Real respect requires something much more than babying; it requires overhauling our whole perspective on cat kind. It’s time to open our eyes — like really, really wide, the way my sister’s cat does when it spies the vacuum cleaner — and see this animal for what it really is: not a helpless furball to be patronized and mollycoddled, but an entity both fearsome and sublime, commanding respect in the manner of a mafia don, or the ocean.
For in truth, the humble house cat is one of the most stunning organisms on the planet. No creature is more exquisitely sensitive, and yet none is hardier. None beguiles us more but needs us less. There are more than 600 million domestic cats on the planet today, and we are hard-pressed to explain why. Humans apparently never tried to cultivate them (their abilities as ratters are overhyped). Rather, cats took the reins in our relationship, undergoing a novel process of self-domestication, tweaking their brain structures to better withstand the terrible stresses of human company and thereafter radiating out from the Middle East in determined furry battalions. In an era when lions, tigers and other types of felines flirt with extinction, house cats are themselves an intensifying menace to endangered species.
Our living rooms are among their final conquests, as indoor-only cats are a phenomenon of mostly the last 70 years or so. It hasn’t been an easy takeover. In fact, chaotic human homes, with their noises, stenches and overbearing occupants, may be the most radical and challenging environment that these little hunters, which flourish on deserted sub-Antarctic islands and the slopes of active volcanoes, have yet faced.
So on Tuesday — and I know, it’s hard — resist the urge to simply cuddle your cat with reckless abandon. Instead, consider this creature at arm’s length, study it. Skip the kitty co-nap and wake up to your cat’s magnificent natural history. Respect the fact that no animal has come further under its own power to meet us where we are.
I must say, one more reason I like D. Hart. Cats rock!
True confession: Back when I was a pagan I told my young children “I am not sure cat owners can go to heaven.” —- “I love cats, they are delicious!” (They understood from young ages that their father had a weird sense of humor)
Long sense that time, the wife and I are proud cat folk, two beauties dwell in our home, filling it with delight, funkiness and joy. 🙂
Old Life 
A presby cat!
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Cats even knocked Trump off the Times op ed pages and gave us — wait for it — a cat w-w:
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Reblogged this on Will S.' Sunny Side Blog and commented:
Hey, look, a cat video on the internet! 😉
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I must say, one more reason I like D. Hart. Cats rock!
True confession: Back when I was a pagan I told my young children “I am not sure cat owners can go to heaven.” —- “I love cats, they are delicious!” (They understood from young ages that their father had a weird sense of humor)
Long sense that time, the wife and I are proud cat folk, two beauties dwell in our home, filling it with delight, funkiness and joy. 🙂
A cat lover,
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Auto correct./ voice text…..long since–
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Every day should be Cat Appreciation Day, I am reminded of my failure by the nonstop grumbling from la gata sunrise to sunset.
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