The case for cats

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Rosemary Sullivan is an author and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a book about our relationship with cats.

I am a childless cat lady, which tells you less than you think. Some things are beyond our control. Why is childless cat lady an insult? In the ascendant ideology in America, women should breed, and cats are suspicious creatures. Not straightforward like dogs. Childless dog man would be a descriptive not an insult.

I want to make the case for cats. They are not substitute children. They are wonderfully strange creatures that seem to be willing to share our lives. Enigmatic, implacably other – it is their mystery that intrigues.

I have had two cats, Negrito and Ensueño, who lived with us for 14 and 17 years respectively. They came to us in the spring of 2006 after a fire. A friend phoned to say that the house of his friend Carlos had caught fire. The house was totalled. Carlos’s cat Chiquita lived in the basement but managed to escape through a window. As Carlos watched, she emerged carrying one of her kittens by the scruff of its neck. She deposited it at a safe distance and then turned round and ran back into the fire. She came out with another kitten. She went into the fire again and again, saving each of her six kittens, one at a time. Tragically, she died of smoke inhalation. Such ferocious maternity. We agreed to adopt two of her kittens.

We had two studios in our house on Langley Ave. in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood. Ensueño, which means magic dreams, claimed my writing studio as his own. Long haired-like his brother, the upper part of his face was brown and black. From beneath his pink nose to his tail, he was the most immaculate white. As I worked at my desk, he’d spread his body in a half circle around my keyboard. I think Ensueño loved the solitude of writing. Friends use to say he wrote my books.

Negrito, a black cat as his name “little black one” suggests, chose my husband’s recording studio in the basement, and became Juan’s assistant. He had impeccable taste. If the music wasn’t good, he left the studio. His favourite musician was Mafata Lemphane from Lesotho. Mafata played flute, guitar, percussion, almost anything, brilliantly, but his unique characteristic was that he could sit for hours without moving. Only a cat could manage this level of alert immobility. Negrito saw this. Sometimes he would settle in Mafata’s lap and the two wouldn’t move for an hour. I envied Mafata. He’d broken the membrane that separates human and animal; they were speaking the same language.

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We also discovered that our cats had an evening ritual. Negrito and Ensueño regularly went to the backyard of a house a few doors down where they met a gang of local cats: about six of them, happily engaged in intense cat conversations, as if they were trading the day’s gossip.

The odd thing was that our neighbour didn’t have a cat. He had fled to Canada in 1988, after the Halabja massacre in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own citizens, killing more than 3,000 people. Does human evil give off an olfactory signal. Does good? Our neighbour was clearly one of the good and Negrito and Ensueño loved him.

Cats are introverts: intuitive, enigmatic, self-sufficient and selectively affectionate. Dogs are mostly extroverts, endlessly enthusiastic and loyal. They want to please. In my favourite New Yorker cartoon, a cat looks down condescendingly at a dog grovelling at his feet. “Your mistake,” the cat says, “was when they told you to bark, you barked.”

I decided to look up cat supporters on the web:

Eckhart Tolle: “I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.”

T.S. Eliot: “With cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to.”

Margaret Atwood: “Like all proper Romantics, cats are independent-minded, and Byronic in their contempt for authority. They are always well-groomed.”

Taylor Swift: “Cats are very dignified. They’re independent. They’re very capable of dealing with their own life.”

Often, I watched Ensueño curled in a ball like a question mark. He was deeply asleep yet still vigilant and totally relaxed. Sometimes his foot would twitch or there was a quick flutter of movement under his closed eyelids. He might even utter a small meow. I wondered: Is he dreaming? Scientific research has determined that the source of dream activity is in the paleo mammalian brain, which includes the oldest part of the cerebral cortex. In other words, all mammals dream. By incapacitating the nerve centres that inhibit movement in sleep, scientists have watched sleeping animals act out their dreams: cats stalk hallucinatory prey; dogs dig for bones; the hunted flee from phantom hunters. Ensueño’s dreams were numinous – like mine they worked with symbols beyond verbal expression. Here we meet on the evolutionary chain. Our insistence that we are the top of nature’s hierarchy, totally unconnected to animal life, is a mistake which leaves us alone in the universe.

As I watched Ensueño move in his sleep, I thought perhaps he was dreaming about my ring, a beautiful smoky quartz given to me by the poet P.K. Page. I treasured it. One night I put the ring on my bedside table. In the night I heard a clink – something fell – but I ignored it. A week later I realized the ring was missing. I searched the bedroom, the house, the stores and restaurants I’d visited. No ring.

A full year later, Juan and I were reorganizing the living room. We tried to pull the rug out from under the couch, but the couch was very heavy. We’d almost given up when Juan said: “Just a little more.” The carpet slipped out and under it was a treasure trove of small items: a pencil, a Q-tip, a small figure of wax, a rubber ball. And my ring!

Ensueño had carried my ring from the third floor to the first and dragged it under the rug to join his precious hoard. Cat behaviourists say that cats steal objects that resemble prey. My ring was not prey. Ensueño was possibly dazzled by its mysterious silver brightness. How could I be angry at such a clever thief?

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We like to think of cats living in an eternal present, but they have excellent long-term, episodic memories, and will recognize a person after years of absence. But my most amusing experience of cat memory involved a stranger.

When we travelled, we always needed someone to feed the cats and safeguard the expensive equipment in the recording studio. We were going to New York, but our potential sitters had other commitments. Finally, Juan found a young man named Sergio to take over.

Before we left, Juan took Negrito aside and told him we were going to New York, but we would be back Friday morning. When we returned home, Sergio told us the strangest story.

Thursday night he’d gone to bed around 2 a.m. He was sleeping in the guest room on the 3rd floor. When he woke up in the morning and opened the bedroom door, he found his hat and his scarf on the lintel. The only explanation was that the cats had brought them up from the first floor.

Of course, it’s crazy to think that Negrito could know which day was Friday. Clearly, he’d noticed Sergio was packing up his suitcases. For some reason cats understand the implications of suitcases. They were telling Sergio this was their house, and it was time for him to leave.

I guess the question may be why are cats drawn to some people and not to others? What are they sensing? Is it a matter of chemistry? Or are cats and how they perceive and react in the world way beyond our understanding?

I tracked down the cat behaviourist Kristin Hulzinga and visited her in Burlington, Ont. “Cats are habitually under-stimulated, and their intelligence is chronically underrated,” Kristin told me. Her philosophy is that cats, to be trained, must be intelligent, confident, open to stimulus and like to be challenged. She added: “I would never ask them to do anything that they don’t enjoy.”

When Kristin called her cat Zeddie to the living room, she came immediately and responded to commands: sit, stand, spin in a circle, weave through legs, high-five. It was extraordinary to see this beautiful creature enthusiastically high-fiving her trainer with a lifted paw. Zeddie has appeared in several TV series including American Gods and Jane, and in ads for Purina and TikTok, in one case riding a skateboard, propelling it forward with her hind leg.

Kristin is fascinated by cats. She says they are master manipulators. They change their tone depending on which human they wish to communicate with and can mimic the sound of a baby crying. She admits they have a short fuse, which is usually because of a perceived invasion of their autonomy. She also believes cats can communicate with humans telepathically.

I learned that after 10 million years of feline evolution, cats are not much different from their wild ancestors. They’re the only domesticated animal that can return to the wild, readapt and survive. One thing that distinguishes cats is that they have a third eyelid (or nictitating membrane). This is a transparent or translucent pinkish eyelid underneath the primary eyelids that can be drawn across the eye for protection without interfering with vision. This is an ancient adaptation. How ingenious – Negrito’s eyes could be moistened without him closing his lids and losing sight of his prey. I imagine Negrito’s ancestors moving through forests and tall grasses, their eyes protected by the third eyelid. They see clearly in the dark night, picking up the slightest movement.

Cats are crepuscular; they love twilight and dawn. I think of my two night-prowlers moving through the house when we are asleep. Playing, hunting, collecting rings. They are truly magical creatures.

I am grateful to Ensueño and Negrito for sharing my life. While they have both passed on – Negrito in 2020, and Ensueño last March – they haven’t really left. I think the animals we love are intermediaries that can lead us back to nature, which we are desecrating, literally divesting of its sacred character – if only we would listen to them and speak their language.

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