I'm a Cat Man, not so much a Dog Person, and It's Made Me More Empathic
Let's have a cat, not a dog in the next White House
My family, for at least as long as I lived at home, always had a dog. Mom and Dad were given a Cocker Spaniel as a wedding present which they named Trek, as they had decided to spend their honeymoon on an adventurous journey driving their 1938 Ford across the entire US from Greensboro, NC to California and on into Mexico and then back to Washington, DC. (This was back in 1948 before the Interstate, when an “interstate” route was a paved road with two lanes, a designated national route number (like Highway 66) and lots of stoplights and small-town Main Streets.
I don’t remember Trek, but well remember one of her puppies, Winkie, a male Cocker who took her place as the family pet when she died. Winkie was a good dog, the terror of local woodchucks and guardian of our chickens, but he really was fond of my younger brother Gary, who took to dogs more than I. (I always found their licking, drooling and consistently bad breath annoying). I felt the same about the third family dog, a beautiful Irish Setter named Heather. She actually saved me once when I was knocked down and bitten on the back by a vicious Great Pyrenees that had broken loose from his chain as we were walking past his house. Heather, who was probably a third of that dog’s weight, attacked him fearlessly and drove him off me before he could do serious damage. That courageous loyalty on her part endeared her to me, but I still didn’t like the drooling and licking.
I’m really a cat person. When I was seven or eight, Mom got each of us three kids — me, Gary, who was six, and and our little sister Elizabeth four — a kitten of our own. Her idea was that we should learn how to care for an animal. Of course, Mom ended up doing most of the feeding, watering and litter cleaning, but we all did gain a sense of ownership and companionship. My cat, a male who grew to a good size and, with his tan fur, looked like a miniature cougar, I named Dusty. It seemed the appropriate moniker for a feline that looked like he belonged out West on a mountainside.
Gentle and with a Buddha-like calm, Dusty slept on my bed every night, and would wake me in the morning by approaching my head, usually by walking up my prone body, and then purring into my face.
As we lived in the country on what was initially a dirt road, he and the other two cats were indoor/outdoor pets, with a cat door in the kitchen so they could go in and out as they pleased. It worked well until the road got paved and the cars began passing the house at a faster clip. One of the early traumas of my life was being near the road when a car raced over Dusty as he was crossing. His head hit some low-hanging part of the chassis, killing him instantly. The driver sped off, uncaring, and I had to tearfully carry his lifeless body into the house to my mother. It was really my first experience of mortality and loss.
I recall this now as I think about the execrable JD Vance, the man who, should Trump win this presidential election, would become vice president, placing him a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and a president whose heart must look like the black grease-encrusted petrol pump on a rusted-out ‘46 Dodge pickup.
Vance denigrated women and men and all left-of-center Americans when he said Kamala Harris was “one of those childless cat ladies who are miserable with their lives” because they never had children. Never mind that Harris, who married a man who had two children from an earlier marriage, whom she became a step-mother to. he called them ‘sociopaths” who “want everyone else to be miserable too.”
The thing is, I’ve always been a cat boy or later, a cat man. Over my 75 years, 54 of them married to a “cat woman” who is allergic to dogs, and counting my beloved Dusty, between us we’ve had eight cats. Each including our current little tiger cat Shere Khan, who came to our house a starving feral kitten on a cold, rainy spring morning, has had a unique personality, and each has taught me things about life, love, about being vulnerable and stoic in the face of tragedy, and about the importance of purring.
Cats have a grace and sweetness that belies their evolved instinct as almost perfectly designed hunters — alert, quick and with deadly claws and fangs. How can an animal that can let out a blood-curdling howl when it thinks it’s been left in the house alone or when confronting a strange cat in its territory make the unique and gentle purring sound that resonates through its whole body?
When when one of my favorite cats Soren died suddenly in the night , apparently of a heart-worm, leaving me to discover her curled up in rigor mortis, her dried eyes wide open with round black pupils, and her jaw still clamped on the arm chair coverlet, Rip Rense, a journalist, novelist, poet friend and fellow cat person, consoled me saying, “That this world should host creatures such as Soren and Trixie [his cat], these days, strikes me as almost bizarre. They are little living exaltations.””
That nails it.
People who own cats — even multiple cats — and, full disclosure, we have on occasion had three cats in the house while boarding one for our daughter, are not ‘deranged’ as the hillbilly poseur Vance claims. Rather we are sensitive people who care about beauty, grace and others’ feelings and suffering.
A friend in Philadelphia who makes wonderful and usually comical videos of his cat made one in which he shows himself acting distraught in front of his pet to see how it reacts. Weeping increasingly piteously he cries out that his mother has just died, The cat sits watching him impassively but intently until his owner (if a cat can ever be truly owned) falls to the floor histrionically weeping. At that dramatic point the cat gets up and walks over to him and begins rubbing against his head. That’s vastly more empathy than I’ve ever observed in either Trump or Vance.
I don’t know if Harris has or once had a cat in her life, but I suspect she has. If she hasn’t, I hope that if she wins this election, she sets a new precedent: Instead of getting a dog to bring into the White House, I hope she gets a rescue cat from a local ASPCA center.
Maybe then instead of just wringing her hands and calling the Israeli slaughter in Gaza “heartbreaking,” she would shut down the murderous pipeline of US weapons and two-ton bombs and demand on end to the genocide there.