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Cats are a lot like people. You never know what they’re going to do next. And like people, they come in all shapes and sizes, varied personalities, and capacities for mischief.
A cat can be lying perfectly still and with a shocking suddenness bolt with lightning speed to another part of the house. Just like that, faster than a speeding bullet. How do they do that?
But this trick is not the cat specie’s most impressive. No way. Cats are at their finest when they demonstrate their talent for indifference. Cats can sleep, lounge, or practice the art of snootiness in a room stuffed with 25 people. You can stand on your head, whistle, or recite the Gettysburg Address in front of a cat, and if it’s so inclined, the cat will ignore you with an insouciance James Bond couldn’t match. Yes, cats “do apathy” with enthusiasm—ah, an oxymoron, enthusiastic apathy. But that’s cat behavior.
I had a relative—won’t tell you what kind for the relative was a good person—who didn’t like cats. Fair enough. It’s a free country. But the relative periodically told tales of men or boys in the relative’s childhood hometown who liked to kill cats. I don’t know whether the relative ever did this, but even as a wee lad, these stories didn’t engage me.
I, thankfully, had a father who grew up on the farm. And the farm was still five minutes away throughout my childhood. So not only did my father love and respect animals of all kinds, so did I. Even cats like the ones on the farm that would sit patiently near my grandmother as she hand-milked a cow, waiting for her to aim a part of the cow’s anatomy at them and squirt milk into their eager mouths. If you’ve never seen or participated in this trick you haven’t lived.
I remember, I don’t know why, Dad holding kittens once. I think we were somewhere other than home. But the point is I remember him intervening to protect these kittens from I can’t remember what and then gently petting and talking kindly to them. It’s just a blip from childhood, but it is a powerful memory, one that helped form my love for animals and later interest in wildlife preservation and “the outdoors,” what we now call the environment. I'm glad for Dad's example.
I admit cats are not my favorite domestic animal. Dogs hold that position. But cats are endlessly creative, energetic, and interesting animals. To me they’re fun to watch while dogs are fun to physically enjoy, i.e. wrestle and roughhouse.
I know all the arguments about feral cats and too many cats and why do we need cats and cats kill small game animals. But those are people issues, not cat issues. If people took proper care of cats we wouldn’t have cat problems.
So here’s to cats: one minute calm the next minute over the moon. Cats are a lot like people.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
Believe it or not, we have 5 cats, 4 outside and 1 inside. We chose to have 2 cats who before they went to their reward had litters from whence we got 3 of the cats we have now…so you could say we chose 3 but ended up with 5. Confusing, I know, but a typical cat-story.
At various times along the way of family life and raising kids we’ve had dogs, as many as 11 cats one time when two (mentioned above) had simultaneous litters, rabbits, fish, and hamsters.
We never went the bird route, but hey, we like birds. As a matter of fact we like all animals, so we enjoy the deer, pheasant, rabbits, turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks, opossum, raccoons, and more that frequent our yard in all seasons.
I grew up in a small town five minutes from Grandpa’s farm. So big farm animals and all that went with them was part of my youth. Animal husbandry, therefore, is something with which we’re familiar. And from at least an intellectual point of view, so is conservation, hunting and animal rights, and use of animals in research. No matter how you slice it, we’re “animal people.”
This cat-story, though, focuses upon the “inside cat.” Her name is Abby, she’s probably about 5 years old, and she’s from California. She first came to the Rogers clan via our son, who acquired Abby from a local shelter in Pasadena as a gift for his wife. Abby lived happily in their home, moved from CA back to MI, and then came to our house with them when they transitioned from an apartment to their first home. Meanwhile, baby is on the way, so our son and his wife decided they didn’t want to take Abby into their new home to be around their newborn. Now you know how Abby came to reside at our place.
Abby is the most social animal I’ve ever known. If you let her, which my wife does and I don’t, she’ll climb onto your lap at all times in all places. She’ll climb onto your laptop keyboard. She’ll walk on you in the bed at night, if you let her, which I don’t. When my wife’s gone for a few days and I return to an empty house except for Abby, she’ll meow for an hour or more, upset from lack of companionship.
All in all, if you like cats, Abby’s about as nice as they come, even though two cat-isms drive me crazy. Abby sheds and periodically sharpens her claws on the back of the furniture, even though she has a scratching post.
So a couple of months ago we investigated getting her declawed. The cost was not an issue, but the more I read online about this procedure the more I didn’t like it, the more I realized how invasive it was to the cat—not like us clipping our fingernails, but painful, possibly injurious long-term, and most of all, permanently removing something that makes a cat a cat. We opted to put up with periodic scratching behavior rather than declaw our cat.
Since then I’ve read more about declawing cats and an even more invasive procedure, devocalizing dogs. These practices are part of modern urban life.
The ASPCA opposes declawing, debarking, and a host of other physical tweaks people make on their pets. Yet some 60% of pet owners, including 55% of cat owners, say declawing is OK, while only 8% say debarking a dog is OK. Another 47% favor making debarking illegal but 44% do not agree. So on the whole, Americans are fairly open to declawing cats but pretty negative on devocalizing dogs. I can’t go with either.
I’m not against all forms of physical interventions with animals. Having been close to the farm I know that horns are cut from cattle primarily for the safety of human beings working around them. Now we have polled breeds wherein horns have literally been bred out of the line. Sometimes cattle’s ears are cropped for identification. And then there’s the old practice of branding. Birds' wings are sometimes clipped to prevent them from flying away. In urban areas and beyond we’re being encouraged, and many are doing it, to have tiny computer identification chips surgically placed in pets, especially dogs. Even bobbing some dog breeds’ tails is considered appropriate.
I am not suggesting everyone who chooses to intervene physically with their animals violates some principle of animal husbandry. Nor am I saying that a person who physically alters his or her pet is ipso facto a person of moral disrepute. I’m simply calling attention to the fact that such a decision should be made carefully with due consideration to genuine need and the well being of the animal.
I must say, though, that declawing and debarking seem to me to be more about human convenience than about protecting the animal, making its life better, or even securing protective identification. Both surgeries can apparently be successful and seemingly not hurtful to the animal long-term. But there’s much evidence that both surgeries can also cause considerable discomfort, illness, and death in the animal. When you opt for declawing or debarking you really don’t know what will happen to your animal.
For us these latter possibilities weren’t worth the risk. We decided we’d rather have a cat that’s a cat, whole and well, and enjoy and/or tolerate her cat behavior. It’s why after all we have a cat.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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What would the world be like without animals? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I’d rather live in an animal-populated world as we know it or in a world like Jurassic Park. I am, have been, and ever will be an animal lover.
So in a new article called “Praise God For Animals” I tell a couple of animals stories and finally put in print a record of my own growing-up dog, Peppie. She was a good dog, one I can still miss.
In that article I discuss what I believe God thinks about animals. He is, after all, the one who gave us animals in the first place. Yes, he made us humans smarter, but with our smarts he also gave us responsibility. We are his care-takers. We are stewards of the world and everything in it, including animals. So there is no place for cruelty, misuse or abuse, needless slaughter or any other decimation of a specie.
Loving animal life meant, for me, loving reading about animals. Each month in junior high and high school I read religiously Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield. In time, I read some of the classic stories involving animals: Jack London's White Fang and The Call of the Wild, then Moby Dick, Animal Farm. I read and than watched Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books and later films. I watched Gentle Ben, Old Yeller, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Lassie, and every other film or television program involving animals. Later still, I read some of Theodore Roosevelt's reports and books about his big game hunting and other expeditions. Loved them all.
Animals provide us with companionship, food and clothing and a host of other products necessary to life. They provide us with a labor force, intriguing true stories, and entertainment. We need to care for them, domesticated and wild. We could not do without them. Who would want to?
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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Hunting is an interesting if frequently controversial subject. The reason it’s interesting is that hunting involves some incredible stories of both human and animal heroics. Hunting is controversial because some people do not consider hunting a legitimate human activity, some people engage in good hunting, and some people engage in bad hunting. My focus here is good hunting vs. bad hunting.
By good and bad, I do not mean available game animals vs. lack of game. By good and bad I’m not making reference to the hunter’s skills. By good and bad hunting I mean hunting that respects and conserves the animal and the environment vs. hunting that is simply about killing, destruction, and bragging rights.
Now I assume that even those individuals who oppose all hunting would prefer good hunting to bad hunting as a lesser of evils.
Good hunting is conducted by people who care about animals and their environs. Good hunting does not slaughter without regard for humane methods or conservation. Good hunting is not characterized by litter, reckless fires, or polluted waters. Good hunting takes only the limit considered best for the game population. Good hunting rejects the selfish and sometimes grievous excesses of bad hunting.
While there is no biblical injunction against hunting, God charges human beings with the stewardship of his creation. No sadistic cruelty, no wanton slaughter to the point of near extinction, no poaching, no harvesting of animal parts while the animal is left to rot (like hunting rhinos to near extinction in the superstitious belief a rhinoceros’s horn is an aphrodisiac), no trashing of the environment can be justified by Scripture.
Bad hunting, because it violates God’s trust, makes us less human. Bad hunting is morally bankrupt. Both good and bad hunting reveal the character of the hunter.
"Good And Bad Hunting," #365 from the Making a Difference program. Originally recorded December 17, 2003.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.