying "This woodbin belongs to me." |
"Well, another time you'll know not to eat all the ice cream--there must have been two or three tablespoons, and you inhaled all but a couple of mouthfuls of it," I said. "Go to the sand pit and get rid of it and you'll feel better."
Samantha understands an uncanny amount of English. Not that she obeys any particular command; she ignored even "Come and get your kibble" while hogging the ice cream, and even when Emergent Queen Cat Serena explains it by slapping her, she pretends not to understand "Samantha, no! Stop that!" But this is the cat who refused to cooperate with being "sold," but completely cooperated with "coming home with me." She went directly to the sand pit, and probably did start to feel better.
Before I'd closed the door, however, she ran back to the door and nonverbally said "I still feel sick."
"Do you want charcoal?" I said.
Samantha headed toward the place where she'd last seen me put the bottle of powdered food-grade charcoal I use as first aid for food poisoning, then turned around and headed toward the place where she'd seen me store the cup of water into which I'd mixed a teaspoon of charcoal and put most of the cup aside for future cat needs. It would never have occurred to me to make that up.
So she took a dose of charcoal, and curled up on my knee and nonverbally said she felt better.
I started to get up and put her outdoors.
"Stay here," Samantha nonverbally said, growling and sticking just the very tips of her claws into my knee. (Any of the other Calico Divas would have purred and cuddled and licked my hand.)
So I petted her and fussed over her for a few minutes. "You still have little mats of dried-up ice cream in your fur. Do you want me to comb them out?"
"If you want to," Samantha nonverbally sighed.
So I combed her fur, and she didn't purr, audibly, but she did cuddle and cooperate until I hit a big mat right at the back of one ear.
"STOP THAT!" Samantha nonverbally said, by reaching up to grab the comb out of my hand. Then she added, "That hurt," by very carefully placing her paws on my hand and nipping the back of my hand, just nipping, not damaging the skin.
"Well, I'm sorry," I said, stroking the top of her head.
"I forgive you," Samantha nonverbally said. "Do you want to comb the fur on my throat too?" She said this by tilting her head and gently guiding my hand below her chin.
After a few more minutes Samantha decided she was ready to go out. When I opened the door, Serena came and stood in the doorway.
 |
| Before she was six months old Serena was big enough, and had more than enough attitude, to seem like a mature Queen Cat relative to ordinary American Shorthair cats such as Samantha. Here she was asserting her ownership of Samantha's Safe Place, although of course she still lets Samantha use it; she respects her mother. Although her tail now looks full-length and her legs have always looked proportionate to her size, it's still a relatively short tail on a chunky body. She's one-eighth Manx and still growing. |
"You're not sick?" I said. Serena, who had gobbled her dinner and been racing back and forth on the roof a few minutes before, nonverbally said she felt like a healthy, growing kitten. "But you want to be petted, too, do you?"
"Yes," Serena nonverbally said, bouncing up into my arms. Serena doesn't purr and cuddle. She wraps herself around my arm or leg, clawing and chomping in a friendly puppy-like way, to show affection. She was born that way. After a little clawing and chomping, what she really wants to do is dart away and have me chase her. She has been known to run up and slap or nip me, when I've been outdoors, and bound away, waving her tail like a flag. She knows I'm her Human Godmother, but as an only kitten she got plenty of mothering from her real mother, and what she wants other people to do is play with her. She's always been that way.
So I held Serena for a few minutes, during which she didn't do any actual damage to my skin, and then she bounced back onto the porch to see if Traveller wanted to play tag.
He didn't. He wanted to be cuddled too. Usually female kittens cuddle and males romp and play-fight, but in this cat family it's just the reverse. Traveller is the one who really wants to curl up on someone's knee and be stroked until he falls asleep.
 |
| Traveller, when photographed, was saying "Why are you snuggling an object up against your face when you could be snuggling me?" He was preparing to slap that camera! His coat is almost entirely black; his skin is almost entirely white. He was actually born three counties away from Serena, but everyone, probably including the kittens, thinks they must be full siblings. They adopted each other when they were seven or eight weeks old. Serena sweetly and gently persuaded Samantha to nurse Trav, too, until both kittens were completely weaned. |
I remembered, as I often do, how many times I've laughed at the notion that three-colored cats are "mean" or even "aggressive." The ones who've lived at the Cat Sanctuary, before Samantha, were "Calico Divas" who competed for attention in amusing, never violent, ways. Polly, Mogwai, and Heather were all great hunters--leaders of hunting teams--but gentle with other cats and indulgent with their kittens. The most gentle, lovable cat I ever knew, who didn't live at the Cat Sanctuary, was a tortoiseshell called Pippi; I wasn't sure Pippi even had claws, going by the way she behaved in the boardinghouse, until I saw her outdoors, hunting.
Cats with pale orange or "seal point" (pale brown) Siamese coats have seemed to me to share a certain temperament. These cats all started out as dingy-white kittens, their coats turning orange or brown only with exposure to sunlight, and every dingy-white kitten I've ever met hissed and spat at the first sight of me. Some kittens of this color even bite, the first time they're handled, and this can be a serious self-defense bite, drawing quite a lot of blood if they happen to strike a vein. If you ignore this initial aggression, by the second or third encounter the kittens usually decide they want to be friends. They're not mean; they're hypersensitive, probably a bit nervous, but they really want to be beloved pets, and if they're shown affection they will return that affection with interest. They'll follow you everywhere and meow until they're snuggled. Some of my Calico Divas, like Ivy, showed some tendencies in this direction, but never quite so strong as the cats who were "biscuit-colored" all over.
Barnie, whose basic color was "seal point," did seem to be a mean cat, and a hateful, sneaking, cowardly one as well. Pitt, whose coat was flat black, was polite to me and respectful to my resident cats, but he looked mean and I saw him do some things I'd call mean to non-resident cats. Samantha and Serena seem to share a different trait. I'm tempted to bang on about this because I see so much evidence that people, even cat rescuers, don't recognize the difference.
Serena, who has the healthy version of the trait, could fairly be called an aggressive cat in the good sense--an active, enthusiastic little predatory animal who likes to control her interactions with others. She's certainly a bundle of energy, and she can be rough...but I've never seen her intentionally hurt anyone. Kittens' teeth and claws are just long enough to scratch other cats, through their fur, in a pleasing way. They have to learn from patient, gentle, consistent correction how to control their teeth and claws if they want to caress humans in the way they do when showing affection to their mothers, mates, and young. Because Serena (and Traveller) have grown bigger, faster, than any other kittens I've known except Graybelle the giant Manx-mix, I've had to correct Serena many times. But all I have to do is push back into her mouth or paws and say, "Serena, that hurt." She's never worked herself up to the point where I've had to break off contact altogether, which is what you do to suppress serious roughness in kittens. She recognizes "That hurt" and never fails to back off, calm down, and nuzzle or lick my intact skin in a friendly, apologetic way. She has learned to calibrate her caresses faster than most kittens I've cuddled...possibly because she's been growing faster, and had to pay more attention to making sure her affection doesn't hurt me.
I don't let her show affection to other people. When visitors want to pet her I hold on to her and make sure they confine themselves to stroking the top of her head. She's a friendly cat at heart and seems to enjoy this; I just don't want her to start showing pleasure and returning affection to people who might not understand the way she does that to me.
Samantha, I think, started out bouncy-pouncy and fun-loving like Serena, and was then badly confused by humans who inconsistently (from her point of view) either encouraged or roughly over-punished her "playing just like a puppy." She does not completely trust me, or noticeably trust other people at all. She enjoys being groomed or petted, but she doesn't relax into it; she growls warily instead of purring, sometimes I can feel cold sweat on her paws, and if surprised in any way she'll bite and scratch.
It's always been a controlled, corrective, don't-make-me-really-hurt-you bite or scratch. I've never made Samantha really fight, as I suspect other humans may have done, in an attempt to "break" her--cats don't break well. But anyone who handles cats learns the difference. Corrective or playful bites produce surface wounds that heal without a scar in a day or two. An adult cat's serious bite goes down to the bones or tendons, and may need to be treated by a doctor. Even feral cats are remarkably reluctant to do this to humans, but even lifelong house pets are capable of doing it.
Samantha is not "aggressive," nor is she a "alpha" animal, at all. She's a small individual in a small species, and she knows it. She's so willing to defer to other animals that I've had to put food in separate dishes to make sure she gets a chance to eat her share. (Social cats eat out of the same dishes anyway, but putting out three dishes keeps the two bigger kittens from crowding Samantha out of whichever dish they're all using when Samantha is actually hungry.) She likes slapping and biting at toys--Traveller came with a selection of overpriced cat toys, which he's shared, and Samantha's had her share of fun with them. She slaps and bites at other cats or humans only in what she seems to perceive as self-defense.
I don't let other people pet Samantha unless I have a good hold on all of her paws. One false move, and anyone but an experienced cat handler would be screaming about that "mean" cat who "bit me when I was petting it."
Or, in the case of my mother, who was traumatized by sudden nips from a family pet as a child, and never completely trusted even docile, passive Calico Diva Irene: "They all shed and they all scratch things, but how you can staaand to put up with those two mean cats, and right after losing that Heather, who was at least a gentle pet...Samantha and Serena aren't even pets for you."
Heather had advantages toward becoming a gentle pet, and she used them. She grew up indoors. Her mother was, like Serena, more interested in romping than in cuddling, but never rough. More than that, she was born a social cat, with a capacity for empathy normal cats lack. Not only did Heather and her Calico Diva sisters instinctively know they could scramble up one side of me and down the other, when they were little kittens; they instinctively knew when they'd become too big to go on doing that. None of the cats in that litter ever hurt me, or any other human, so far as I know. In middle age, when cats take more and longer naps, Heather developed a Napping System that involved at least one afternoon or evening nap snuggled against my knee. Samantha looks a great deal like Heather from above, only smaller and slightly darker, but I don't know that she'll ever be comfortable enough to fall asleep while touching me--or that I'll ever feel that way about her.
Serena is definitely the alpha female. Serena understands the house rules and enforces them with gentle slaps when Samantha and Traveller break them. Only gentle slaps; they're all friends who eat out of the same dish if they can all get their noses into it, snuggle together in cold weather, and hunt squirrels together.
"But why are you clawing at my things?" I asked Serena over the holidays. "You're my sensible cat, our Emergent Queen. You know I don't like having my things shredded. Why are you trying to shred that book?"
"Because it smells of Burr," Serena nonverbally explained, pointing to a spot and sniffing, then clawing. "I don't want things on my porch to smell of anyone but us."
"Serena," I said, "you have a point. You've explained something I never quite understood about some other cats' reactions to only a few of the moldy books I leave on the porch or in the shed. You are a very clever kitten."
"Gurk," Serena said, slapping my hand with one soft paw, which I took to mean that she was pleased. She says "gurk" when she's showing affection by chomping gently on my hand, too.
"Aggressive" may be the word for these two three-colored females, but neither of them is "aggressive" in the sense of being quarrelsome, or domineering, or quick to anger.
They're not the cats you'll meet every day. Well, since when have I ever been attracted to the kind of cats, or dogs, or humans you meet every day! Samantha's and Serena's different personalities are a challenge for me to understand. They're not cats most people might want for pets--well, they can stay with me; other social cats are likely to come up for adoption next summer. Samantha Scaredycat and Queen Serena (ni Burr mac Irene ni Candice ni Bisquit ni Polly ni Patchnose) aren't even my pets in the sense that Heather, Irene, and Ivy were. But they are my friends--and they are not mean.
Animal rescuers should abandon the horrible practice of killing any cats who "show aggression" by biting or clawing when teased. These cats can and do become good companions for humans; some of them become very loving and gentle pets, like my Bisquit, who hissed at me when she was six weeks old and fawned on me for every day of the rest of her too-short life.
But you do have to be willing to understand why they're doing what they do, and why that may be annoying, inconvenient, painful for you, and/or positively neurotic for them--but not mean.
 |
| The human companions of the famous "Grumpy Cat" say that, despite the way its face looked to humans, the cat was actually a friendly, good-natured pet. |
No comments:
Post a Comment