They say cats have nine lives. I've seen them survive falls from enormous heights, be hit by cars but leap up and run off -- yet I've grieved for cat deaths and asked the vet to kill some cats who were in great pain or very aged. I meet death and life, intermingled as they are, through cats. To me they are not pets or toys, but independent beings with their own goals and decisions. More than anything else, they address the continuing tension between individual and group.
These cats invited themselves into my life and I interfere in theirs very little. Mostly I just feed them, shelter them, and rescue them if there is a threat. Otherwise they go about their cat business which only sometimes includes me. Since there are more than a few and they come and go, I capitalize on them by letting them be my observed white rats, though they are gray cats.
The first cats in this house were intended pets and they ruled the roost for ten years, just as they felt they were meant to do. But they died of old age and then the cat flap swung only in the wind for a while, until the feral cats began to move in. The first one, I think, was a calico cat who figured out pet doors by watching the small dog across the street use his. But I never caught her in the house. She lived in my attached garage with her kittens.
Richard S.Wheeler, the now deceased Western writer, had sent me some electric pet warming pads and I put them in the bottom of cardboard boxes with old blankets. When the winter temps went to twenty below, the cat family stayed warm and a few older kittens figured out the flap, though I'd been feeding them in the garage. The trouble with that was that if they didn't eat wet food immediately, it froze solid as a rock.
Since then, there have always been cats who were related, one generation after another, a perfect frame of reference for reading Joseph LeDoux's book, "The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains." This is a big fat book that goes small step-by-step through the beginning of life and then the gradual complexification of whatever forms survive. Though I've been reading about these materials for decades, this is the most clarifying and complete book by far.
I'm just about to start Part Five: "And Then the Animals Invented Neurons." I just finished the part that came to Meiosis, which is a key part of the idea of mutation, the constant reshuffling of DNA -- which creates variations on a DNA recipe -- and then evolution -- which keeps the most successful versions and lets the rest die. Changing environmental conditions mean that sometimes it is one variation that survives and other times it is a different version. There is no goal. There is nothing about domination of others because that's not always what it takes to survive. Jesus' revolutionary Christian idea was that it may be the meek and small who survive. Any kid can explain how the dinosaurs, so powerful and big, couldn't survive the cataclysm of an asteroid impact with the earth, but the little wee mammals went down in burrows and nibbled on whatever there was. That's where cats come from, as well as mice.
First here was that calico grandmother, then her babies, then many of them disappeared, then the people next door brought home a big gray striped tomcat (only a baby then) who grew into a big thug of a tomcat I called Finnegan as though he were beating up people in an Irish pub. He was a house-wrecker. I became the asteroid in his life, but he was leaving anyway.
One little kitten I called "Blue Bunny" -- because that was her color -- loved Finnegan and often sat close enough to lean on him. When he left, she became my fondest cat and still is. But my only way to curb the population, my means of predation, is to drown kittens the minute they are born, while they are still slimy dark blobs with no eyes. I'm as gentle as I can be, using warm water and staying with them by my big Victorian pedestal sink. This is one of the darkest parts of my household life.
Seeing this, Bunny took two kittens under the house and hid them in total darkness. I considered closing the hatch to the crawl space but didn't, in case they were alive and she was feeding them. That was the case. Tuxie is the surviving kitten. Flat, shiny coat, Tuxedo markings ( thus the name), a skinny bone frame, a Finnegan attitude, she's not quite right. If cats too far off the basic formula, they die as kittens. She is still very much attached to Bunny and still tries to nurse, though she's had batches of kittens herself. At the moment there are two, the only two in the batch, one basically white and the other the group keynote gray. The two grown females care for the kittens, though only the mother gives milk, and the two half-grown tomcats left from the last batch have given up trying to smack them. They are mostly quiet cats, even the kittens. But they stink, no matter how diligently the cat boxes are maintained.
Cats demonstrate how the inherited characteristics -- appearance and disposition -- are accentuated and complicated by what humans think about certain colors. Some are more attractive than others and some have myths around them, like black cats. But to me, ginger cats are the smartest and steadiest. Calico and tortoiseshell cats seem to be the best mousers, maybe because they are always female and must feed babies. But here came gray instead.
Cat, like humans, are individually formed by their DNA-prescribed bodies and minds pushing up against the circumstances of their environment. They need very little, which is why colonies can form and thrive. Up the street from me one day, I witnessed a whole line of possibly twenty cats -- most of them ginger and in all sizes, come out of an abandoned church and go single-file between the houses across the street. I never saw them again. Probably the town decided to kill them. They can't shoot within the city limits but they like to use poison. As well, there is a respiratory virus that occasionally sweeps through. At one point I was feeding nine cats, but in a few weeks I was down to four. I should be getting them shots and sterilizing the ones I can catch, but I have very little money. Cat spaces are soon filled by new cats.
The individual lives of these little animals, like those in the wild apart from humans, are wound like ribbons through the fabric of life, generation after generation. I should probably interfere with them more. They do kill birds, but mostly ring-necked pigeons who are invaders from another ecology, attracted by spilled grain. I think about the morality of all this. So much of morality is about these forces.
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