Feline Farce

There have been myriad queries (okay, one or two) about the lamentable cat situation (chronicled here November 23). Pictured at right is an actual Novalis cat at risk of villainous entrapment (did I mention...? ha ha). (Due to a technical glitch, illustration later removed).

One additional cat was trapped, although it actually wasn't one of ours, but rather a stray (we think) we had seen lurking around the neighborhood for a while. My wife pleaded for its release, as it would have faced sure euthanasia at the animal shelter. The neighbors relented, and the stray was pardoned (although I haven't seen it since, so I wonder).

It turns out that the neighbor wife's cat phobia (stemming from a past "bad experience") is the issue, as well as the teenaged son's fear of having a cat scratch up his pristine new car. My first car was a 1975 Dodge Dart--I was more worried about making it across intersections without stalling than about domestic cat defacements. But I did not bring up that "bad experience."

Water guns were proferred and declined. Neighbors agreed to withdraw traps so long as steps are taken to limit feline prowling. As a gesture of good will (and a kind of neighborly placebo), we agreed to erect a privacy fence in the back that will at least keep that neighbor out of sight, out of mind (with pleasure), both for the cats and for us.

I point out that we were actually, without knowing it, offering the neighbor wife free therapy, in the form of graduated exposure, for her cat phobia. In a better world, our friendly felines would gradually have infiltrated their yard, stamping out their rodents and gently marking their territory, and, no catastrophe ensuing, neighbor wife would have been won over to their charms: cure effected. But as usual, psychiatry's efforts go unappreciated.

I tried to think of a proper cat-trapping poem to dignify the occasion; the corpus in that category being limited, I could only choose Rilke's great and terrible "The Panther" (translated by Robert Bly):

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted

that it no longer holds anything anymore

To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand

bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride

which circles down to the tiniest hub

is like a dance of energy around a point

in which a great will stands stunned and dumb.

Only at times the curtain of the pupil rises

without a sound...then a shape enters,

Slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,

reaches the heart, and dies.

Breaking...Local Cat named Best in World

In a nice segue from last post, I am astonished to learn that I live within a half hour of the Best Cat in the World. Santos, a one-year old black Persian that is originally from Venice but now lives in north Raleigh, beat out 729 feline competitors to take the Cat Fanciers' Best in Show in Atlanta. Santos reportedly sleeps on blue silk pillows in his own room and has a serious catnip habit. After this big win he might be able to have some girlfriends. Details here.

You Be the Judge--Please

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent

Again she stretched, again she bent,

Nor knew the gulf between.

(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)

The slippery verge her feet beguiled,

She tumbled headlong in.

"Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat"

Thomas Gray

Good fences may make good neighbors, but they are mere nuisances to felines. I need feedback on this post, to settle an urgent question of practical ethics, in the general area of neighborhood pet management. Our neighbors are cat-intolerant, and this has generated friction. We are aggrieved--do we have a right to be?

We possess a number of cats that is well above the mean, but still in the single digits and still, I would argue, short of the threshold of pet-hoarding pathology (all were shelter cats or strays). Most of the cats stay in the house, but all are free to come and go, and while they generally stay in the immediate vicinity, they sometimes feel the need for more extended perambulations. Our cats are typically well-mannered, and most of the neighbors whom they have visited have expressed pleasure in having made their acquaintance.

A month or two after having moved into the neighborhood, the fellow next door, with whom we had had minimal contact (it is a rural area, and he keeps to himself), came over and politely mentioned that at least one of our cats had ventured onto his deck, and that his wife is allergic to cats. I had never heard of cat allergy being triggered by a cat passing through the back yard, and I mumbled something about the difficulty of constraining the movements of felines. I told him we'd keep an eye out for cats in his yard, and that he should feel free to shoo them away (in point of fact, I had never actually seen a cat in his yard--if anything they seem to prefer the yard on the other side of us--but I didn't doubt that it had happened once in a while).

We heard nothing else from them, until a few days ago we got a call from the county animal shelter about one of our cats--it had been caught in a trap set out by our good neighbor. The cat was unharmed, but of course there was a fee to reclaim our cat, and this time of year one hates to think of a cat stuck in a trap for whatever period of time it might take for someone to realize it is there. This time the complaint, per the animal shelter, was that paw prints had been found on the neighbor's car.

My point of view is that roaming cats are very much like barking dogs--they can be annoying to those who don't care for them, but they are just a price of living in proximity to other human beings, who tend to like to keep animals of some sort. Actually, I can't imagine how a cat or two walking through the yard is even remotely as annoying as a back yard dog that won't stop barking. The cats do not tear up plants or otherwise destroy property. The worst they could conceivably do is leave a bit of fertilizer behind, although they usually do that in the litter boxes or in the woods behind our house. Ours are certainly not aggressive in any way (they are all healthy and up to date on their shots).

Obviously with respect to law our neighbor has a right to trap any animal on his property that he doesn't want to be there. But with respect to ethics and social convention I think this is a ridiculous situation. Is the onus really on us to keep all the cats in the house so that none of them might venture past the property line? Oh, how I hope this fellow decides to get a dog--I have sensitive ears!