Chapter Two

Becoming a Cat

A lot of cats have mental problems. Augusta certainly did. Sudden loud noises sent her diving for cover. The only strangers she would even approach were those few quiet women long familiar with cats who had the patience to sit on the floor, speak softly, and wait. Even then, it might take a while for Augusta to slink from hiding and sniff the lady’s extended forefinger. Even then, one twitch and she might be gone like a bullet. Men, almost universally, she had no tolerance of whatever, her exceptions being me and our aforementioned six-eight friend with feet like anvils. All her life long she never sat on a lap. She would sit close by, purring and content, but laps, no, those were danger zones. She would sleep on our feet, and, later, between Elizabeth’s legs—higher up the colder it got—or on top of your head, but as soon as you sat up you were scary.

We were fortunate. Such neuroses as Augusta’s were, comparatively, piffle. Thousands of cats won’t pee in their litter boxes, preferring to squirt the walls or furniture (and the stench can be ineradicable). Furniture, oh yes, thousands of cats rip it to ribbons. Thousands scratch or bite. There’s yowling all night. Wool sucking. Eating houseplants, including poisonous ones. Refusing to eat. Obesity. Running away. Fighting. Compulsive vomiting. Compulsive self-grooming. Feline hyperesthesia (a sort of epilepsy, in which the cat attacks itself). Aggression toward all humans. Terror of all humans.

It’s tempting to ascribe many of these difficulties to the domestic cat’s essential wild nature in conflict with its life of confinement, or to our own misunderstanding of our own mysterious pet, or to neglect or maltreatment that we didn’t even know we were guilty of at the time. In many cases, however, the trouble has started much earlier, before you ever laid eyes on your cat.

When things go right for a kitten, it is almost certain to grow up to be a sociable, even-tempered, happy cat, even in difficult circumstances. But what does “things going right” mean? Amazingly, in all the years of cat domestication, there had been no fully scientific study of that question until late in the twentieth century. There was a great deal of folk wisdom, some of it accurate, some of it not. There have been dozens of books on how to raise cats, some of them sound, some of them not, much of their guidance not sufficiently clearly defined or sufficiently widely tested to yield reliable outcomes. Seemingly as simple a question as the right age for the adoption of kittens seems not to have been addressed with much consistency in veterinary schools. (It would at least have been agreed that abandoning a tiny kitten in the snow in Montana fell short of the ideal.)

The one study that demonstrates nearly everything we need to know about the ideal early life of the domestic cat has lain essentially buried for almost thirty years. The study is not entirely unknown—some popular writers have referred to it—and some of it simply confirms old common sense; but its essential discoveries were revolutionary.

The text of the technical article “The Human–Cat Relationship” by Eileen B. Karsh and Dennis C. Turner never made it to the internet. The title occurs only in a few other papers’ reference lists. The study’s sole public existence is as part of a collection of papers from a symposium called “Cats ’86—The Behavior and Ecology of the Domestic Cat,” which was held at the University of Zürich-Irchel in Switzerland in September 1986. The collection was published in book form by the Cambridge University Press in 1988 as The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behaviour. It was not a best-seller. As far as I have been able to discern, there has been no significant specific follow-up to the Karsh and Turner paper.

Which is a shame, because “The Human–Cat Relationship” is almost certainly the single most important study in all the scientific literature on the domestic cat. The information in it has the capability of making a great difference in the number of kittens that grow up to be happy, well-adjusted cats, and, thereby, a great difference in the lives of many people.

It took me months to find Eileen Karsh. Nobody in the Temple University psychology department remembered her. I could find no email address, no phone number, no scholarly references other than that single study. She didn’t exist on the internet. I finally found a list of donors to some charitable cause in Philadelphia that included “Eileen K. and Lynn Hammond,” which mentioned that Dr. Lynn Hammond had also been a member of the psychology department at Temple. There was another emeritus Temple professor of psychology on the list, and eventually I was able to find his email address. He told me that despite the name more often given to women, Lynn Hammond was a man, and that his wife, Eileen K. Hammond, was probably the same as Eileen Karsh. But he hadn’t seen his former colleague in thirty years, and he had no idea where he was. I started searching for Lynn Hammond in telephone listings in and around Philadelphia and finally, bingo, there was one in the suburb of Wayne, Pennsylvania. I called, and a woman’s voice answered, with an old-fashioned New York accent. Was this by any chance Eileen Karsh? It was.

Would she be willing to talk to me? She started talking, and I could hardly get a word in edgewise. I said I wanted to come and see her and have her tell me about her research and her whole career. She said she’d be delighted. So I took the train down from New York to Philadelphia and a creaky commuter train out the Main Line to Wayne. A big blue BMW jounced into the station parking lot.

She made me promise not to write about her house. I couldn’t imagine why, and I said I was interested only in her work anyway. What I can say about the house is that there are a lot of cats in it. Karsh was surprised but gratified that I had found her work. She knows it has never gotten the attention it deserves.

Eileen Barbara Karsh was born on July 6, 1932, in New York City, and grew up in the verdant Riverdale section of the Bronx. She excelled as a student at the private Fieldston School, and she went on to Smith College, where, she later discovered, she fell within the 5-percent quota of Jewish girls. She dropped out after two years to marry, got divorced after three years, and then entered Barnard College, where she developed an interest in psychology. Her father, a physician, wanted her to go to medical school, where there were very few girls of any stripe, but Eileen wanted to pursue her psychology studies in graduate school, where there were even fewer. Columbia, Harvard, and Yale all accepted her. She chose Yale. Both the students and faculty were all male. She had counted on a small income from a teaching assistantship, but it was Yale policy that a woman could not hold one. The psychology department was not congenial to its only female graduate student, but she persisted in her study of animal learning—using lab rats, as nearly everyone in the profession did—and in 1959, with a dissertation on the nature of reward and punishment, she achieved her Ph.D. The University of Pennsylvania, where she went for postdoctoral work, was no friendlier, but she managed two years of research there nonetheless, with a National Institutes of Mental Health grant to look at areas of the rat brain that controlled feeding behavior. She discovered that the stress caused by forcing her rats to swim caused damage to their hypothalamus.

For the first time since childhood she got a cat, a red tabby named Cyrus, but her work continued with rats, first at Swarthmore College, from 1961 to 1963, and then from 1963 to 1967 at Drexel University, where she was appointed to an assistant professorship in biomedical engineering, specializing in statistics. Finally she found her permanent academic home at Temple University, in Philadelphia, where for the first time she was fully employed as a professor. “Eight years after I got my Ph.D. it took to get hired by a university psychology department.” Things were tough in academe for even the most brilliant of women.

In 1968 she married fellow psychology professor Lynn Hammond, who suggested that she might prefer working with cats. “He was right,” she says. “I didn’t feel like shocking rats anymore.

“I got a small grant, trying to do a sort of Pavlov thing with the cats, a progressive denial of food, trying to create an experimental neurosis. It didn’t pan out, because the kittens were too old. I began thinking about how a lot of mother cats don’t help their newborns if they can’t reach a nipple—they just die. And so I developed an interest in early-stage relationships. Attachment. I took very good care of my cats. Except for the very young litters, who had to be kept in a cage, I always let them just move around the lab, which they enjoyed. They enjoyed each other’s company, and mine.

“Cruelty to lab animals was the norm back then. Cats and other lab animals, when the researchers were finished with them, would be sent to med schools for—for a fate worse than death. Really, worse. There were cruel experiments, yes, but also there was actual sadism.

“Lab animals now are pretty happy—happier than animals in zoos, certainly. They develop relationships with their people, they get used to their routines. A lot of people don’t believe this. When I got going with a larger number of cats—and they were always happy, very happy—people were protesting outside. I was on television, and I was not nicely portrayed. I was the villain.

“And then people in the department, some of them, thought I was ‘playing with cats,’ because they weren’t in cages. Sometimes, if somebody opened the door, a cat would jump out, and they thought the cats were trying to escape some terrible situation. If you know anything about cats, you know that if you open a door with a cat on the other side, he might just jump through it. I mean, how are you going to study attachment between people and cats if the cats are in cages?”

Karsh’s interest in early-stage attachment was the key that unlocked mystery after mystery. She was fascinated by the work of a biologist named Zing-Yang Kuo, who had published research in 1930 showing that “when kittens were reared with rats, they grew up to be cats that did not kill their cagemates and usually did not kill other similar rats.”1 In later work, Kuo raised kittens with puppies, rabbits, birds, rats, and other kittens, in various combinations. He measured the degree of the kittens’ attachment to the other animals by removing the latter from the study enclosure, leaving only the one kitten, which “would become restless, cry, and look as if it was in great distress. If the kitten lived with five puppies, as soon as he put in a puppy, the kitten calmed down. However, when the kitten lived with four other kittens and one puppy, the kitten remained restless and distressed in the presence of the puppy until another kitten was put in the cage.”

Michael W. Fox, in a 1969 experiment, had raised some kittens with puppies starting at the age of four weeks, and with other kittens starting at the age of twelve weeks. The kittens that started early played easily with the puppies and never showed any fear of dogs. The kittens that had never seen a puppy until the age of twelve weeks were afraid of them, and remained irrevocably so.

There had also been earlier studies of the effects of human handling on infant animals—baby rats as well as kittens. Both species initially reacted with distress, but both also showed faster rates of physical development. In one experiment, Siamese kittens were handled for twenty minutes every day for the first thirty days of their life, and “they opened their eyes one day earlier, emerged from the nesting box 2.6 days earlier, and developed Siamese coloration earlier.” Later analysis suggested that the more rapid development may have occurred because the babies’ cries for help stimulated their mothers to pay more attention to them—which had been shown in other research to have similar effects.

Another study had demonstrated that even very brief handling—as little as five minutes a day—caused kittens to approach people more readily and more often. Another experiment added play to the handling, as well as varying the number of people involved. The kittens that played with five people grew up to be the least afraid of strangers, while one-person kittens became more affectionate.

This basket of scrambled and inconsistent data was all Eileen Karsh had to go on when she started her work on cats. Her first experiments focused on confirming earlier research, particularly the studies that investigated the effects of handling young kittens. She found that “eight cats that were handled for five minutes daily approached a person faster (32 seconds) than seven non-handled cats (128 seconds).”

She also considered earlier, rather horrific studies in which infant animals were separated from their mothers and from all other contact. In one, kittens had been kept in complete isolation up to the age of ten months and then exposed to dogs, rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, canaries, parrots, sparrows, and other cats. In all cases—big surprise—the poor kittens’ response was “predominantly hostile and attacking.” Another god-awful experiment removed three groups of kittens from their mothers at the ages of two weeks, six weeks, and twelve weeks—and kept them away—and then looked at the results when they reached nine months. Another non-surprise: The cats that had been kidnapped at two weeks “displayed excessive undirected activity, disorganized behavior, fear of novel situations, and inability to tolerate delay in feeding… [and] showed aggression and non-cooperation in a food-competition contest, while cats from the other two groups cooperated.”

Similar torture had been inflicted on puppies, with parallel results. Horrible as all this had been, as the data piled up Karsh began to see patterns defining narrow windows of time in their infancy when kittens were particularly sensitive to socialization—first with their mothers, then with their littermates, and then with people. There had been a few vague speculations on these time periods, but never any scientific attempt to define their boundaries or their nature.

Suspecting that socialization with people may have been possible at an earlier age than had ever been thought, and that it may have extended much later than had been widely believed, Karsh devised an experiment that divided her British shorthair kittens—all born in the Temple labs—into three groups. The first would begin to be handled at the age of three weeks, for fifteen minutes every day; the second, at seven weeks, “about the age represented in most pet care books as the best time to begin handling”; the third group would not be handled until they were fourteen weeks old.

“Handling” is a somewhat crude word for what Karsh and her helpers did, which was to hold a kitten in their laps and gently pet and stroke it, and then return it to its mother and its brothers and sisters. Each kitten was handled by four or more different experimenters. All of the kittens lived with their mothers and littermates in large cages up to the age of eight weeks, after which they were all free to roam around the several rooms of the lab.

From the age of fourteen weeks up to one year, they were tested for “friendliness or attachment” every two to four weeks. Karsh had two ways of measuring that. In the first, one person put the cat in her lap while another timed how long the cat stayed there until it jumped down. In the second test, “A person was seated at the far corner of the room on the floor, with a chalk line drawn at a distance of fifteen centimeters around the person. The cat was introduced and the time taken to reach the person (latency) was recorded. Trained observers also recorded time spent with the person within the chalk line during a three-minute test period and other friendly responses such as head and flank rubs, purrs, and chirps.”

The earliest-handled cats stayed in their handlers’ laps for an average of forty-one seconds. Those that weren’t handled until seven weeks stayed for twenty-four. The ones who were untouched until fourteen weeks stayed only fifteen seconds.

The approach test had startlingly different results. The early-handled kitties approached within eleven seconds, but the middle group and the lates were almost the same—thirty-nine and forty-two seconds. Clearly, seven weeks was too late to start overcoming the kittens’ shyness. This was a major finding.

Augusta’s personality comes vividly to mind. Wouldn’t sit in our laps, and a stone fraidy-cat.

Karsh found the responses of the three-week-old kittens so striking that in her next experiment she included a group that were handled starting at the age of one week. These are really little kittens. Usually they’ve just opened their eyes the day before—and their eyes are always blue at this point—but they still can’t focus. Their ears are just starting to fold open. They weigh barely eight ounces. They’re unaware of their surroundings: Their whole world is mom and their littermates. And yet handling them in their earliest infancy made a significant difference in their later lives. When the tests began at the age of fourteen weeks, these kittens stayed in laps longer than those started even at three weeks. They approached people more quickly as well.

Now Karsh wanted to improve the precision of her findings. In the previous studies, the kittens had been handled for differing lengths of time, and perhaps that had distorted the results. In the new study, she would have a larger sample size—seventy-five kittens in all—and each group would be handled for precisely four weeks: from ages one week to five weeks; two to six; three to seven; and four to eight.

She was looking for precision, but suddenly she thought of a possibly serious confounding variable, which could in fact have been screwing up her experiments all along. She was thinking about Pavlov again, and how back in 1927 he had observed that the dogs in his experiments fell into two broad natural character types, which he called excitable and inhibited. The excitable types weren’t easily conditioned. Other researchers had done similar classifications of dog personalities by breed, and there were informal notions about cat types: “Siamese cats,” wrote Karsh, “were described as outgoing, demanding of attention, and vocal, while Persians were described as lethargic, reserved, inactive, and not desiring close contact.” Now, on the hypothesis that some cats, like some humans, are born shy or born outgoing, she added assessments of timidity versus confidence to her approach tests, while her co-author, Dennis Turner, in Switzerland, using different methods, measured what he called shyness versus friendliness. Whether or not these traits were innate, they seemed to be stable from early kittenhood throughout a cat’s lifetime. One strong possibility was that since cat litters commonly have multiple fathers, timidity or confidence might be inherited from the father. Karsh recalculated her data to include timidity and non-timidity of all the kittens, as assessed by three of her assistants. Sure enough, once the timid cats were excluded, the results were even stronger:

“The sensitive period of socialization for cats to people is from two to seven weeks of age.”

This was the gold. It meant that kittens should be petted, cuddled, talked to, and taught the sight and smell of humans much earlier than anyone had ever known, and that the period when handling is effective tapers off much sooner. Breeders, shelter staff, veterinarians, self-appointed experts of every kind had had it wrong—and for the most part they still do.

It took a great many kittens to sustain Eileen Karsh’s research, and as they matured they were no longer of use in the laboratory. Those who had been hand-raised from very early ages were supremely adoptable—friendly, confident, unafraid. Even the ones classified as shy were still way ahead of their peers in shelters and, God forbid, pet shops. And of the fourteen-weekers—the kittens deprived of petting and play till the age of fourteen weeks—Karsh now says, “Of course they’d be a little harder to tame, but it’s not like they were damaged in some way. A little gentle care would bring them around. I mean, most of them, by the time we adopted them out, had been with us for a while, running around loose with me and my assistants in the lab. It was a pretty good life. At first we gave them away for free—a good British shorthair like that was worth three hundred dollars—but we felt that people were sort of taking them for granted, so we started charging thirty-five dollars, which was just the cost of neutering. Naturally I kept a few for myself.”

A piece headlined HER JOB’S THE CAT’S MEOW in the Philadelphia Daily News described the Temple cat lab thus: “Cats roam freely, snooze on roofs of open cages, or enjoy various climbing poles, perching shelves, and cat amusements.… The ‘lab’ seems more like a combined feline fun arcade and cat hotel.” Karsh was quoted: “Most of the time when you see cats in the laboratory, they have electrodes in their heads.”2

The serial adoptions offered a perfect opportunity for more research on attachment. Dennis Turner, in Switzerland, had already looked at the question of whether the mother’s presence was a significant influence during the early period of contact between people and kittens. He found that when the kittens were very young, having mom nearby made them somewhat bolder in entering the open test room—but they would then run not to the testing person but back to mom. A few weeks later in their lives, mom’s presence seemed to give them confidence, and they would approach the person more readily than kittens whose mothers were not in the room.

Both Turner and Karsh found that kittens reared in people’s homes tended to develop friendlier and more trusting personalities than even those with the most handling in the labs. It proved impossible to measure the time the home-reared kittens spent with people, and the number of people interacting with them was equally difficult to pin down, but it seemed a safe bet that a home would be a richer environment than a lab. More people spending more time with their kittens—that was the best of all possible ways to rear a happy, bold, and sweet-tempered cat.

Turner tested the question of whether feeding, alone, could be a significant factor in establishing or maintaining a sense of attachment in kittens or cats with the people who fed them. The experiments were somewhat elaborate, but the results were simple: “The act of feeding a cat can enhance the establishment of a relationship, but it is not sufficient to maintain it. Other interactions (petting, playing, vocalizing, etc.), are required to cement a newly founded relationship.” To a sensitive and sensible modern cat owner this finding may well be met with a “Duh!” but it must be remembered that there are many other owners who think feeding is about all they need to do to keep their cats loyal—and who then, dismayed, characterize their cats as “aloof” and “standoffish.”

Eileen Karsh was interested in how people chose which kitten they wanted—and in how the matches might be made better. She was immediately struck by the fact that physical appearance seemed to be almost the sole criterion. Sometimes people were looking for a cat to replace a previous one, and wanted a look-alike. “One woman told [me] that only the personality of the cat was important to her. When she was shown the first few cats, she remarked that she couldn’t relate to a cat that was all white or all black. When questioned about this, she responded that she related better to cats that were gray or striped.”

It didn’t take long for Karsh to conclude that just describing how people made their choices wouldn’t make for a very satisfying study. She wanted to influence how they chose—with the goal of both happier adopter and happier adoptee. She had already conducted a long-term study that showed that a successful match between cat and owner, especially an older owner, could have remarkable benefits for the person.

Eileen Karsh’s study of the effects of cat ownership started with interviews of twenty people, with an average age of about sixty, asking them to rate themselves on scales of loneliness, anxiety, and depression.3 They all came out pretty much the same. Then seventeen of the twenty interviewees adopted cats. Of those, eleven kept their cats for more than a year. Over the course of several follow-up interviews—of the long-term cat owners, the short-term owners, and those who had not adopted a cat at all—Karsh found that at the end of a year, the long-term cat owners were significantly less lonely, anxious, and depressed. After two years, four of the long-term owners who had had seriously high blood pressure at the beginning of the study now had much lower pressure; one was able to discontinue medication entirely. Two who were diabetic showed lower blood sugar levels. No such changes were seen in the subjects who did not own cats.

More recent, generally broader studies of the effects of pet ownership on human health have shown varying results, and there has been wide disagreement among scientists. Many have found significant benefits—physical, emotional, social, and psychological.4 Dennis Turner has written, “The cat might be an ideal co-therapist for clinically depressed persons. Psychiatrist Daniel Hell found that in human–human relationships the depressed person increasingly dissociates him/herself, the more (s)he feels misunderstood by the partner, who often attempts to help. The cat accepts the level of ‘interactivity’ the (depressed) owner wants to have and is present when the owner desires that contact without forcing itself on the human partner.… To some degree, cats can be more pleasant partners for depressed people than humans.”⁵ I wonder if Turner was smiling, perhaps grimly, when he wrote this.

Other scientists contend that the studies showing positive health effects were methodologically flawed, and the benefits are illusory, except perhaps some improvement in self-reported happiness.⁶ (One study found that the only measurable difference between pet owners and non-owners was that the owners were fatter.⁷) Regardless of measurable factors, as Richard Mayon-White of Oxford University writes, “Good health is more than the absence of disease.”⁸

What I consider to be definitive, a meta-study (that is, a study of studies) by the Human Animal Bond Research Initiative Foundation titled “The Health Care Cost Savings of Pet Ownership” not only affirmed the findings of “a growing body of academic and professional research” showing “the health benefits of pet ownership” but also showed dramatically lower “total health care spending.”9

Only eleven of Karsh’s seventeen adopters stuck with their cats. What had gone wrong in the other six cases? Could they just have been bad matches? Might there be a better way, she wondered, to choose a kitten than “I like the look of that one”? Karsh and her colleague Carmen Burket, a clinical psychologist, developed a program they called Companion Cat, which relied on structured interviews with prospective adopters. The interviewer would describe a number of aspects of cat reality—appearance, yes, but also various aspects of personality and temperament—and then the interviewee would be asked to express a preference in each category. Level of “activity” would be an important one: Did they prefer a cat that was a sleepy, dreamy couch potato, or a spitfire, or an up-all-nighter, or a princess? Some people might be bored to death by a lethargic cat. A highly active cat might drive another person nuts.

The next part of the program, then, was to create a profile of the adopter’s personality. “People who lack self-confidence,” writes Karsh, “find it difficult, even impossible, to relate to a shy or timid cat.… The cat’s inclination to hide triggers feelings of rejection in the insecure person.… Nurturant people, however, provide good homes for timid or even fearful cats.” She considers “as an ideal person-to-cat match, placing aggressively friendly cats (those who come up and repeatedly initiate cat–person interactions)”—the kind of cat her early-handling experiments were producing quite a few of—“as therapy for mild to moderately depressed persons.”

Karsh and Burket collided with several intractable adoption problems. The most common occurred when people’s cats had died only recently, and the grieving owners hadn’t found their way through their grief: Often they wanted a cat just like the one they had lost. Which of course was impossible. Over and over they were disappointed, and the poor unknowing substitute would be returned, or, worse, put down.

The second problem would be soap-operatic if it weren’t so sad. An older person, usually but not always a woman, is living alone. Her adult son or daughter, or more than one of her children conspiring, decide that Mom’s loneliness would be wonderfully assuaged by a cat. Maybe they’ve read how some elderly folks’ dark, dull lives have been pepped up and brightened by a kitty. Except that Mom doesn’t want one. Eventually she gives up and they go to Karsh’s lab, where they’ve heard the kittens are so sweet. Mom can’t make up her mind which one she wants, so one of the kids picks one. A few weeks later Mom calls and says the cat doesn’t like her, it’s got to go. In fact what has happened is that she has made zero effort to love the cat and the cat has responded in kind.

The third difficulty was the plain old mismatch—the timid cat and the depressive, the manic cat and the already nervous wreck.

Over time, Karsh got better at matchmaking, and she was particularly happy with how things turned out for the adopters who were lonely, elderly, handicapped, or depressed. Single parents found something new to share with their kids, something all could love equally without a burden of competition. One older woman’s systolic blood pressure fell from 175 to 125. Another, ninety years old, could no longer hear her phone or doorbell ring; her new cat learned to summon her when either rang. “If you talk to some elderly people, all they have to tell you about is their infirmities,” Karsh said. “When they get a cat, they have cat stories to tell.”10

A study by Adnan Qureshi and colleagues of the University of Minnesota looked at the occurrence of fatal heart attacks and strokes in a sample of more than four thousand people. After adjusting for a number of other predictive factors—gender, ethnicity, blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, and obesity among them—the study showed that cat owners had a significantly smaller risk of deadly heart disease than people who had never had a cat.11

The cats that the six original adopters in Karsh’s study gave up on were lucky, because it was understood that if the adoptions didn’t work out she would take them back, and in time she found good, permanent homes for all six rejected cats. The more typical outcome of a failed adoption, however, is that the cat ends up euthanized in a shelter. The shelter is brimming with kittens, younger and cuter than the rejectee, and they’re the ones chosen and happily carried home.

Karsh points out that nearly all kittens are “acceptably friendly.… However, if they have not been handled during the socialization period… they will typically grow up to be much more aloof. Also, unless one observes many kittens, it is difficult to tell an overly active kitten from an ordinarily active one.… Therefore, if a kitten is selected impulsively”—almost always, to Karsh’s eternal frustration, by appearance alone—“it may very well mature into a cat that differs from the adopter’s expectations.” And end up just another older cat back in the shelter.

Most shelters have more cats than will ever be adopted. The cutest kittens win. The others languish until the staff and volunteers face the agony of killing them. In no-kill shelters, of which there are increasingly many, finding a home for the cats no one wants can be a struggle—phone call after phone call to other shelters, municipal agencies, farmers’ associations, until somebody has an open adoption slot or a barn in need of a mouser.

It is a baffling fact that a good many people don’t care. A good many people—mostly men, it seems, God knows why—just hate cats. Cats were worshiped in Egypt, loved in ancient Rome, and loved well into the early years of Christianity in Europe. Then in the Middle Ages cats came to be associated with witchcraft and the plagues, and were widely reviled, tortured, burned. Now they have come back into the circle of Western people’s love, but incompletely. Black cats still spell bad luck to many (and are, in fact, adopted less often). Some people sense a vague sort of evil in all cats. Some people fear them. Karsh writes that on several occasions, groups of workmen were afraid to enter her cat colony rooms, with ten or fifteen cats roaming around loose, until somebody locked them up.

Some people hate cats for their apparent disposition not to communicate more clearly (a false impression, as we will see). Many believe them incapable of affection, unworthy of existence. If the dog hates ’em, they think, he must know something.

A great many more people love cats. They are by far the most popular animal companion in the world. There are ninety-six million pet cats in the United States, ten million in Canada, ten million in the United Kingdom, three million in Australia, a million and a half in New Zealand, fifty-three million in China, ten million in France, nine million in Italy, eight million in Germany, seven million in Japan. These are owned cats; we’ll deal with feral cats later. Some small number of these are barn cats and such, unneutered tom roamers, kitties so shadow-shy they won’t let you touch them—but the vast majority are our familiar, curious, weird, intermittently affectionate, unpredictable, dinner-loving house cats. Almost all of them are loved, albeit sometimes with a dose of frustration.

There are more cats than dogs in the United States, but there are more households with dogs. That’s because households with more than one cat are fairly common and multi-dog households much less so. But there are more pet fish than either.12 Less beloved, safe to say.

Victoria Voith, a professor of animal behavior at the Western University of Health Sciences, who is a veterinarian with a master’s degree in psychology, interviewed 872 cat owners who brought their cats to the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary hospital in 1981 and 1982. Ninety-nine percent of them considered their cats to be a family member. (The Humane Society of the United States, however, publishes a very different number: Citing the American Veterinary Medical Association Sourcebook of 2012, they state that 56.1 percent of American cat owners consider their cats to be family members.13) In Voith’s study, 97 percent of the cat owners talked to their cats at least once a day. Ninety-one percent believed their cats were attuned to their moods. Eighty-nine percent of the cats slept on their owners’ beds.

Nearly half these people reported that their cats had bad-conduct issues of some sort—mainly litter box problems and destructive behavior—but nobody was considering getting rid of their cat. This intrigued Voith, and she then designed another study “to learn why owners keep pets despite serious behavior problems.” She focused on people who had brought their cats to the hospital specifically for treatment of such problems. She asked thirty-eight of them why they’d hung on to their troublesome cats for so long. Fifty-five percent answered with something like a shocked, “Why, I love him!” or “You wouldn’t get rid of a child because he had a behavior problem, would you?” Obviously, no matter how much trouble they were, these cats were full-fledged members of their families.

“If an owner decides not to keep a pet because of a behavior problem,” Voith continued, “the decision is usually reached with considerable sorrow and regret. [The owners] often acknowledge a paradox. They recognize their attachment to the pet and, at the same time, acknowledge that the animal is a source of inconvenience, a financial expense, social concern, or even a physical threat. They will say, ‘I know he’s just a dog, but I feel about him as though he were my child.’” In fact, Voith concluded, “Many of the behavior patterns between people and pets are very similar to those that occur between a person and a child.”¹⁴

“Like children,” writes Eileen Karsh, “your cat (or dog) is dependent upon you for survival and, in this respect, is a perpetual child. Your cat appears to miss you when you are away and be happy to see you when you return. And your cat relates to you as an individual in a non-judgmental way, independent of your professional, social, or financial success or failure.”

Finding a cat who has been raised according to Karsh and Turner’s findings isn’t easy. The best shelters’ fostering programs do come close, and are surely your best bet. But cats come into our lives in many other ways than by rationally decided and planned adoption of a gently fostered kitten of a good mother at the age of at least three months. Augusta was dumped in the snow and survived a night skedaddle down the driveway. Sometimes your mother dies and leaves you her cats, all three old, one cranky, one sick, and one who hides from you for the first six months. Sometimes a cat shows up at your door and won’t stop complaining till you feed him, and eventually you let him inside. Sometimes the cat is part of the girlfriend package and you and your dog both have to learn not to hate cats, even while this one has peed on two of your sweaters—which you’re going to have to learn not to leave on the floor. You might see a cardboard box of mewling six-week-old orphans in the lap of a young woman on the sidewalk in the evident grip of despair, probably homeless, possibly a junkie, and on the box are shakily lettered the two words FREE KITTENS.

Whichever cat or cats you end up with, however it happens, you will be in for some surprises. If you’ve had cats already, you know. “Cats vary as much within their species as people do within theirs,” wrote the late Muriel Beadle in her well-known book The Cat. “Some cats are so dull-witted that never in their lives do they learn that a door which is ajar can be nudged further open. Other cats can open shut doors and get the lids off garbage cans as easily as if they had two hands with opposable thumbs. Some cats are born with unshakably equable dispositions and others are so high-strung that they go all to pieces when a doorbell rings.”

In “Individuality in the Domestic Cat”—published in the same collection as Karsh and Turner’s study—Michael Mendl and Robert Harcourt search for possible evolutionary explanations for the otherwise inexplicable eccentricities of the species. “The process of domestication is likely to have relaxed the constraints imposed upon the cat’s behavior by natural selection,” they write—speculatively—“and to have allowed it to express more variation in behavior than is seen in non-domesticated species. The cushioned existence of many domestic cats alleviates the constant need for behavior to be continually directed toward catching prey, mating, avoiding predators, and so on.” Which leaves them plenty of time for jumping out of hiding at you, racing mindlessly around the room, playing (or refusing to play) with their wide selection of cat toys, lying on whatever you’re trying to read, unspooling an entire roll of toilet paper, or… playing with bears in the dark. Individuality, thy name is cat. Just a few examples:

Charlie, my angel boy, used to get his toy mice right after I’d gone to bed. He would meow that really long and sad meow, and pick them up one by one bringing them up on the bed and laying them down beside me. Then he would lie down on the other side of me.

My cats get lost in the house. They’ll go downstairs in the night to eat or use the litter box and then stand at the bottom of the stairs and cry. You have to call out to them so they can follow the sound of your voice back to you. One’s lived in this house for six years, the other almost three.

Our cat, Maverick, jumps up the sides of the walls separating our family room and dining room. He jumps almost four feet, puts his “arms” on each side of the wall and slides down. He’s done it since he was a kitten.15

Elizabeth and I had a friend with a long history of training animals, including cats—she was the one who told us how to teach Augusta to fetch. Shamed by our failure to carry that through, we tried other tricks that our friend, again, assured us we could teach her easy-peasy. You have a bag of little crunchy cat treats, and each time Augusta does something that remotely resembles the trick, you praise her, pet her, and give her the treat, which she loved. We couldn’t get anywhere.

We concluded that this was a case of individual variation. Some cats were smart; some were not. Walter and Penny, the barn cats, obviously had all kinds of things figured out, for example their calm fencepost-sitting when coyotes came to call. It looked as though we had to face the fact that Augusta was just plain dumb. She was beautiful, though! So sleek, so smooth, so black. Everybody said how pretty she was. People do come to characterize their cats on a combination of available evidence and a certain amount of fantasy. We didn’t know, we just liked the idea of her being the black cat equivalent of a dumb blonde, and one of her affectionate nicknames became Dummy. Also Stoopie.

The interesting question does arise of how, if you’re a serious researcher, you measure things like individual intellectual variation in cats. They don’t take tests very well. A fine description of the challenge comes from Alex Thornton and Dieter Lukas, a psychologist and a zoologist, respectively, at Cambridge University, in their introduction to a paper titled “Individual Variation in Cognitive Performance: Development and Evolutionary Perspectives”:

Imagine a team of alien scientists visiting London during the summer of 2012, selecting a random sample of twenty humans and conducting experiments to test theories of human evolution. Some trials involve swimming, and most subjects perform rather poorly. However, one subject happens to be Michael Phelps, the Olympic record holder. Based on Phelps’s performance, the aliens conclude that humans have an astounding capacity for high-speed movement through water, underpinned by physiological and behavioral adaptations including efficient conversion of stored carbohydrates to sugars and fine-scale motor control for efficient propulsion. From this, they argue in favor of the aquatic ape hypothesis, which postulates that ancestral humans were under strong selection for an aquatic existence.

The paper—essentially a review of a slew of studies of cognition in many species—concludes that most of the work done up to the time of its publication, in 2012, was methodologically flawed because it didn’t adequately consider the wide differences among individuals. They suggested that some variation could represent “adaptive plasticity in response to local conditions,” and said also that “we must ask whether individual differences in cognitive traits are heritable and whether they have consequences for reproductive fitness.”

Perhaps, then, Augusta was dumb because she didn’t need to be smart. Reproductive fitness wasn’t an issue, because she was spayed, but all the wild and crazy minds, ideas, and imaginations of other cats, some number of whom were certainly fertile, could make for a dandy study of the question of their reproductive fitness—just as soon as somebody could figure out how to measure—or even characterize in comprehensible terms—the nature of their variations. Then tabulate same. Bon voyage!

Temple University closed Eileen Karsh’s lab in 1990. She then moved to the suburban Ambler campus, which had a population of feral cats. She worked with her students trapping them, feeding them, and gradually making them more or less tractable enough to be adopted. She continued teaching until her retirement in 1997, but she no longer conducted formal research. Her epochal study, “The Human–Cat Relationship,” of 1986, when she was only fifty-four years old, was the last scientific paper she ever published.

Was Augusta happy? We know now that her environment provided the right ingredients. That was luck—living on a ranch, far from the road, no traffic on it anyway, nice dogs, nice horses, nice cats, no nasty predators so far, lots of fascinating habitat to explore. She had owners who loved her and who tried, in their own dumb ways, to make her happy. But I believe that another of her individual traits was an innate happiness, a capacity for joy, which found its incarnation—never for a moment the same yet always the same—in the sun and the grass and the space and the wind of her home in Montana, its plants and animals, water and soil, its whispers and its fragrances. She was of that place, that ecosystem. Its gift to her—and, through her, to us—was her capacity for absorption, engagement, all-attention. No, those are too small. Call it delight.

We recognized it fully only in retrospect, by its absence. When life in my ranch partnership came to be too expensive, I had to sell my share, and we moved to San Francisco. We feared that as Augusta’s range shrank from a boundlessly fascinating universe to the narrow confines of apartment life, it would dull her soul pitifully. Then we found a sunny flat with an exterior staircase and a back yard separated from others only by cat-climbable fences. Perhaps this could prove a new frontier—it had texture, complexity, challenge. She was just turning two years old, and brimming with vitality, as well as that feline essence, curiosity. She began to teach us her new needs—new games, new races and chases. She charged up and down the back stairs, tightrope-tiptoed the banister top rail, prowled the scruffy, untended bushes at the bottom of the yard. Surely this was engagement? At first we were so busy, and so jangled ourselves by the shock of our own abrupt and entire change of habitat, that we did not see the faint dimming in her eyes.

Her new toys and adventures seemed satisfactory. She purred at Elizabeth’s feet in bed as always before. But as the picture formed in our memory of her life in Montana we saw there the glossy ripple of light in her fur, the acuteness of attention in her ears and whiskers, a lightness of movement that we had not been seeing here in the city. We began to notice that now there were noises that startled her, sirens, airplanes, car horns, shouts in the street, the whine of saws and whamming of hammers from the building next door, sounds that we, as longtime urban dwellers, easily absorbed and more or less forgot. For Augusta, perhaps even the anticipation of them induced anxiety.

Then my father came for a visit, and some rough barking laugh of his, or some clumsy attempt to pet her like a dog, sent her pipping out the back door and gone, into the morning, into the afternoon. We took the old man to the airport. When we came back Augusta was still gone. Into the night. We called and called. She always came, but she didn’t come.

Late, late that night, when the traffic noise had died, from the building next door, which was under renovation and empty, Elizabeth heard a weak, miserable mew. We called to her. Come home, little kitty, oh, dummy, come home! Please. Mew. We climbed into the adjoining back yard, found a ladder, squeezed through a window, worked our way through three flats littered with construction debris, sweeping our flashlights, calling as calmly as we could (not very). From somewhere, we couldn’t tell where, mew. There was still a low, unfinished attic to look in, and in the highest corner of it, wedged into the tiniest crevice, there was Augusta, frozen in… misery? terror? In any case no longer even speaking. Elizabeth had to pry her out, and she was ajitter for days.

We bought a house in the street behind, a narrow old Victorian with a little back yard—a place where Augusta could sniff, climb, roam, and yet be protected from traffic, for the entire block was enclosed by buildings shoulder to shoulder. We would see how that would be, but meanwhile summer was coming on and a dear friend was lending us her place in Montana, near my old ranch.

It was near indeed—the main Boulder River—but the main was a different world from our old West Fork of the Boulder. The West Boulder was rocky, rough, a hurrying mountain river. The water here was wide and slow, and it soaked into the meadowed plain it meandered through, an ancient lake bed, giving rise to quiet little creeklets and springs and a magnificent old-growth cottonwood forest. Augusta took one look at that cool, shadowy woodland, raised her nose, breathed it in, and said, Yes, this is mine. What had been absent in San Francisco confirmed its existence here so unmistakably that it might as well have been a notarized declaration: This is who I am, what I am.

She went to the cottonwoods first thing each morning with such regularity that we called it her office. Sometimes she worked late and had to be called insistently home, but she would always come, plunging through the yellow-green grass, which grew tall in those spongy riparian meadows, her little black head bobbing up-up-up, boink-boink-boink, porpoising, eyes on us at the top of each arc. We’d be laughing and urging her on, Come on, Boopus, come on!

Once, a pal came to visit with his excessively friendly Irish setter, the kind who greets a cat with a genial, loud-arfing charge, no harm meant, just want to say hi, doncha know—not Augusta’s notion of gentility. Met thus halfway home from the office, she fled back into the cottonwoods, and then came a sudden late-afternoon deluge. We knew that no amount of calling at that point would dislodge her, that a long pause for dinner and the confinement of the sweet doggy in our friend’s pickup were the only hope, but no dice.

We set out in the pouring dark, stumbling over downed branches, splooching into mudholes, and when at last we found her she was still invisible but plenty audible, about twelve feet up, in a deep mossy bowl that had formed where the huge cottonwood tree had broken off at that height long ago. We staggered back home, searched out a ladder, and then had to find our way back to the tree, no mean trick. Augusta was so soaked her teeth were chattering.

This version of the rescued Augusta was quite different from the one in the San Francisco attic. As we toweled her roughly back into shape she was purring and pliant, and after that she didn’t stop grooming herself till, finally dry, she fell asleep and slept all night, soft all over. First thing in the morning, sun bright, job to do (whatever it was), back she went to the woodland, all delight.