Writing in the Times newspaper today, Deborah Ross says that she doesn’t even consider her dog as a pet (implying she considers her dog as something much more important). She then goes on to say:
“A goldfish, yes; that’s a pet. A rabbit is a pet. A cat is a pet. A hamster? Good luck with that. But you share a life with a dog…”
As can you see, Deborah thinks that cats are pets while dogs are true companions in almost the same league as humans.
On behalf of all domestic cats I feel insulted by that. It is completely inaccurate and it besmirches the character of the domestic cat and yet again it is the work of a journalist. Clearly Deborah Ross has no knowledge of the domestic cat and the relationships, in their millions across the globe, in which people share their lives with their cat in much the same way that other people share their lives with the domestic dog.
I’m not sure why Deborah came to this conclusion that cats are less of a companion animal than dogs. Let’s first mention that the word “pet” is somewhat derogatory and I nearly always avoid it for that reason. The word pet indicates a creature of lower standing. It almost hints at the animal being like a toy to amuse us.
As Deborah has bracketed the domestic cat with a goldfish, it implies to me that she thinks that the domestic cat is less intelligent than the dog and less interactive and therefore is less able to provide companionship. All of us, who understand cats, know that that is inaccurate.
Deborah also says that you share your life with the dog implying that you don’t share your life with a cat which is frankly ridiculous. She says that she is completely in tune with her dog. Any genuine cat caretaker would say exactly the same thing about their cat.
She also says that dogs tell their owners that they love them every day implying that cats don’t but I disagree with that completely once again. Cats show their love in many different ways but it is of equal value.
Cats are not in-your-face, and their form of communication is more subtle than dogs but nonetheless there is a ton of communication between cat guardians and their cats.
Cats are more independent and less needy than dogs but personally I do not think that it means that a cat is less of a companion. To some people, it is an advantage. Cats are more able to look after themselves and require less maintenance. Many people like that.
However, she does mention one thing which also hints at speciesism (a form of racism against another species). She refers to the well-known television programme in the United Kingdom, For the Love of Dogs, which stars Paul O’Grady and which is filmed at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home.
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home is a world-famous rescue center for cats and dogs located in central London, in the area called Battersea. I believe that there is a good argument for a similar television program which could be filmed at a major cat rescue centre. What about Cats Protection in the UK? They use volunteers who foster their rescue cats but I feel that there could be a television program in that.
In addition, I don’t see why the cats at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home cannot have their own television program. I feel there is a need to raise the profile of rescue cats and what better way than making a daytime television program about them.
Photos: from Blink on Instagram
Down here where I live, people talk to themselves. Which doesn’t mean they’re queer in the head. They talk to themselves because they have more ocean, mountains, forests and rivers than they have neighbors. Sunk in their solitude, fulminating, bewhiskered old-timers amble down the road past my house every day.
In a similar vein, yesterday morning I stood in my garden, verbally raking someone I haven’t seen in years: a man who sawed my grapevines to the ground in 2005. Seeing as how he’d just bought my house, I couldn’t let him know what I wanted to do with his chainsaw. But after he’d left, I wept as if he’d butchered half my family. I slid a bowl under one of the stumps, and it dripped its golden blood in that bowl for days.
Yesterday, though, I was thinking of the past, when every late summer you’d find me in the kitchen, surrounded by kettles and colanders, mesh strainers, wooden spoons, dozens of quart jars, mountains of fruit piled in the sinks and plopping on the floor. And I thought of my boy who was fascinated to watch me mashing grapes. He sat all day and into the night on the kitchen table, keeping an eye on and talking to me.
Those years have vanished. Nothing’s left but his ashes and memories. My grapes were gone too.
So there I was, badmouthing this man yesterday morning, then walking to the end of the garden to take a look at my twenty feet of vines, as I’ve done every summer.
Vines? What vines? Well, I clipped off a handful of twigs from the parents that lay on the ground years ago, rolled them up in wet newsprint and took them with me when I moved. Though I doubted they’d grow, I was wrong. A week after I’d stuck them in the dirt, they were sprouting leaf-buds.
Five miles down the road from my house is a winery with a small vineyard. Low-sugar grapes tolerate cold. But I don’t like wine, and sugary ‘juice’ grapes need eighteen units of heat, or something. And all we have is twelve. Which is why, nine years later, my vines are barren. (Strange, since figs flourish in this climate.)
Be that as it may, yesterday I’m thinking dark thoughts as I wander down to the hedge and poke my head under the leaves, knowing there’s nothing to see, so why bother? But then, moments later – EGADS! AM I LOSING MY GRIP? Feeling around, I’m finding seventeen clusters of grapes! Were they small? Don’t ask. The sturdiest were three inches wide and twice as long as an Irish potato, their grapes bigger than peas, but smaller than marbles. Will they ripen? Good chance. Until late October, this time of the year is sun-gilded. Are the grapes a sign of global warming? Not that I can see. It’s been an average summer. Very nice, but average.
Yes. It’s absurd to rhapsodize over grapes. Anyone living farther south will laugh to read this. So do I, when I think of my parents’ 40-acre farm up the coast from San Francisco. Their 100-foot row of grapes that grew along the orchard was rampant and neglected, loaded with amber cascades of grapes that hung to the ground.
But I live fifteen hours north of that farm, and grapes this close to the ocean won’t fruit unless they’re wine grapes. Even at that, vintners west of the mountains grow ‘play vineyards’ to thrill the clientele, and truck in tons of grapes from eastern Washington.
How to encourage my little harvest? The grapes in Seattle liked my stone house, although the had only six hours of sun. Down here they’re blasted with fourteen hours during the summer, and nine hours until late October. Clear plastic sheeting draped over the fence would raise the heat to 110 F. Which wouldn’t work: bees need easy access to the flowers. Another drawback: plastic doesn’t biodegrade. A two-foot layer of gravel might offer a friendlier solution.
Anyhow, why am I overjoyed by my grapes? And what have grapes to do with cats? I’m happy because these varieties have a perfumed flavor, a ravishing sweetness with no resemblance to supermarket grapes. I’m happy because their massacred parents were babies in pots when I brought them home from the nursery eighteen years ago, and they didn’t deserve to die in the springtime of their lives. A grapevine can thrive for four hundred years, and my vines were lavishly kind to me during their brief lives. They deserved to live on – and that’s what they’re doing! Another reason? I’m happy because my land is a Garden of Eden. I don’t spray my plants with chemicals.
Beyond that, my grapes are a window to the past. They make me remember my home in Seattle. And most of all, they make me remember my best boy who stayed with me as I worked in my kitchen on warm summer midnights, smothered in baskets and buckets of green and purple grapes.
Is a cat or dog a ‘pet?’ Alice Koller, a scholarly writer of beautiful books, found the word abominable. In common with Geri, in her equally beautiful comment, her animals were her companions. So was my boy.
Except for several cat-loving friends I left behind when I moved here, you were my friend, Ruth, who understood what he and I were going through. You consoled me every day. He took ten months to die. And to call those months ‘stations of the cross’ is a blasphemous cliché. So let’s call them a ‘challenge,’ and let it go at that. I did everything I could to make sure – at least to hope – he had no major suffering. But what he did to me is lasting. I know no one down here in this land of duck-hunters and their retrievers who likes cats. There was no one but you, in faraway England, who kept me half-alive. And you still endure my tears.
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Cleveland Amory would never have used the word ‘pet’ for an animal. He thought the world of his cats. He also praised coyotes. True, when they’re hungry they kill rabbits, cats, small dogs and small livestock. As I wrote to you during the final months of my boy and little girl’s lives, I used to drive out to the woods with jugs of cat food, park on a dirt road, and walk up a hill where there were coyotes. They yapped when they heard me! They knew I was coming! Mr. Amory admired their intelligence, their playful personalities and capacity for friendship – if people could be trusted. Which of course they can’t. In his book he describes a group of hunters, some of them ashamed, encircling an exhausted coyote who dodged their bullets for hours until he was driven, at last, into a field and gunned down in the crossfire.
Mr. Amory also wrote about a man who hiked into a wilderness meadow where a coyote waited for him every day, so the two of them could play.
No — an animal isn’t a ‘pet.’ It’s our beloved, carnivorous child.