Currently living in New Jersey, the colorful Betty White has run up a substantial vet bill that includes even dental care. Reminding me of a comment on a book this web site reviewed last winter: At the end of the main story of Upon Destiny's Song, the teenaged Ane Marie has completed a long hard adventure of her own, standing on her own little frostbitten feet. Ahhh, I like that in a novel. Women choose our own adventures in life and very few of our adventures involve being rescued by men. However, Ane Marie's story stretches forward through and beyond the end of her lifetime, and after she walks into Salt Lake City to start working she runs up some bills, from which her husband gets a chance to prove his love and rescue her. Fair enough, I suppose. Well, Betty White Cat has run up bills from which you may now rescue her. Details are at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/betty-white-54889076/nj/jersey-city/jerseycats-nj638/ .
...to their credit, they're willing to let you "foster" Auburn before you go all the way to "adopting" her. She's described as a beautiful kitten with a lot of personality. Details are at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/auburn-54699528/va/alexandria/tails-high-inc-va540/ .
She's described as both athletic and a couch potato, which is hard to picture, but she's adolescent so she probably cycles between the extremes. Her Petfinder address is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/papaya-52901336/ga/atlanta/southern-animal-rescue-ga653/ .
This is the way my human remembers me best...sort of like the way the senior human used to remember my human having once weighed seven pounds and five ounces. As a grandmother cat I've grown into the queenly attitude I had as a four-month-old kitten. Not that I'm fat...I'm a large cat relative to cats in general, but not at all large for a Manx cat, which some of my ancestors were. I'm active and healthy.
Hello, obviously I, Cat Queen Serena, am not the
one typing this post. That is a human’s job. Nevertheless I am the source of
these ideas, and entitled to a by-line, just as Jim Babka was the source of
most of the post titled “What’s Statesploitation?”. My human is typing these
thoughts while I am basking in the sun, this St Patrick’s Day, watching over my
kittens. It is still March, but it’s warm enough for us to keep our kittens
warm in their nest space on the porch.
“What do you say to this, Serena?” she asked,
looking at something on the Lap Pooper (http://www.michellesmirror.com/2022/03/time-time-time.html). Much to my disappointment it’s never
actually pooped on her lap yet.
“Throw it out,” I said, as so many times before. I
don’t like the Lap Pooper. I see no use for it. The Real Computer at least
generates heat, which is useful in winter, but the Lap Pooper is what the
humans call a late model with the Energy Star, which means it hardly ever even
feels warm.
“Well, it’s only a cartoon, so it might not make
sense to you anyway. This man lives with a fat cat who he says is always
standing on his table and showing him its back end. That’s not something you’ve
ever done, but if you saw a cat doing it, what would that mean to you?”
So I exercised my powers of mind control to remind
her of some general truths more humans need to understand about cats.
1. Pay
attention.
As a cat who grew up in a human’s office room I
believe humans must have some kind of consciousness, though it must be very
different from ours. The ridiculous and revolting things they choose to eat
seem to meet their species-specific nutrient needs. Humans need less taurine
and more of something called Vitamin C than cats do, so it no longer amazes me
that my human will reject a prime-grade,
freshly killed mouse, and eat disgusting pineapple instead. Humans are
apparently designed to digest pineapple so it must taste nice to them.
Still, even humans can learn some things. Do they enjoy being grabbed and stroked by every new
acquaintance they meet? Why, then, do they seem to imagine that cats enjoy
that? Some of us are willing to indulge the humans we love. Some of us didn’t
get enough snuggling as kittens and really do crave snuggles. Some of us use
touch to get our humans’ attention in a polite, friendly way. Then there are
those of us who really don’t like having to wash human odor off our coats, at
all, and are likely to go feral if we think we’re tough enough.
I like to sniff my human, of whom I am very fond
actually, and then tell her when, where, and whether she’s allowed to touch me.
Her own personal scent is at least familiar to me, and bearable, when she
washes herself with water not soap. Some of the scents humans pick up in the
natural course of events,. like food, are very nice. Most of the things humans
use to disguise their natural odors are disgusting.
Those of us who live with humans spend our days trying to tell them everything they really need to know about life. We know humans are not built to be able to understand everything, but they can learn a lot if they pay attention.
2. If you
want to be heard, try listening.
Again, do humans always come when they are called?
Do they recognize their names? Most cats who live with humans give their humans
names, but most humans don’t respond to those sounds differently than they
respond to anything else their cats say. So why do they expect cats to figure
out that somewhere in the general natter of noises humans make, there might be
something like a a name a humans has given to one of us?
It's always been my belief that humans and cats can learn to talk to each other, in a
limited way, even though each species is designed to make a different set of
sounds. I taught my human to recognize a small set of spoken words, similar to
the noises humans make, and she seemed to “translate” those words into human
noise and respond to a few simple commands fairly consistently after just a few
weeks’ training. But if we work out anything close to a common language with a
member of a different species, our own species think that is strange and
question our relationship with our alien friends. So we seldom even try. Siamese cats, which some of my ancestors were, are known as the most likely to try to work out an audible "language" for communicating with humans. Long ago, back in ancient Siam, legend says there was an Ancient Thai human who understood everything cats said to it.
Most cats don't bother trying to talk to a creature that can't even figure out that it has a name. Among ourselves we do more of our talking with gestures and postures, facial expression, scent, and touch. We are more likely to try to train humans to understand things the way we naturally say them, so humans can "listen" to us using their senses of sight and touch. Those senses seem closer to ours than whatever sense of hearing humans have.
3. Feasting
has consequences—for cats or humans.
Once in a while, nearly all of us like to eat all
we can hold, especially when something tastes specially good. Then what
happens? We lie around digesting the feast. We don’t want to eat very much, or
at all, until it’s been digested. We may overeat to the point of feeling grumpy
or sick, and don’t let anyone dare poke
at our middles, even if we’re lying about bulging up into the air. One huge
binge of a meal may be fun, but we don’t want to pig out again the next day!
Some foolish people—both cats and humans—lack that
warning sense that tells them that “once is better than twice” when it comes to
indulging any carnal appetite. They are easy to spot. Their midsections bulge
even when they’re not pregnant. They’re not comfortable in their bodies. They
don’t move gracefully, or enjoy movement. They develop all sorts of disease
conditions, and tend to have short unsatisfactory lives.
Why humans get into this condition is not clear. What’s
to keep them from going out for a
good walk whenever they need one?
When cats do, it’s usually because some human has
tried to change our nature so that we won’t want to go out and explore the
world. Not that we want to explore very far; we’re built for short bursts of
speed but not for long-distance travel. But we like to know what’s outside any
wall we might be inside. To change this some humans try to tempt cats with one
feast after another until they find themselves living with a great bloated
grumpy pile of flab covered in fur. Even the fur of such a cat is likely to be
rough and unsatisfactory to the touch, not that the wretched animal inside can
enjoy being touched anyway. Cats in this condition can usually be cured by
offering less food and more exercise, but their humans may not be willing to do this.
Humans who want to live with active, healthy cats
won’t live in places where the cats can’t explore and hunt naturally. I don’t know
what that means for those who want to live in Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand,
or other places where cats aren’t native and our hunting endangers rare
valuable species. Some might say that since humans have already introduced
invasive nuisance rodents into those places, the least they can do is import
cats to control the rodents. Others might just as reasonably wail that they
don’t want either cats or rats to
kill all the kakapos—whatever those are. (The human says they’re a sort of
large greenish bird, which sounds like something you’d see in a nightmare after
eating a bird that died of aspergillosis.) Humans are safer when they live with
cats, so maybe it’s best that humans just choose to live in places where bigger
felines were native. When we human-friendly house cats are displacing the
so-called big cats in the local food chain, everyone wins. We hunt the same
creatures the big cats do, but we’re smaller and slower, and let more of them
survive. That leaves more prey for humans, and humans obviously enjoy killing
prey more than we do; they kill all sorts of animals they don’t even want to
eat.
Sometimes humans who are old and ill themselves
want an old, dozy cat to curl up on the couch or bed and help keep them warm.
That can work well for both parties if the humans can find an old, dozy cat to
begin with. Old, dozy cats sometimes need medication and are put in shelters by
humans who don’t want the bother or expense of looking after them. Shelters are
often eager to place these cats and, if the cats accept new humans, the cats
probably have a good idea which part of the bed or couch is best for napping
on. This kind of family will need a healthier person to clean the house daily
to prevent flea infestations. If they have that, the arrangement can work.
Bonus Petfinder cat: Here's Lucy, an old, dozy cat from Tennessee who needs medication and absolutely has to be in a safe place indoors where she can snooze out of reach of predators.
Lucy Locket lost her pocket; Lucy the pale calico cat has lost her claws. Not many cats have had this cruel surgical procedure done these days, but Lucy has.
(When my daughter Silver claws at the door, my human clips Silver's claw tips just as she trims her own nails. This can be dangerous for some people who might want to try it at home, so let's mention that, if you humans reading this have trouble seeing which part of a cat's claw is the quick and which is the dead tissue, our claws can also be filed down--if we can stand the sound of a nail file! But Silver has learned to sit still for a pawdicure. Having the dead ends of claws clipped doesn't hurt.)
Lucy is also diabetic so her medication requires close supervision, for a cat. She impresses the shelter staff as a very sweet alley cat who is really grateful to those who treat her more kindly than some humans she has known. Though her picture came up on a search for senior cats in zipcode 40404, Kentucky, she is in Clarksville, Tennessee. Her Petfinder page is at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/lucy-47205279/in/clarksville/purrfect-friends-for-adoption-inc-in368/ .
Humans or cats who overeat and become fat are likely to develop diabetes. Then they become thin and ill, and have to spend a lot of time and money controlling this disease before it kills them. Laziness, grumpiness, and an urge to shove our strongest odors right into other people's faces are early warning signs of this disgusting disease.
4. The back
view is what you get when you don’t seem to understand the front.
Most of the polite things we cats say to one
another can be said face to face. We use gestures, facial expressions,
postures, and scents (mostly the subtle scents called pheromones) more often
than sounds. Sounds are mostly for talking to humans. Of course some of our
sounds are reserved for other cats—courting and fighting “words”—but we use
those much less often.
Sometimes we display our back ends to make a
message painfully obvious. Soft yet
obvious, polite scent messages come from our faces and are picked up when we
kiss one another in greeting. Messages from our back ends are harder to ignore,
so if people are determined to ignore what we’re telling them we’re likely to
show them our back ends. How rude is this? Maybe like rolling your eyes up when
other humans say the stupid things they say. Maybe like saying “What part of
‘no’ don’t you understand?” or “Repeat after me...” “Read my lips...” “For the tenth time...”
Also, sometimes we show our back ends to one
another, and if our intimate cat associates want to answer us back they’ll sniff at our back ends, or
even shove their faces up against us. This is not what it looks like to humans.
Couples are not more likely to do it than siblings are. Humans probably
wouldn’t understand what this exchange of gesture “words” means in most of the
contexts where it’s observed. Usually some sort of territorial or status
dispute is going on so a translation might be “Sez you?”—“Sez I,” or “Move
it.”—“Make me.” It’s like giving the other cat a choice whether to let a
disagreement escalate or let it drop. Humans might see this happen when cats
are working out whose pet that individual human is going to be, or how much lap
time each cat gets if we’ve agreed to take turns for lap time. My human says some long-ago cats called Minnie and Pepper used to do it when bickering about which of them should lead the procession, and which should walk closest to her, as they led her around the yard.
It’s not something that’s happened here, or is
likely to, but when cats overeat we do release surplus gas. In that case, if a human were trying to
communicate with an overfed cat who preferred to go on digesting a heavy meal,
the back view of that cat might say “Can’t you smell what I’m doing? Leave me alone.”
Occasionally we use our back ends to scent-mark a
human to send a message to other cats. If traces of our fur aren’t enough to
tell other cats which humans are ours, or
if we think the other cats smell interesting and we’d like them to visit us, we might want to make our scent on a human stronger. Sometimes an exuberant young male cat will mark his human’s legs the
same way he marks the gateposts, doorways, and other features around his home. Usually
we prefer just to encourage humans to scratch that hard-to-reach spot just
above the tail joint. Sometimes it itches, and always it leaves a very clear
scent message on their hands and laps.
Rarely do we social cats at the Cat Sanctuary show our human our back ends. We do, however, show them to our mates. In that context, the message may not be subtle, but it’s not rude.
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