A S most householders, consciously or unconsciously. harbour a domestic cat
or cats, even scrappy deduc- tions as to these animals seem excusable. It would be bumptious, since their essence is an enigma and we often barely realize their external shape, to set down anything as known about such abstruse beings, whether they are our confreres. police against vermin, tolerated vassals, or zanies kept. for diversion. Some cats seem almost disembodied, they appear and disappear so spookishly—in the family but not of it If mousers they are tolerated, but if they catch birds or rabbits are outlawed as murderers and thieves.
They have no specific Latin name, and even Mivart can only call them " common " cats, owning that this is zoologically incorrect. All associates of cats, even their enemies, are influenced by their psychosis. We dominate dogs, but we cannot dominate cats except by force. They can be annihilated or abolished, but not made subservient or banal.
Kipling, Plato, and the Egyptians knew that Puss is a personality apart. She will love a rat, rabbit, horse, dog, bird, monkey, or man, but none of them can enslave her
Cats suffer much, in soul and body, from human patrons. Interference with their destiny, usually injurious, is often fatal. They are slain or hurt by doses many sizes too large for them, are dragooned ruthlessly, and expected to realize habits, fetishes, and ritual which do not concern them, and of which their observance is as inconceivable as that a planet should keep its orbit over Rotten Row. Forcible feed- ing is anguish to cats. "All animals," Pliny said, "know what is good for them except man." Grass, of the right sort, seems the feline all-heal. Rough cocksfoot (Dactylic glomerate) is what they like best, but meadow soft grass, otherwise York- shire Fog (Holcus lanatus), green wheat or barley, oatgrass, or variegated garden Ribbon Grass are eaten, though with leas relish. These rough-edged grasses help them to disgorge the hair swallowed in cleaning themselves. Cats' dietary caprices are many. Some lap ice-cream ; others like asparagus, beetroot, cheese, cherry-tart, hard biscuit, or treacle. These animals are reliable weathercocks. Like all roamers, they outlive trying outdoor conditions, but succumb to chill indoors. A draught from an open door, divided by a closed door from the room in which a cat lay on the floor, drove it on to a chair. On the open door being shut, unseen by puss, he came down from his refuge. On the floor the draught enveloped him all over. Again, a cat sleeping on a bed facing a slightly open window always crept under the quilt when the wind came from the quarter to which the window opened, but lay outside the quilt in much lower temperatures when the wind was from other directions. Cats' dislike for heavy treads and sudden com- motions is obvious. Noise is usually abhorrent to them, but not if customary, as with cats in railway stations or thorough- fares. Certains flavours and smells, movements which inspire play, the quarry they desire, and tactful notice from humanity please and interest them. Lack of this last, especially if it has been withheld from previous generations, gives a cat an unmistakable mien. And cats who spend their nights roving are easily identified by the attitudes and places they sleep in by day—often bare, chilly spots, on flagstones, on wet earth, under a bush, or in a door-scraper.
No wonder the cat " walked by itself," since people live with cats for years and never speak to them, nor give them even a cheeseparing. The average cat's attitude to the average home is what ours would be to an almshouse or workhouse where we depended for intermittent maintenance on Brobdiug- nagian despots of alien kind. No domestic animals are more sensitive to human handling, physical or moral, and it is centuries of human demeanour which have made them like shades among our substantial entities.
In spite of Walt Whitman cats do seem "demented with the mania of owning things," and if one acquires a corner to his liking he resents another usurping it., and teases him away with persevering lickings and bitings. We may place the chief actuating impulses of cats in the following order : (1) Maternal affection, instinct, or solicitude ; (2) fear ; (3) hunger or thirst; (4) curiosity or cleanliness. It puzzles one to sort these last motives. It depends on degree whether hunger or thirst overcomes curiosity or cleanliness. Cats like to satisfy their fifth (or sixth ?) olfactory (or subliminal?) sense as to the contents of their abode, for reasons undivined by our dissimilar mentality. A very hungry or thirsty cat will eat or drink before washing, but a cat, if not hungry, investigates objects which puzzle it before eating or drinking. Fear in cats is stronger than normal hunger or thirst, and maternal instinct (naïvely labelled " spite " by unobservant people and known as maternal affection in woman) is strongest., and is far less self-conscious, simpler, and more vehement in the average feline than in the average human mother. Fear sometimes literally paralyses cats whom it assails. Anyhow cat-psychosis is so subtle that all redaction of it is hypothesis. After reading Miss Keller's amazing books unknown forms of life, with personalities invisible, inaudible, and intangible seem possible. If she, in the narrow limits of a maimed existence, communed with unseen and unheard associates, who knows what might ensue after bodily dissolution? And animals, less hampered by externalities than ourselves, may know strange things now. One must leave it at that.
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