What the Censored Is It About Cats

INTRODUCTION

When I was very, very small, my family lived in a series of tiny apartments with no real room for anything pet-shaped, and I grew up without a living non-human critter of any type to share my days with. That didn’t stop me from fawning on other people’s critters whenever and wherever I could find them; a man who lived in the same building as us, a couple of floors up, still somehow managed to own a brindle pointer-type hunting hound of some stripe, and I was forever dogging (so to speak) his footsteps when I was seven or eight years old. He’d generously share the dog with me, having me rub my scent onto a handkerchief and show it to the dog and then go off and hide it and then he’d sic the dog to find it – and it was always a thing of joy to me when the dog got the scent and did the pointer thing (paw up off the ground, snout focused on the spot of interest).

It wasn’t until I was ten and my father got a job with the United Nations, which would mean our going to live in Zambia for at least two and a half years, that someone in the know said, you’re going to need a dog. And so our first dog entered our lives, a German Shepherd pup, some ten or twelve weeks of age at the time of her arrival. One night with a non-house-trained puppy in our cubbyhole of an apartment was more than enough to convince us to hand the dog over to my grandparents (and their outdoor yard) until such time as our travel plans were finalized. The puppy flew to Africa with us, came to Zambia, had all her growing-up adventures there; she then had to be abandoned in a kennel for a while until Dad’s second international job kicked in, then traveled to what was then known as Swaziland (where we had all kinds of escapades involving killer bees, wayward mongooses, and an attempt by another dog to adopt us, which didn’t take, partly because our own resident canine so fiercely protected her home turf). Then we transitioned again, more kennel for the poor baby, and we ended up in South Africa – first Pretoria, then Cape Town – which was where her epic road finally ended. We buried her behind a flower bank which she liked to sleep by, and after that those flowers never bloomed again. Who knew nature mourned.

Our second Shepherd was acquired not long afterwards, and hers was a tragic tale that I need not tell here – but here is where things begin to be interesting, because this one overlapped. You see, at some point South Africa became an extremely difficult place to be, and in search of peace and quiet my family pulled up sticks again, and swapped continents one more time. I led the way this time, and in the twilight of my twenties I crossed the ocean and landed in New Zealand. My parents (and the dog, of course) would follow in due time, but for the initial period I would be on my own, establishing the beach-head, as it were. And by this stage I had spent nearly two decades with something warm, living, and four-footed weaving around my ankles on an everyday basis, and it wasn’t something I could just give up. But I was living on my own, and had a full time job, and I just couldn’t do that to a dog – I couldn’t get a dog and then leave it alone in the place where I was living for eight hours every work day (dogs are too social an animal for that) and then, on top of that, probably be responsible for a walk every day before going to work and a walk after I came home (I was initially living in a condominium-type semi-detached house with no yard to speak of or leave the dog in so the dog would have be left INSIDE for eight hours while I was at work…)

And so, as an alternative that would work under these circumstances, I swiveled from a dog person to a cat lady. A cat would be more self-sufficient, I would need to take care of a litter box rather than those mandated walks, it would provide the living furry companion I wanted and craved, and it would take care of its own basic needs in other respects so long as I upheld my half of the bargain by keeping its bathroom clean and its food bowl full.

But, you see, I knew nothing at all about cats. They were an alien life form at this point. It would be the best of times, and the worst of times, and the journey was just beginning.

Their signals would have to be re-learned from scratch – for instance, a dog wagging its tail is friendly and excited to play and happy to see you; when a cat’s tail is twitching it’s time to run for cover. A dog’s claws, always extruded, were a possibility of bruising harm by dint of being pummeled by blunt force trauma, as it were – but a cat’s needle-sharp talons, hidden so innocently in those sweet padded paws (I learned the phrase murder mittens early), were concealed weapons which could be deployed to terrifying effect at a moment’s notice and without any warning at all. A dog is trainable – a cat, to a large extent, is plainly not, and will do what it pleases when it pleases it to do it. You can yell no at a cat as much as you like, but the best you can hope for is that it will refrain from doing that thing that you don’t want it to do when you aren’t there to see the unrepentant beast do it. Dogs wear their hearts outside their body and when the initial adoration contract is signed the dog hands over its heart lock stock and beating barrel and is yours forevermore – but being chosen by a cat is an entirely different process, and in some ways a value-added one. A cat chooses carefully and meticulously and while they are fully capable of loving just as much as any given dog it’s they who will be doing the waiting, for you to hand your heart over rather than being seen to do so themselves. I learned of a saying, much later – dogs have owners, cats have staff – and that’s it in a nutshell. Cats, as I’ve heard them described, were once worshipped as gods in ancient Egypt, and they have never forgotten that – they require their humans’ worship, in a sense, and they will condescend to return that with affection, but their way of telling you that they’re glad you’re home is very different from a rambunctious dog’s. The pure unbridled joy of a dog’s tail-whipping welcome is a world away from a cat’s emerging from somewhere as you’re shutting the front door, with its tail held high, meeting your eyes and giving you a long slow blink (that means I love you in Feline, as I learned along the way) and then waiting until you’re settled somewhere with dinner, a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, before coming to claim your lap and purring you into serenity.

It was a different world I was about to step into, all unknowing.

And so, speaking of cats, let me introduce you to those who have consented to allow me to walk by their side for a while over the last couple of decades…

Alma Alexander

2024

THE MAD CAT: MURPHY THE MAGNIFICENT

I committed some of Murphy’s story to blog form back when Livejournal was still a thing and I was still doing regular long-form blogging there. The first part of an entry dated 24 August 2008 describes Murphy’s entry into my life:

Murphy came about when I first moved to New Zealand, alone and lonely, and wanted a warm furry body in the house for when I came home from work. A dog was out of the question because of certain aspects of dog-ownership - I was out of the house all day and a dog couldn't be left alone for all that time, so - although I had never had one before - I decided that a cat was called for. So I looked at the noticeboard at the place I worked, and there were several cats looking for homes, so I decided to investigate the matter.

The first one I found was a perfectly sane, perfectly ordinary cat. We looked at one another, tipped each other's hats in one another's direction in a metaphorical manner, and walked away.

The next cat was Murphy.

A silver mackerel tabby (think grey tortoiseshell with stripey bits), he was the youngest cat in his then-current household (approximately six months old at the time) and ruling the place with an iron paw - the other two resident cats didn't eat until he gave them permission to approach the food bowl. He had cattitude in spades, and it was painfully obvious that his family doted on him - but Murph had a bad habit of liking to get into your face, and the couple who had him had just had their first baby, and there was no way they could convince Murphy that the baby's face should not be got into. It was the cat or the baby, and they gave away the cat - although, when I came to pick him up to take him home, his dad practically almost begged me to take his first-born son and leave that cat behind.

I took him home to a house still empty of furniture. He emerged from his carrier like ET, all neck, looked around, hopped out of the carrier, stuck his tail in the air, and went into every room to investigate it for, as I later told people, emergency exits. Once he had given the entire house the once-over, he returned upstairs to the living room and the pile of cushions that served as a sofa at the time, flopped over in a heap, and went to sleep. That was it. My house. Okay. That night he turned up in my bed as if by right, This is where I sleep. You don't have a say in the matter. I quickly learned that the name was not accidental - my home became run by Murphy's Law - which could be summed up in one sentence as My way or not at all.

He was the smoochiest, cuddliest cat imaginable... with family, at home. Take him to the vet - well - the first time we did that he hooked a paw into the vet's stethoscope and ripped it out of the poor guy's ears and sent it flying across the room (the next time he was brought in, a year later, the vet took one look and said, Oh, it's *you*.)

Murphy settled into his new realm with an insouciance that was almost preternatural – it was as though his previous existence had never been at all, as though he had been merely marking time until the hour when he could come and become my own boon companion. I kept him inside for a little while, just until I was certain that he had imprinted on the place and the human and knew where home was, but after that he was an indoor/outdoor cat, and he liked nothing more than to extend the area of his rule to the entire neighborhood. He climbed up into one of the tall pines in the yard at the back of the house one time, and the only reason I knew about it was the pitiful mewling that came from some thirty feet up above my head – I looked up, saw him there, and told him he got up there so he could jolly well come back down again. He did,