Serena, the classic calico queen cat, tends to take over. Below you see her having taken over two of her adult daughter's three kittens, last summer. All three kittens were born to the smaller adult cat in the background but we see who is "mothering" two of them.
She knows the word "soon." By the time her grandkittens were photographed, above, she'd taught them about "soon" also. Recently I was feeding someone else's pets, and I caught myself feeling disappointed that they didn't stop nonverbally screaming "Feed me! Feed me now! Feed ME first! No, ME first!" when I said "I'll bring your food out soon."
Y'mean all animals don't know the word "soon"? Oh wait...
Then I came online and somebody had to top this story with the claim that their cat came from a shelter having already learned the word "stay." I've tried, but never been able to teach a cat to "stay."
Anyway Serena tends to linger on my mind and generate Cat Sanctuary Interview posts.
In a clear case of synchronicity, I found this link...
https://www.purina.com/about-purina/better-with-pets/pet-welfare/domestic-violence-shelters/redrover
...shortly after hearing a reportedly true story of domestic emotional abuse. In order to make the story come out so that the husband had been the one to file for divorce, while he was out of town on a long-term temporary job, the wife packed up and left town for a long vacation...leaving the dog in their home. If any food or water had been left for the dog, it didn't last the dog long. The husband came home first and found that the dog had tried very hard to claw its way out at every wall, door, and window before dying of thirst.
The husband, and the wife's family, really didn't believe in divorce and tried other changes. New house. New dog. Counselling. Still, the wife had had a secret from her parents, not so secret from her husband, for years: she'd been "in love" with someone else's husband all along, and really wanted to manipulate the man she'd married into filing for divorce. She took the new dog to the vet, falsely reported that it was ill, and had that dog put down.
Serena: You've threatened to put us in Cat Jail, at times. Is there a human jail?
PK: Every county and city has one.
Serena: Why don't you go and put that human in it?!
PK: This happened long ago and far away. But humans have been put in jail for doing things like that, more recently.
Serena: Not for just a few hours, like us?
PK: Probably they should be locked up for the rest of their lives but, these days, more people are starting to feel that animal abusers should stay in jail for months or years.
Serena: What's the matter with a human like that, anyway? Does it have rabies?
PK: Things can go wrong with the human brain. When some humans are trying to keep a terrible secret by not allowing themselves to feel what they feel about it, they can become badly confused. This woman was trying so hard not to let her parents know how badly she'd fallen short of their standards that she felt desperate and wanted to do anything that would hurt her husband. This man admitted that he was trying so hard not to hit or scold his wife that when he went to work, he slacked off on the job, quarrelled with other men, and even threatened the boss's life.
Serena: We cats lose patience with our mates every time we start new kittens. We just slap them and tell them to go away. Why was that not enough for these humans?
PK: I don't know. When I had a mate, we lost patience with each other now and then. We didn't even have to slap each other. We'd catch our voices and blood pressure starting to rise, and one of us would say "I'm out of here!" Once in a while one of us stayed out late enough that the other started to worry, but we always came home before bedtime. Some humans don't seem to think that clearly. Sometimes hurting or killing another animal, or a child, is a way to threaten someone we want to harm, or practice what we're thinking about doing to that other human.
Serena: I wouldn't let a cat stay here if things went that far wrong with its brain.
PK: Sometimes humans' complicated brains keep us from exercising as much common sense as any other animal has. Then again, sometimes our long life spans give us time to recover after things go wrong with us. After some years and a lot of counselling, that man and that woman started acting like reasonable humans again. They married other people, had children, and grew old and respectable. When we don't drive humans away or kill them, it's usually because we hope that they'll improve with age.
Serena: How many other animals are humans allowed to kill before you put them in jail?
PK: Well, we try to help people just separate before anyone is killed. That's the point of having shelters for humans. Sometimes what it takes to stop humans abusing each other is for one of them to disappear; sometimes that's enough to stop the more dangerous one attacking the other one. But sometimes one human will know that she (it's nearly always the female) needs to get away from the other, yet she's afraid that, if she leaves, the other human will harm the children. Or the other animals in the family. So she goes on letting the more violent human beat her up and tries not to go out of the house until the wounds heal. Sometimes she chooses to fight back with sneaky little acts of revenge or verbal abuse, instead of breaking the pattern. When some humans become violent, that kind of thing only inflames them more and makes them more abusive, so the beatings get worse and worse.
Serena: What is wrong with those humans? If a human ever hit us, we'd leave and never come back!
PK: Believe it or not, some humans don't know how to survive on their own. Or they become so attached to money and luxuries that they don't want to separate from someone who is rich. Sometimes worrying about another animal, even if the animal is in no danger, can be a way of clinging to the luxuries the richer person provides. Sometimes being able to take the animal with them, when they go, can help them deal with their fears. Some people can be horribly afraid of sleeping alone. This might come from feeling guilty about what they've done...in any case, being close to their dog or cat can help them work through their fears and wait and see whether the abuser improves with age.
Not that every separation needs to last overnight. Many people would be better off if they could just learn to say, "I don't want to quarrel with you, so I'm taking the dog and the children to spend the rest of the day with their aunt." That might be enough to break the pattern. When people think about depending on society-as-a-whole to help them separate, they think about complaining to the police, someone going to jail, losing their homes, losing their jobs, having to put up with tiresome strangers at a shelter, and sometimes they decide their quarrels aren't really all that bad. Then again, sometimes the quarrels are all that bad, and the animal is in danger.
So, this campaign of Purina's may sound like a silly rich chick's charity...and then again, it might save someone's life. Some human's life.
