Cat Box

Posted on October 14, 2002 in Cats

Just a little filler of things about cats that have occurred to me recently:

1. I read in a recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine that, outside of the Primate Order, the animal whose DNA most closely resembles our own is the domestic house cat. Does this explain the peculiar symbiosis between a man and his cat? Or should cats be scared, as ^snaily suggested, because the worlds’ labortories will want them for experimentation? Stay tuned and keep petting your cat.
   
   
   
2. Ever notice how there are no cats in George Orwell’s satire Animal Farm? Did Orwell hate cats? Or did he just not notice that as soon as the pigs’ utopian dream began to sour that the barnyard cats said “Fuck this shit” and ambled off to the next freehold?
   
   
   
3. Would a cat really have made The Incredible Journey? Lynn and I imagined ordering a cat to climb Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. The cat, if it deigned to acknowledge the order, Lynn thought, would take a few steps towards the summit; stop and sleep for a long time; then poke around; march a little higher; and keep going like this until it arrived at the crest in about a week’s time. I suspect that it could be made to move very fast if it knew there was a food bowl in the dressing room of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
   
   
   
4. You might think this is explained, perhaps, by number one above, but I have no explanation for it (just gratitude): when the tears come and you retreat to your bed, how is it that cats who have been sleeping in the loft and who have been otherwise oblivious to your sadness saunter in to where you are and impose their own special feline therapy as a salve for your griefs when you feel that you are a shoddy piece of work? I imagine Ambrose (who always adds an s to the end of words) saying “Daddys, forget this deservings stuffs. It’s nots abouts deservings. It’s abouts lovingses.”
   
   

   Now lick your paws and don’t track on the carpet.