Feline Friday: Cats and Mental Health

Time for another Cat Sanctuary Interview...animals' lines are "real" in the sense of being freely translated from the animals' observed behavior. I'm stone-cold sober when I write these things. I use my Irish gift for getting "high" enough to be whimsical, imaginative, and silly on words alone. 

Since this post is going into a new link-up, let's start with a bit of introduction. My home has been dedicated as a Cat Sanctuary, in memory of a fantastic cat, for about thirty years. For me that means almost the opposite of a shelter. I do have a few cages for transients and sick patients, but most of the time the cats here are purrmanent residents who live on and under the porch. There's no paved road within the quarter-mile radius female cats normally patrol, so they're safe outdoors. If they were bird hunters I'd be trying to relocate them into situations as indoor cats in town, but I don't believe that all or most animals need to be indoor pets in town. I don't believe that all or most humans need to live in town, either, actually.

The resident cats are a social cat family. Cat families, when they exist, basically consist of females who have learned that cooperation boosts their survival. Males may or may not be part of the main group and may or may not be allowed to interact with the young. Lions and cheetahs typically live in families. Our house cats' wild ancestors typically don't, but a minority of domestic cats do form cooperative family groups. 

The ancestors of my resident cat family attracted attention, and were rescued instead of being persecuted, because they were social cats living in an alley in a nearby town. Because social cat families are interesting, most of them have been allowed to reproduce naturally--no, they don't overpopulate. The current Queen Cat Serena represents the seventh generation of the family.

Serena never photographed well; this kitten picture is the first I ever snapped of her and the only one that came out well. Let's just say that she's more than twice that size, now, but her calico coat and imperious air haven't changed. 

Silver is also much bigger than she was in this kitten picture. Some social cats don't form a strict status hierarchy. Serena and her daughters have one. Silver definitely outranks her younger sisters, and Serena is definitely the boss.

There are no pictures of the junior cats Pastel and Crayola, a pale calico and a classic calico like Serena, respectively. There is no picture of Sommersburr, a neighbor's big old neutered tomcat whom the four females, especially Silver, love and pamper. 

Partly because it irritates the whimsy-challenged, I've formed a habit, or a blog tradition, of writing my cat observations in the form of dialogues, thusly:

PK: "Serena, our friends at the Purina company, who sponsor the Petfinder web site, just e-mailed about May being 'Mental Health Month.' What if anything does that mean to you?"

Serena: "My mind is healthy every month."

PK: "I don't have much to say about 'Mental Health Month' either. For a psychology major I think I have a fairly healthy mind. My original goal in studying psychology was to write about how we can use diet and exercise to regulate our moods. My original goal in life was to be a writer; since colleges wanted English majors to have a good solid minor, I considered a few other job-related courses, including my very first trade school course in word processing, and finally settled on psychology after observing how much a good meal and night's sleep did for desperate students' mental health. Since I never finished my degree it's nice to be able to report that people like Katherine Desmaisons have done the research and written the books I wanted to write when I was in college. Let's just say that I've never felt particularly interested in major learning disabilities or mood disorders. I was interested in the fact that there's a simple cure for many cases of anxiety, depression, and distractibility. I wanted to run with that, and I sort of did...with a trade school certificate in massage, not a BS or MS in psychology. I was thinking seriously about a dietitian's course, though, when both parents became ill at the same time and that distracted me from the whole idea of finishing a four- or five-year degree.

Nearly all the people I've ever liked are introverts. That means that when we were younger we used to be told that something was deeply wrong with our mental health, and deep down most of us always knew better. Now that we know that introversion is produced by a permanent physical trait, everyone is having to admit that it's a good trait, that it's looking more as if the absence of introversion may be the 'problem' for the poor souls who want to chatter at other people all the time and never want to go home and work on a project of their own. When I was a young psych major I didn't expect the scientific facts would have vindicated my friends and family and me the way they've done; that's been one of life's little bonuses."

Serena: "All cats are more like introvert humans than we are like extrovert humans, if we have to be compared with humans at all. Some of us are, however, more social than others. Some of us really want to stay in our own homes, with our own humans, all the time..."

PK: "Have you anything to say to an e-friend of mine..."

Serena: "E-friends again! You spend too much time petting that Lap Pooper when you ought to be outside doing useful things for me!"

PK: "The laptop computer brings in a fair bit of the kibble around here."

Serena: "Oh, well...I have no use for it, anyway."

PK: "Anyway, this e-friend knew some people who wanted to travel. They asked whether their cat could stay at her house with her cats. Their cat was a great pet, at home, and was friendly with the people it was sent to visit...but when its humans left it alone in their house, the cat immediately hid behind the biggest piece of furniture she saw, and wouldn't come out even for meals. When everyone else had left the room that cat would sneak out and nibble at the delicious food set out to entice her, but when people came downstairs for the day, she hid in her corner and tried to pretend she was dead. It was awfully uncomfortable for the humans. They like cats; they feel as if, when cats don't like humans, it means they must be bad humans! And here was this cat who had seemed like a friend, not liking them one little bit."

Serena: "Well-brought-up cats don't cozy up with other people's humans. You may notice that Silver has never purred and cuddled in your arms no matter how much you petted her. She endures your attention when she can't avoid it, leaps away from you when you release her, and stays a good healthy distance from you the rest of the time. That's not because she dislikes you, although she has learned that your caressing her is rude; it's because you're my human and I've taught her to let me give and withhold my affection as I see fit in order to train you as I thiink you need to be trained. Your e-friend has simply met an intelligent, courteous cat. From cats' point of view, staying in other cats' home is trespassing when they didn't take the initiative to invite her. The only thing she could do, when her clueless human forced her to trespass, was make it unmistakably clear to everyone that she didn't mean to encroach on anyone else's territory, that she wanted to go home and would be going home as soon as possible."

PK: "That may make sense to the cats, but it was hard on those humans' mental health,"

Serena: "From what I hear of human 'news,' your species' mental health is a very fragile thing, at best."

PK: "This is true. We complain of things like anxiety and depression, as if there were anything normal about pollution and war, rape and child abuse, or the idea that some humans ought to be in charge of making decisions for other humans. As a species we're all prone to the primal sin, or depravity, or insanity, called hubris--the delusion that we are God. Most of the stupid things we do can be considered as manifestations of this form of mental illness, though only a few of us are insane enough to think thoughts like 'There ought to be a global government and I ought to be part of it.' Most of us just unconsciously act out thoughts like 'My impulse to hurry out of the bathroom is more important than everyone else's disgust with having to share a bathroom with someone who leaves it dirty.' We are a, well, an interesting species. We think it's because, when sin entered the world, we had been made in God's image and had farthest to fall..."

Serena: "You would."

PK: "I suppose you think of God as a Great Cat?"

Serena: "God might choose to manifest as a Great Cat, without being limited to a cat form. We don't know." 

PK: "No. We don't. Some of us think of God as a Cosmic Man, a grumpy-looking old White man with a long white beard, but what our sacred scriptures teach us is that God is a spirit, not bound to the shape or gender or number of a body, or bodies. Because we believe God loves God's Creation as a father loves his children, and one of our greatest painters painted God in the image of the painter's father, we forget that God doesn't have to look like anyone or anything in particular. In any case we're told that God is willing to forgive our stupidity. We're told that God wants to forgive our stupidity. And the trouble with that is that, these days, too many of us want to imagine that forgiveness means thinking it's all right and no one needs to do any better. But no. Forgiveness begins when we know we did something wrong and ask for a chance to make it right, or do better. God wants to forgive us for imagining that we are God, and God can do that when we want to practice humility. That is the beginning of sanity, sense, and intelligence for us. Even if we're thinking only in terms of mathematical intelligence, it all begins with the beginner saying 'I don't understand, yet, what I want to understand,' thereby making it possible to begin to understand. Do cats understand mathematics, Serena?"

Serena: "I don't recognize that word."

PK: "Some people say that cats can't count because, when you move your kittens from one nest to another, you always go back to the old nest and inspect it after all your kittens are in the new nest."

Serena: "Well, of course. If I have kittens, Silver, Swimmer, Stache, and Felix, and I move them to another nest, the next thing I do is go back and see if we left anything behind us."

PK: "Yes, but do you understand the concepts of one, two, three, four kittens as distinct from the concepts of Silver, Swimmer, Stache, and Felix?"

Serena: "Should I?"

PK: "Maybe not. Maybe that's one of the ways convoluted human brains get humans into difficulties with our mental health. I don't know. I do know, though, that almost any other kind of animal can help humans who are feeling concerned about their own mental health. If we just take the time to stop worrying about ourselves--there's that primal hubris, thinking ourselves are the only important thing--and just relax and be with some other animal, we will usually feel better."

Serena: "Well, of course. That's what some of us have purr-boxes for."

PK: "It doesn't have to be cats. Some people are helped by watching fish swim around in glass tanks. The butterflies that are likely to sit on people's hands are nasty composters whose feet have probably been tasting garbage, if not worse, before they decided to taste human sweat, but it does wonderful things for humans' moods to sit still and watch a butterfly fanning its big black-and-yellow wings over their hand. Watching birds can do a lot for humans--I remember, when tiresome business used to take me to the courthouse in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, I used always to buy lunch in town and eat it at the duckpond near the courthouse, to let the ducks distract me from the tiresome business, before I boarded the bus to go home. But when cats purr, you add a whole new dimension to the mind-soothing business of watching other animals. We get a lot of relief just from thinking about something other than our stupid selves--but cats add that special healing vibration to the general effect."

So, here are the winners of the Adorable Adoptable Pet Photo contest for this week. The rules for the contest are very simple. Animal rescuers post pictures of homeless animals on Petfinder, and I go to the Petfinder page for the type of animals seeking homes near New York, Washington, and Atlanta, and choose the cutest pictures on those pages. Of course the photos don't tell us which arke the most adorable animals. If people call the shelter and meet some adoptable animals they may find themselves drawn to some other animal! All I do is choose a picture. Then it's up to readers to share the pictures with people who will actually adopt an animal. Most of my regular readers already belong to animals but they know people who don't.

Generally this web site alternates between cats and dogs each week. The Petfinder posts aren't always live on the same day each week, partly because I try to have them go live just a few hours after they're written so the information about the animals will be current. We feature different kinds of cats and dogs, and sometimes other animals. We try not to feature fancy breeds that cost extra. I'm generally biased in favor of American Shorthair cats and mised breed dogs...but sometimes I look at other types.

Manx cats, e.g. I don't like the idea of Manx cats. There's a horrible gene that causes a lethal mutation, producing deformities and sometimes disabilities in a percentage of cats who have the gene, death in the others. Serena's relatively wide frame and relatively short tail are symptoms of the least deadly form of the Manx gene. As long as the fathers of her kittens are healthy non-Manx cats she has normal healthy kittens. If sweet old Sommersburr were the father of her kittens they might not be born at all, or might be born with physical defects that would cause them to die young. What does it say about humans that we have deliberately encouraged, even forced, cats to breed this awful gene into the pool?

I think cats that have a real Manx look should be spayed and neutered to keep the lethal strong form of the gene out of the pool. Many shelters insist that all homeless cats you adopt from them be spayed or neutered, so we're on the same page there. 

But the undesirability of the gene says nothing about the desirability of the individual cats. Manx cats appeal to some people just because they're funny-looking animals with extra-thick coats, to other people because they can be especially lovable pets. Manx cats are usually calm, even-tempered, bland cats. Many of them choose one human to bond with for life; they'll act friendly with other humans if their human tells them to, while making it clear where their loyalty really lies. Apart from being flattering to the chosen human, this can make Manx cats good visiting cats in care homes/ They visit people who have chronic physical problems, from broken legs to senile dementia, and help keep those people from developing mental problems as well. 

We had a little Manx cat here called Inky, for a year or two, who was an excellent visiting cat. I left her in a retirement place for one day, in the apartment of a lady who liked young animals, while we tried to locate her original home. All day long other retired people walked and rolled into the lady's apartment to meet the cat, and Inky purred and cuddled with all of them. I couldn't keep Inky as a full-time therapy cat and don't know whether the people at her Purrmanent Home did, but she had a natural talent.

Of course, merely being Manx is no guarantee that a cat has the talent for being a professional visitor in care homes. Inky was calmer than the average cat. The day she showed her talent, I just picked her up in my arms and carried her about two miles along a road with motor traffic, past a railroad, and houses with dogs. Inky stiffened up and clung when she heard loud noises, but she just rode along, confident that we'd be safe. It's not actually normal for a cat to trust humans that much! 

Another consideration with Manx cats is that you can't tel by looking at the kittens which ones will reach a normal house cat size, and which ones will revert to their ancestral size, which can be three times as big as a normal house cat. Humans bred our pets toward the small end of their possible size range; in some breeds, of which Manx are the one that's common enough to be featured here, a substantial number of kittens are throwbacks that will grow to their original size, or close to it. A house cat usually weighs ten or fifteen pounds. It's normal for Manx cats to be closer to fifteen pounds than ten, but some of them keep growing to a healthy weight of twenty or thirty pounds. While the big ones can be intimidating to visitors, they're actually at greater than average risk if they stray out among people who don't recognize them as friends. They don't know when they need to fight or flee.

In addition to the pictures being cute, these cats also impress shelter staff as being calm and friendly, and not intimidating. And, despite my bias toward female cats, all three photo contest winners are male.

Zipcode 10101: Mittens from Churchville 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/mittens-58810584/pa/churchville/susans-cats-and-kittens-pa463/

He has a big fluffy tail, but, like Serena, he has known Manx ancestors. Mittens is described as friendly, easygoing, and good with other cats.

Zipcode 20202: Groot and Ollie from New Oxford 

Their web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/groot-ollie-61863110/pa/new-oxford/harlows-haven-cat-rescue-pa1213/

Classic tailless Manx, these brothers are on the small side and need to be kept indoors because they could easily be mistaken for rabbits. As shown, they're mellow, friendly, cuddly cats. 

Zipcode 30303: Denali from Sautee Nacoochee 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/denali-63506028/ga/sautee-nacoochee/charles-smithgall-humane-society-and-adoption-center-ga485/

He's one of a set of four black kittens, two with bobtails and two with complete tails. Three are male; one of the two with complete tails is female. They are described as playing with each other and with other young cats at the shelter in a friendly way, and liking to snuggle up with humans. Each kitten has been provided with its own web page but the text suggests that the shelter staff would be delighted if someone took all four kittens home. The cuteness overload is just too much for them, they say.

We note that, while the other Manx cats featured at tis web site have been adopted, the Georgia page shows that two Manx cats who won previous photo contests are still in the shelters. Well, technically one featured cat and one featured cat's accessory are. We featured two kittens, both called Bunny, a healthy and a sickly sister. Bunny 2 wasn't expected to live long but she's still alive, still blind, and still in the shelter. Someone really ought to adopt that no-longer-a-kitten, more-of-a-half-grown-cat Bunny 2.