Chapter Six

A Good Life

The little log house was so cowboy-chic it had been on the cover of a Western décor magazine—the Navajo rugs, the sepia Edward Curtis photographs of tragic chiefs, the furniture with bark still on the wood—but it sat in a seething nest of rattlesnakes. The stair-step cliff that rose behind the house was in effect a solar oven, down which, that summer of drought, the rodents of the high prairie above had come in quest of water, pursued by a multitude of vipers. The snakes liked the heat. They basked easily seen in the cliff’s declivities and lurked invisible in the tall, dry, ungrazed grass between our front steps and the river. The friend from whom we had rented the house had hidden the key between the third and fourth of the stack of round flat stones beside the door, and when I lifted the top three, there lay curled a tiny rattlesnake, which, the moment light hit it, raised its little tail to rattle and its little head to strike. But when the evening chill came, and it came quickly, torpor quieted the snakes all around, and Augusta was (I told myself) safe.

It was her second summer there, familiar ground, but unsteadier ground than the summer before, owing not only to the drought and the rattlesnakes but also to domestic non-tranquility, which registered in her anxious eyes and an extra measure of emotional need. This was the summer when we returned from an evening out to find her far from the house in the middle of the bridge above a furious passage of the West Boulder, disoriented and scared, possibly having been trying to follow us, possibly even seeking her kittenhood home five miles upstream. After long work on a comic novel set in Montana, I had sent it to my longtime literary agent—and she had hated it. New agent after agent had been rejecting me. Now at last the rising star David McCormick and I had found each other, and our first meeting, in New York, was imminent. My flight and my room at the Yale Club were reserved, but it was not a good time to be leaving. My father suffered from severe macular degeneration—he was going blind—and I had finally gotten him an appointment at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins, to which he was incapable of going without me. But it was not a good time to be leaving. The heat in the house, physical and emotional, was oppressive, but it was not a good time to be leaving. Augusta chose this time to disappear.

We looked everywhere, we called and called, we alerted the sheriff, the veterinarians in equidistant Livingston and Big Timber, every neighbor up and down the West Boulder valley. Two mountain-climbing friends scaled the cliff to a golden eagle aerie—a dozen feet across—set into a shallow cavity and deep with the tattered remains of their prey. The biologist studying eagles in the Boulder drainage told me there could be a century’s worth of bones in such a nest. My friends did not find pieces of Augusta. I heard about a mountain-lion-hunting guide who trained his hounds on domestic cats. They could sniff Augusta’s bedding and track her to wherever she was. I booked him. They were set to go the very next day. But early that morning, before the sun rose, it snowed—Montana in the middle of June!—obliterating all trace of scent.

Augusta, Augusta, Auuugussstaaa! we called, day and night, and then it was time—there could not have been a worse time—for me to leave. Like so many times when I did wrong by Augusta, and more times, too, unrelated to her altogether, when I was simply bound and determined to do some damned thing for reasons I can no longer reconstruct, I could not change my mind, and I should have changed my mind. My new agent would have understood. I could have gotten another appointment at Johns Hopkins for my father. The airfare change fee, duh, I could have paid that. Augusta, what could have possessed me? I think I knew about as much as you did: Something was wrong and I ran away.

I went to New York, I went to Baltimore, I went to a friend in the Berkshires and wept for her sympathy. I talked to Elizabeth every day on the phone, and although she was, as she recalls it, “spending hours searching, calling, crying, worrying, lying awake, I might have talked through every detail with you less and less.” Which gave me the impression that she was doing less and less, caring less and less. I realize now that that was a delusion, rooted in a briar patch of self-misunderstanding. I was not in my right mind. If I, I, cared so much, what in God’s name was I doing two thousand miles away in Massachusetts?

Augusta grew up outside in Montana, okay? She played with bears. She escaped from coyotes. She knew that that culvert she took shelter in was too small for them. Smart kitty! Loud city noises and big men aside—scary things she had not been habituated to as a kitten—she was no fraidy-cat. I had many and elaborate justifications for Augusta’s outdoor freedom. You might have argued that the life I allowed Augusta in both San Francisco and Montana was an egotistical folly, and I could have argued you blue that it wasn’t.

I could argue on more than Augusta’s individual behalf. Having felt in myself—even if only in imaginative projection—the joy that rippled through Augusta’s frame when she engaged the wild wind and the countless immingling scents it bore, I was certain that that joy was at least potential in all her species, and certain that too many cats never know it. Sorting through that complexity, making sense of it—that was how she formed her world. A certain turbulence, not only of scent but of experiences, too, is resolved, set in order, in the cat’s tranquility. That is her genius; that is the richness of her life. Complexity is a condition indispensable to a cat’s good life.

The setting doesn’t have to be some pristine redoubt, far from it. A city park is thrillingly alive with olfactory fascination for cats; but they must have learned to tolerate the resistances it presents to a delicately nurtured feline sensibility—children, car horns, barking or over-curious dogs, and the like—and acceptance of a sturdy harness is good as well. They can learn all that easily, if they’re started early and gently enough. An additional benefit, for the person who has made the effort, will be a companion of notable equanimity.

Real country cats may require no constraint at all as long as you accept the risks and exercise reasonable caution. But please—not if you’re close to a road. Automotive traffic is the greatest danger anywhere, and although most cats are terrified of the sound of motor vehicles, the evidence of their inconsistent judgment is to be seen on roadsides everywhere, even backwoods routes seldom traveled. Some cats can be trained to stay away from the road, some will just naturally do it, and then it’s a chance you can decide to take or not. After that decision, there are still plenty of dangers. Almost anywhere in the American countryside, you probably have coyotes in your neighborhood, though you may not know it, and they surely do kill cats. There are all sorts of other animals that will kill a country cat, some of them pretty small, including feral cats, especially intact males. Some of the killers drop out of the sky, where cats tend not to be looking—hawks, owls, gangs of crows for the sheer hell of it. Sometimes it’s just canine amusement, arf arf arf and up a tree she goes. But not rarely, alas, either by instinct alone or even egged on by their masters, dogs kill cats.

The list of mortal perils is long, and by no means all external. One very thorough study of suburban cats found that risky behavior by far outweighed the risk of attack. The greatest risks, in descending order, are 1) the aforementioned danger of crossing a road; 2) exposure to infectious disease from other cats or from fleas or ticks, even the possibility of poison from common toads; 3) eating or drinking the wrong thing (antifreeze seems to be an especially evil temptation); 4) exploring drain systems, where they can drown in sudden storms; and 5) getting locked inside the crawl space of houses, there to die, horribly, of starvation.1 Not surprisingly, just like teenage boys, male cats are much more likely to take stupid chances.

Not very often, but still worth thinking about, some people just shoot cats. The town we most often went to when we lived in Montana, and where I’ve spent two recent summers, Livingston, was home to a gentle-seeming citizen, a friendly neighbor, who by night shot cats down and then bludgeoned them to pulp with a shovel even when they were already dead. Jim Durfey was so confident of his impunity that he disposed of the remains in his own garbage bin, but he made the mistake of killing a cat that belonged to Bonnie Goodman, one of Livingston’s leading cat lovers, who campaigned for his prosecution, and succeeded. Durfey was fined five hundred dollars, charged ninety dollars in court costs, and sentenced to a year in jail—deferred on the condition that he give up shooting cats for a year. When the judge asked him what he had learned from his experience, Durfey said he had learned that traps were available from the city.²

Ten years later, cats are still disappearing in Durfey’s neighborhood, but there have been no reports of gunfire. Neighbors have seen a trap in his back yard, but that’s all anybody is saying.

Jim Durfey wasn’t the only guy in town with what you might call a cavalier view of the species. In the police log of the Livingston Enterprise newspaper of July 26, 2016, the following entry appeared:

• 1:36 p.m.—A caller at the Park County Fairgrounds reported they saw a Park County department truck dragging a dead cat behind the vehicle. LPD [Livingston Police Department] and animal control responded and spoke with the county employee driver. The driver had been dispatched to dispose of a dead cat and, because it smelt foul, opted to drag the dead animal to dispose of it. No criminal action was taken, and the employee was advised to dispose of the animal in a different way.3

Well, at least that cat was already dead.

These things happen everywhere. In the spring of 2016, in London, the “Croydon Cat Ripper,” under cover of night, had mutilated and killed scores of cats, including “Oscar, an eight-year-old tabby, his head and tail cut off; Oreo, a Siamese kitten left at the bottom of a garden, decapitated and with her collar lying across her body; and Paddy, who had been hacked in half.”⁴

Montana’s Jim Durfey made vague noises about saving birds from cat predation. The Croydon Cat Ripper had made no public statement.

It has been a sweet comfort to the owners of outdoor pet cats to learn that ferals bear most of the guilt for the slaughter of songbirds now under way, but few of us have not been presented with feathered gifts from our proud hunters. It is decidedly worth knowing, however, that predation by pet cats can be pretty spotty, depending on local conditions. Researchers from the University of Georgia and the National Geographic Society’s remote imaging project monitored fifty-five suburban cats wearing miniature video cameras for periods of seven to ten days—for a full year, in order to account for seasonal variation—and got some interesting results. First of all, their owners way underestimated how many of them were hunters: 44 percent. But they weren’t great hunters: For every week of hunting, they captured a grand total of 2.4 prey items. The cats brought fewer than a quarter of those home. They ate slightly more than a quarter, and the rest—more than half—they just killed and left on the ground. Obviously they were getting plenty to eat at home.

What they did kill would not, I think, stir the ire of a conservation biologist. Only sixteen of the fifty-five cats were successful hunters. More than a third of their victims were little reptiles—Carolina anoles, five-lined skinks, three snakes. They killed a butterfly, a walking stick, a dragonfly, an unidentified flying insect, a frog, three worms, four voles, one shrew, three chipmunks, one mouse, and a squirrel. The haul of birds was pretty poor—one robin, one hermit thrush, one eastern phoebe, and two unidentified nestlings.5 The biodiversity of Clarke County, Georgia, was not significantly degraded.

Other research has also shown sharp differences in predation by feral cats and pet cats in the same area. In a study in central Illinois, owned cats had smaller home ranges than un-owned cats. Un-owned cats were more active at night, and because their prey was more available then, they were far more successful hunters; they were also much more likely to die young.⁶ Owners of cats who let them roam can dig up plenty more such studies. But like everybody else in every other field of study, they tend to find what they want to find. One good, slightly sneaky study in England observed, “Cat owners generally disagreed with the statement that cats are harmful to wildlife, and disfavored all mitigation options apart from neutering.” (Here we go again!) “These attitudes were uncorrelated with the predatory behavior of their cats. Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats’ impact on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information.”7

But! A study in Switzerland showed that only 16 percent of the outdoor cats it studied accounted for three-quarters of the creatures killed—meaning, as the researchers wrote, that “a large fraction of owners considerably overestimated their cat’s predation.” In fact only one cat was an ace bird killer; the rest made do with mice, voles, and “undetermined innards.” The researchers also note, with calm neutrality—a quality, perhaps uniquely Swiss, present seldom if ever in the innumerable studies I’ve read on cat depredation—that “prey species on continental landmasses have co-evolved with domestic cats over hundreds of generations and have thus been considered little susceptible to this hunter.” Nonetheless they do add, studiously, that “recent declines in many farmland and garden birds, the importance of gardens as wildlife refuge[s] in fragmented landscapes, and increasing cat populations due to intensified urbanisation have brought the ecological role of cats on continents into focus of much scientific debate.”⁸

Since for the most part you or I don’t know whether our particular cat is a hunter or just a looker, we must revert to the chilling core finding of the meta-study by Scott R. Loss and colleagues cited in chapter 5: somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds (and 6.9 to 20.7 billion mammals) are killed by cats every year in the United States.⁹ Loss et al. didn’t break down how many were killed by pets and how many by ferals. But let’s give our own cats a ridiculously huge benefit of the doubt and say the feral cats committed 90 percent of the crime. That still leaves us owners of outdoor cats with between one hundred forty million and three hundred seventy million dead birds on our hands.

Math can be funny, though. Let me try to lighten our shame. Stick with me through the arithmetic. Because all the self-respecting humane organizations—at least the American ones—are so strongly in favor of keeping all cats indoors, there are no reliable statistics about how many American pet cats are indoor-outdoor. Advocates of keeping cats indoors say 65 to 70 percent of American cats are free to go outside at least some of the time.10 A more scientific but small-sample study reports that half or fewer are indoor-outdoor.¹¹ In other countries, far more cats are free to stroll around at least some of the time—more than 90 percent in the United Kingdom.¹²

Since so many American cats live in apartments and other places where there’s really no choice about letting them out, let’s say that the proportion of indoor-outdoor cats is half. If we take the generally accepted U.S. population of pet cats as ninety million, then forty-five million have some outdoor freedom. The Loss study’s numbers, then, come out to 3.1 to 8.2 dead birds per indoor-outdoor cat per year. And that includes farm cats and all sorts of other unmanaged cats. If you are taking good care to minimize your cat’s depredation—a subject we’ll get to—you can cut those numbers in half. So take the median between 3.1 and 8.2—5.6—and halve it to 2.8. Two-point-eight birds per year! That’s not even a quarter of a bird a month! Good kitty!

(What was it I was saying about finding what you want to find?)

In fact there is a lot you can do. Careful scheduling of liberty hours protects not only cats: At dusk, at dawn, at night, ground-feeding birds may be particularly vulnerable, and all the little four-legged critters are likely to be most active at those times as well, so that’s when to keep the cat inside. Teaching your cat to come reliably when called—by reliably administering treats at each prompt return—can head off all manner of mischief.

You say you live on the fifty-seventh floor on 57^th Street? There’s Central Park virtually at your feet. Teach the little furball to walk on a leash! “It is best to start as early as possible, before your cat has developed a fear of the outdoors or a fear of unusual noises,” say the experts at PetMD.com, insisting that it can be done. “Older cats are often more reluctant to go outside on a leash—or to be on a leash at all”—no kidding!—and “It may take months to get her used to accepting a harness, and to being led, but with diligence and a wish to succeed, you can do it.”13

My former wife and I, just married at 20 and 22 years of age respectively, and residing on the top floor of a little brick house on West 95^th Street in Manhattan, adopted a tuxedo-marked kitten in Greenwich Village and named her Elvis Abdul Ho Chi Minh McNamee the First (look, that was the tenor of the times). Our house was the only one on the block with a stairway to the roof, and soon Elvis was bounding from parapet to parapet flat out forty feet above the street, eyes alight with the joy of flying. After days of confinement, with both of us away at work, Elvis would grow cross, liable to lash out and scratch when approached, but a big bowl of Tabby Treat and a run on the roof would restore her constitutional sweetness. Louise wrote her a theme song, to the tune of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”:

Born in a tenement on West Fourth Street
Big long tail and four white feet
Raised on T-Treat so she knows what to eat
Mean and ornery but no one can beat
Elvis! Elvis McNamee!
Queen of the Upper West Side

Weekends, we went to a cabin in southeastern Connecticut. In the apartment, Elvis would hide at first sight of suitcase or swimsuit—she hated to ride in the car. But as we approached North Stonington she came alive, and she would spend the weekend prowling in the ferns, gobbling up lobster guts, cornering mice on the screen porch, snoozing by the fire. Wherever we went, her whole life long, she never wanted to go at first, because she knew that meant being put in the car and the misery of the ride (whyever that was—we never knew), but once we got there she was happy-happy. Then, at the end of the outing and facing another car ride, she didn’t want to leave. We took her to the Catskills, where she had a fine time all weekend till it was time to go and she crammed herself into a heating duct. We took Elvis camping in Virginia: She rode down there like a champ, seven hours in the back of a jouncing Land Rover amid piles of sleeping bags and clanging pots and pans, and all weekend she was content just to patrol our little campsite, but as we struck our tents we barely caught her before she fled into the forest of Shenandoah National Park. We made the mistake of staying into the first day of bear season in Vermont, where the first gunshots she had ever heard drove Elvis to ground and it took us into early dark to find her, hunched and stone-still in dense cover. We took her to St. Croix, where she hunted lizards and marveled at the flocks of yellow banana birds. We took her to Memphis every Christmas, where she always stayed at Louise’s parents’ house (mine had dogs). Elvis loved Louise’s childhood cat on first sight, another girl cat with a boy name, Napoleon, the placidest feline imaginable: Their great pastime was to lie looking at each other for hours—until one day, on who knew what whim, Elvis took to a pecan tree, fell out, and dislocated her hip, the only mishap she ever suffered in eighteen years of outdoor adventures.

This wasn’t entirely dumb luck. We did keep close watch on her. We kept close watch on Augusta, too, but obviously not close enough. That summer of rattlesnakes, she ran away. Or disappeared. Was she out there dead somewhere? If she was dead downwind, she could have been less than a hundred yards away in the sagebrush and we wouldn’t have known it.

Cats do run away. (Damn you, Augusta!) If you choose to grant your cat the freedom of fresh air and green earth, that is among the biggest risks you take. And it’s not only your own risk, of course, the risk of losing your cat; it’s a risk to the cat, too, of falling victim to any of the hazards of freedom.

Remember also, however, that indoor cats disappear too. (In a 2007 study of lost cats, 41 percent had been kept indoors.14) Who hasn’t seen an indoor cat gazing longingly through impassable glass? And we all know that when a door opens, virtually every cat in the universe will by instinct want to go through it—even into a motel hallway, a Walmart parking lot, a cornfield, a forest. Why? Why do cats fall out of high windows? Don’t kid yourself about them spread-eagling themselves into feline flying squirrels and soft-landing on the concrete from two hundred feet up. (There are such stories, nearly all apocryphal. The true ones are vanishingly rare.) What is true is that they can right themselves and land on their feet, but from two hundred feet, or even one hundred, unless there’s an awning or a pond, that will be a bone-crushing fall and horrible.

Why do they run away and get lost? Of course, sometimes they come back, sometimes almost miraculously. Nearly a century ago, Francis H. Herrick conducted a series of experiments in which he took a number of cats several miles from his home in Cleveland, blindfolded, boxed, tied in an opaque cloth bag, and even, in a few cases, anesthetized by chloroform; and they unerringly found their way back, sometimes over very daunting obstacles.

You can find all sorts of stories of astounding cross-country homings, some of them probably true. Roger Tabor, a British biologist, has cited several that he resolutely believes: “Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Washington; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who, in 1978, ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled one thousand miles to his family’s home.”15 Much more common are the heartbreaking disappearances. Many of those, however, are avoidable.

First of all, let’s hope you’ve taken care to have three critical things in place before the cat was gone. The first will probably mean that the cat will be back in short order: a collar with an identification tag that includes the cat’s name, your phone number, and your email address. The other two are an implanted microchip (registered with a tracking company) and a good current photograph (to put up on posters and flyers and the internet).

If you suddenly look around and the cat is not to be seen, as soon as you catch your breath you can calm yourself with the knowledge that most cats don’t go very far.¹⁶ In fact, there’s a decent chance the cat isn’t gone at all.¹⁷ Augusta several times found the most unbelievable places to hide and then would absolutely neither move nor make a sound. We had no idea why. She abhorred vacuum cleaners. At the ranch, she tore a hole in the bottom of the box spring in the guest room and would climb up into it and perch on one of the slats until the house cleaners left. When we finally found her, she never resisted, indeed seemed happy to be found. So: Really, really search your house, softly rattling a bag of treats as you go.

If he’s not inside, the odds are he may still be nearby. If you see him, he’ll probably be jumpy. Don’t run after him, don’t holler his name, don’t clap your hands. If he looks at you, fall to your knees, look away, and maybe give him a brief shy peep. Maybe whisper his name. Chances are he’s scared about something. Reach out a finger—he may come and sniff it, and then you’re both home free.

If he keeps going, though, and really is gone, you need to set up some sort of welcome center at home, outside if possible—some old clothes of yours, the stinkier the better, inside an upside-down cardboard box with a hole cut in it just big enough for the cat to get in through. Put out food, water, and a litter box with used litter in it.

Plastering the neighborhood with posters and slipping flyers under every door can be quickly successful. (Don’t put them in mailboxes. That’s illegal.) Some people can find the strangest reasons for deciding that your “stray” cat was starving or lost or abandoned—so if the flyers and posters haven’t guilt-tripped them into coming clean, ringing doorbells and looking them in the eye may be an effective next step. Put your posters on bulletin boards wherever you can find one—especially any local veterinarians’ offices. Notify the municipal animal control agency, the SPCA, every volunteer animal organization you can think of, and the police. Facebook and Instagram pages can be invaluable.

Naturally, you want to go looking, too. Late at night—like two or three in the morning, or whenever traffic finally winds down—is the best time. If the cat makes the slightest sound, you’ll be able to hear it. Carry a bag of treats to shake, and maybe a few cans of food as well—the sound of an opening can of cat food can be magic.

Put a lost-cat ad in the paper and on your online neighborhood bulletin board. Check the papers every day to see if somebody reports finding a cat. If you’ve moved lately, make sure the cat didn’t go back to his old home. Sometimes you can borrow a Havahart trap from the SPCA, or you can rent or buy one, then bait it with your cat’s favorite food and set it out in the yard. You may well catch a feral cat, somebody else’s cat, a raccoon, a skunk, who knows what—but you might catch your cat, too. Try to think of other things you might do to make your home recognizable and attractive, especially odorants—old shoes on the front steps, say.

Keep trying. In the 2007 study by Lord et al., referenced previously, the owners of lost cats did a pathetic job of trying to get their allegedly beloved kitties back. Only 14 percent of the cats had any form of identification. The median time before any of the people got in touch with an animal agency was three days, and for those who went to an agency more than once, the median interval was eight days—so because the holding period at most of the agencies was three days, at least some of the lost cats were euthanized. In the end, barely more than half of the lost cats—53 percent—were recovered, and two-thirds of those simply came home on their own.18 No thanks, in other words, to their human guardians.

The lesson here is that if you care, if you try, your chances of getting your lost cat back are really pretty good. Keep looking. Keep calling. Keep checking the agencies and the vets’ office. Maintain your ad in the paper, and your social media posts. When somebody has torn down one of your posters, put up a new one. Talk to kids around the neighborhood. (Little girls are the best lost-cat finders of all.)

Never forget that your cat has very probably not gone far. Try not to broadcast how freaked out you are—in fact, see what you can do to calm down—because if your cat comes near, he can read every slightest quiver of your body language and the faintest whiff of your anxiety scent.

And even when it seems all hope is lost, remember this: Sometimes they stay away quite a while, and then they just… come home.

Case in point. A cat named Holly disappeared at a Good Sam recreational vehicle rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, in November 2012, two hundred miles from her owners’ house in West Palm Beach. They searched for days, distributing flyers, checking the agencies, all to no avail. Almost two months later, on New Year’s Eve, Holly was spotted in a back yard about a mile from her home, her feet worn to nubs, the pads bleeding. She was down to half her normal weight, and barely able to stand. The woman who found her fed her for a few days and then took her to a veterinarian. The vet checked, routinely, to see if Holly was microchipped. She was.19

American humane associations are unanimous—fiercely so—in insisting that cats be kept indoors. The reason is single: safety. But there are costs, too.

We have learned that the inner nature of Felis silvestris catus is inextricable from the species’ wild heritage. More recent evolution in the company of human companions has added to that nature, but not erased it. When the cat’s life comes indoors, with it come a number of instinctive and ineradicable realities, in particular²⁰:

• stalking, seizing, and attacking prey;

• patterns of play that emulate those;

• a need for privacy;

• curiosity, just as the proverb holds;

• a need to scratch, to climb, to observe from a safe refuge;

• territoriality, evinced in part in what may seem an almost obsessive concern with the location and hygiene of the litter box;

• a need for social relationships with other animals, including human ones and, if possible, other cats;

• a need for consistency, reliability, predictability, affection, and trustworthiness in the behavior of the cat’s human companions;

• a world invisible and inaccessible to us, defined by scent, especially pheromones;

• the fact that a cat has a mind, which needs communication, stimulation, puzzlement, interest.

If our cat is to have a good life indoors, we must meet all those needs and accept all those facts.

The most wonderful addition to the heritage of our cat—“recent” in that it seems to have emerged through association with humans—is that the subspecies catus, unlike its desert ancestor Felis silvestris lybica, has evolved a heart designed for love. This unique animal thrives on love, and loves in return.

Indoor or outdoor, a cat can be deprived of love, or loved. Love is not essential. But it is, I must say, advisable. It will make life with your cat, oh, maybe a hundred times better than without it.

As for the critical needs listed above, many are the cats whose human companions don’t know that those needs are critical. Obligatory. Theirs are the cats—we’ve all seen them—who are listless, lazy, overweight, in effect semi-animate sofa cushions. Prisoners of boredom. More item of décor than beloved companion.

The outcome of denying an indoor cat’s nature is likely to be more than just ennui. It is what the cat whisperers thrive on. These are the cats who rip upholstery, marinate carpets, spray the walls, yowl at five in the morning, scratch, bite, defecate on your pillow—and, sometimes, given the chance, run away.

Yes, there’s a lot for the conscientious owner of an indoor cat to do. You really should play with your cat every day, but it can become routine and fun. And the physical configuration of your cat’s habitat, as discussed in chapter 3, can make a great and happy difference. If you live in the Eighth Arrondissement amid walnut boiserie, crystal sconces, and Louis XV éscritoires, you may not want Jackson Galaxy’s plywood perches covered with shag carpet remnants at various heights along the walls, or his cat superhighway running all the way around the room just below the ceiling. Even a just sort of nice house is not esthetically improved by one of those ghastly cat condos you get at Petco or wherever, with their multiple levels of cheap-rug-covered platforms and little hidey-houses and dangling balls and such—but I gotta tell ya, cats love them. If you can stand to put one of those eyesores next to a window with a bird feeder outside, if you can find the sweet spot for the litter box and you clean it religiously every day, if you’ve got scratching posts modestly tucked away but actually all over the place, if the cat can find a cozy lookout post atop the kitchen cabinets or the refrigerator, if she’s found her private refuge under a bed on that crumpled duffel bag that you keep thinking you were going to throw out… see? Things can start to fall into place without a lot of hammer, saw, and catification. The point is that even in your palatial Paris apartment, ways can be found to satisfy your cat’s wild nature. You just have to pay attention to the principles.

These are all easy positives, but it’s important to think of some positives also as absences of negatives. For most cats, fear is the biggest negative. They evolved not only as predators, remember, but also as prey, and tuned as they are to what may seem to them signals of possible threat, many cats are highly sensitive to distress—including some kinds of distress that may not occur naturally to us. Loud noises, for example, can be very upsetting, as can the mere sight of unknown cats outside. Little kids running straight at a cat can terrify him to the point of dangerous self-defense. The point of a high perch is not just so Mr. Kitty can look the proud lord but also so he can feel safe—it’s part of his biological heritage.

Teaching your cat early to regard his carrying case as a refuge has the additional benefit of making travel much less stressful, even trips to the vet. Any room in your house can be made a safe space—especially if there are dogs in the house, or other cats—by installing an electronic cat door activated by a radio collar.21 When there are more than one cat in a household, the possible stressors are many. Mieshelle Nagelschneider’s book The Cat Whisperer provides excellent guidance for reducing inter-cat conflict.

Play is a complicated business, but the cardinal rule is that it should resemble the full hunting sequence as much as possible, including the kill. Endless pursuit is endlessly frustrating. Laser toys excite the chase instinct very effectively, but they don’t provide anything to pounce on, and too many people wielding lasers innocently drive their cats to baffled, game-quitting apathy. A toy to grab and bite, or even just a little crunchy treat after a minute or two of laser chase, will satisfy your cat’s craving for prey. I’m not sure what I think about cats watching cat TV or birds through a window for hours at a stretch, with no end to the game. I suppose it’s better than boredom. They do seem fascinated, and they show no ill effects. A catnip mouse or a toy with treats inside that the cat has to struggle to obtain seems more to the point, though since there’s a reward in store instead of incessant frustration. There are some excellent interactive toys—some as simple as a ball in which you hide crunchy treats, requiring the cat to chase and bat the ball around to get the treats out. In all cases it’s crucial to remember that play is likely to be the only exercise that most indoor cats get.

Playing with you is much more important than what the game is. It’s an act of love for both of you, and it takes no equipment more than a string, a ribbon, a paper bag, a cardboard box. Cats will chase, fly, dive, scurry, hide, pounce from hiding, wrassle, twist, jump, flip, fall, flee, race, attack, scare themselves for the fun of it, end up panting flat on the floor exhausted and so, so happy—and they will know you’ve done it for them.

Food, ah, food. Cats learn nothing more quickly nor thoroughly than using food to torment and control their human guardians. In its first line on Machiavellianism, Wikipedia takes us to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as “the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct.” Statecraft being beyond the reach of cats, the feline Machiavelli—which is all of them—concentrates on general conduct, with an emphasis on gastronomy.

Up to a certain point, we do have to meet their demands. The species is an obligate carnivore. That means they have to eat meat. Their digestive tract is very short, so vegetable matter passes straight through, undigested. They have high requirements for vitamin D, niacin, and vitamin A because they lack the enzymes that other animals’ digestive systems provide. Their feline ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years, ate no plants at all. They subsisted entirely on a diet of the animals they killed, and the domestic cat is anatomically and metabolically identical to them.22 It doesn’t matter if you’re any kind of vegetarian, your cat cannot be one. You can’t use meat substitutes. Dogs, actually, can live on a vegetarian regime. Cats can’t. They’ll die.

That does not mean, however, that way out on the other end of the spectrum, the people who rip up raw chicken and goat meat and suchlike for their cats are doing the right thing either. Wild cats—and ferals—eat their prey whole: fur, feathers, guts, teeth, skulls, stomach contents, the works. With those come vitamins, minerals, and all manner of micronutrients that the folks who think they’re doing their so-wild beasties such favors are depriving them of. The beneficiaries of this ill-informed kindness are pretty well guaranteed to end up quite sick.²³

At the specialty shops there are cat foods in which the first-listed ingredients—those of highest volume in the can—are in fact flesh, and they cost a lot of money. Maybe they’re better, I don’t know. We started our dear Isabel out on those things, and she was delighted, and healthy, but her sustenance was getting toward more expensive than our own. We asked our vet what he fed his own cats, and he said Friskies. The names of the varieties of Friskies (as of all other plebeian commercial cat foods) are perfections of legalese dodge-’em: “With Beef in Gravy,” “Mariner’s Catch,” “With Salmon & Beef in Sauce,” “Sea Captain’s Choice,” “SauceSations Turkey & Giblets Dinner in Homestyle Sauce.” But Purina, the parent company, promises on the label that every one of its canned cat foods is “formulated to meet the nutritional standards established by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) Cat Food Nutrient Profiles for growth of kittens and maintenance of adult cats.” I immediately suspected that AAFCO was a front, made up of feed company representatives. In fact it’s a voluntary coalition of government agencies, with nothing to lose or gain from their rulings.

Then there’s the dry stuff, another matter entirely. Both wet and dry are considered nutritionally complete, but obviously with dry food you need to be sure your cat is getting enough water, especially because kidney disease is one of the most common serious illnesses of cats. Some people mix wet and dry. Some cats are staunchly opposed to dry food, but it is convenient, and although the wet-food crowd may look down their noses at it, it’s perfectly adequate. Or at least that’s the latest information—a few years ago the story was different. Talk to your vet. In any case, what is most important is to maintain a diet without too many surprises. Cats like consistency and predictability in all things.

This is where the Machiavellian manipulation can start to come in. Cats may love one food one day and hate it the next. Harried owners with soft hearts can be seen (or will hide while) opening can after can, as His Highness sniffs and walks stiffly away from each in turn.

It may not be so simple after all, however. Little Machiavelli may have a case. There’s new research showing that cats’ olfactory systems are exquisitely fine-tuned to the nutritional makeup of their gustatory choices. The researchers started by offering their feline subjects several sorts of food, and the cats made their initial choices based on the flavors they preferred. Fish and rabbit were favorites. But over time they began to select foods with a particular protein-to-fat ratio, and they would even choke down orange-flavored food in preference to the “good” stuff if it had the right energy balance. The cats chose 70 percent protein to 30 percent fat across the board, regardless of fragrance or flavor.24

The question that now arises is whether the Prince can detect micronutrients as well, and in refusing both the “With Beef” and the “Sea Captain’s Choice,” or whatever, is making informed dietary decisions. Maybe future research will reveal that cats’ food fussiness is genuinely about nutrition. A big maybe, but if so, it will represent a major victory for picky cats everywhere, and will hit cat owners hard in the wallet.

The major point about cats’ food in the meantime—for us—is that it is the foundation of discipline. For cats, it is the great opportunity to learn that you can be manipulated, and yes, they are capable of generalizing the principle. We must never forget that as sweet and nice as they can be, cats have no conscience whatever. No sense of justice. Fairness, to a cat, is not a recognizable concept. This does not mean they are bad, or cruel. They do take pleasure in torturing their prey, it’s true, and nobody seems to know why. But we are not their prey. We are their cohabitants, and with (as we have seen) assiduous and gentle effort we can be their friends, and teach them to be ours.

They never forget, however, that we control the food. They may learn to open the cabinets, and they can certainly learn to rip open bags of kibble, but they can’t open cans. They can’t go to the store and buy food. This is our true power, and we can use it for good. You may choose to feed on a regular schedule, or “free feed,” with food out all the time as long as the amount is carefully regulated. Whatever you do, all you have to do is be consistent and the cat will get it. This is kindness, not cruelty.

Unlike our cats, we are eminently capable of cruelty, and we can hold anger in our hearts for years. Some people who claim to love their cats also hit them. Kick them, throw them across the room. Yell at them and scare them. Cats are very easily frightened, and one of the few emotions they will hold in their hearts for years, as we hold anger, is fear. Don’t scare your cat, please. You control the food, that’s all you need. I’m not saying withhold it to show your power. I am saying that once you let your cat beg and wheedle and use false affection to inveigle you into just a little more, Papa, please? then the old-time word is the right one: spoil.

There is also the profound justification of health. Just as is the case with contemporary humanity, excessive body weight disposes cats to a wide spectrum of ailments, from diabetes to arthritis to heart disease. Fat cats, like fat people, tend to die early. This isn’t hypothetical, either. Fifty-eight percent of American cats are overweight or obese.25 The percentage for indoor cats alone (versus outdoor and indoor-outdoor) hasn’t been isolated, but you can safely bet it’s higher than that.

Discipline becomes its own reward. When you start to use those little crunchy treats to reward your cat for doing what you wish her to do, and you use the clicker to precede that reward—with the click instantaneous, so that the cat cannot fail to understand what it’s about—you will feel your power and so will your cat, and both of you will soon come to reap real satisfaction from the reliable, symmetrical dance of action, click, and treat. It’s not in the least complicated, but if you’re willing to keep at it, you can teach your cat to do extraordinary things.

You may not want to turn your kitty into a circus performer, but clicker training is how it’s done. The doyenne of the clicker is Karen Pryor. In her book Getting Started: Clicker Training for Cats and at her website www.clickertraining.com you can learn that with persistence, patience, and consistency, you can teach your cat to do almost anything a cat is capable of, with a spoken command or a hand gesture—the feat to be followed instantly by a click and then a treat.26 That simple. Pryor also clicker-trains dogs, horses, birds, and—for real—rabbits.

There’s now an unbelievable sort of cat sport called Feline Agility Training, in which cats jump hurdles, shoot through tunnels, bound up stairs, and weave around poles all within a thirty-foot-square course, racing against one another for doing it fastest—and they don’t even get clicked and treated. The only way they’re trained is by chasing a fluttering bird toy or some such. The champs can blast through the whole obstacle course in under fifteen seconds. Like I say, it’s unbelievable. But it’s real. Take a look-see at agility.cfa.org/index.shtml. And you thought Fluffy could never learn anything.

Perhaps the best thing you and your cat will ever learn together is the word “No.” Click-and-treat, again, is the secret here. A sharp No! and if the cat even pauses, you give her a click and then a treat. The technique is a matter, entirely, of successive approximation. Click by click and treat by treat, the pause becomes a hesitation, the hesitation becomes attention, attention becomes full stop. Once she has wholly absorbed it, once she feels it in her being, you can save her life. A panicked cat will do idiotic, insane things—jump out a window, plunge into traffic. Teaching a dog to stop is like teaching dogs lots of things, not so hard, and you don’t get a trophy. Once you’ve taught your cat to stop, you deserve a reward. Maybe this is reward enough: You get to keep the cat.

From discipline arises attunement. Accepting your authority, your cat comes to trust you. Limits and boundaries become definitions of safety, and a cat can come to understand that fact. Once that understanding is established, you will find that when fear strikes—thunderstorm, woofy dog, grabby child—he runs to you. Food may always be the primal urge, deep down, but once it becomes a settled routine, and once trust is in place, what comes to the surface is the physical expression of calm and affection, most expressive in the form of touch. Cat head-bumps you, rubs chin on your chin, wraps tail on your shin, lies with cheek to your thigh. Gives you the long, slow blink, the quick flick of the tongue.

I’ve said this already, but it’s worth saying again: Cat teaches you. Which stroke where, which direction, how hard, when finger when palm, yes there not there, okay, enough. You can get better at this for years if you keep paying attention. Pick me up, walk me around, I like looking out the window in your arms much better than sitting on the sill—look at that bird! (Feel his skin twitching all over?) Paying attention.

There are lots of books about relating to companion animals, but there’s at least one that I guarantee you your cat will thank you for reading at least the cat-relevant parts of: It’s called The Tellington TTouch (why the double T? I’m not sure), by Linda Tellington-Jones.27 The TTouch is actually easier to learn visually than from the book, and fortunately there are both a DVD²⁸ and a number of YouTube videos. It’s basically a massage technique. The author started it with horses, and in the book there’s a quantity of New Age mysterioso to wade through, but the thing works like magic on cats. It does get pretty technical:

Alternate the Clouded Leopard and Lying Leopard TTouches beginning at the base of the neck. Move randomly from place to place on your cat’s body and make each circle fairly slowly.… Begin with a number three (see here) and experiment with a firmer or lighter TTouch.

Don’t worry if it sounds bogus, I’m telling you it’s worth a try.

The American Association of Feline Practitioners and the International Society of Feline Medicine have made an attempt to define what is a good life for a cat by boiling down the essentials to what they call The Five Pillars of a Healthy Feline Environment. They recapitulate some of what’s already been said here, and may not be quite complete, but the simplicity and clarity of the Five Pillars go to the heart of what a cat cannot do without:

1. A safe place.

2. Multiple and separated key environmental resources: food, water, toileting areas, scratching areas, play areas, and resting or sleeping areas.

3. Opportunity for play and predatory behavior.

4. Positive, consistent, and predictable human–cat social interaction.

5. An environment that respects the importance of the cat’s sense of smell.29

“Positive social interaction,” as a term, may have the unfortunate smell of the clinic, but readers of this book will have understood by now that a much deeper emotional connection than that phrase implies is as indispensable as an adequate physical environment. And a dull life, a life of boredom and ennui, is not a good life. A cat’s life cannot be fully good without mental and sensory stimulation, and it cannot be good without love.

Some people, contemplating so much responsibility, may well think there ought to be a better way. How about breeding a better cat—one without so many and such exacting requirements? Stephen Budiansky, in his book The Character of Cats, recalls the interesting fox-breeding experiment by the Russian biologist D. K. Belyaev, who “demonstrated that by selecting for nothing but tameness, such as a cub’s willingness to be approached and handled by a human being, it was possible in just five generations to produce a strain of foxes that had acquired the whole domestication package. These foxes had piebald coats and drooping ears, they wagged their tails and barked just like pet dogs, and they whined and begged for attention just like pet dogs.”30

In his book Cat Sense, John Bradshaw proposes the selective breeding of an “ideal indoor cat… which might be better suited to indoor life, or be more sociable, than any of today’s cats.” After discussing a range of impractical alternatives such as “hybridization with some of the smaller South American [wild] cats” (a nasty road this narrative has already been down), he settles on existing variation within the domestic cat species as “the best starting point for the completion of the cat’s domestication.” The technique “should be to identify those individual cats with the best temperaments, and to ensure that their progeny are available to become tomorrow’s pets.…

“Selection for the right temperament among house cats requires deliberate intervention,” writes Bradshaw; “natural evolutionary processes, which have served the cat well so far, will not be enough.” What we’re doing now, “neutering cats before they breed… likely favors unfriendly cats over friendly.… When almost every pet house cat has been neutered… we must fear for the next generations of cats. These will then mainly be the offspring of those that live on the fringes of human society.…” The ultimate result, then, of depending mainly on the adoption of shelter cats, as we do now, with so many of them drawn from feral populations, will be, in Bradshaw’s view, “pushing the domestic cat’s genetics back gradually toward the wild, away from their current domesticated state.”³¹

Budiansky, contrariwise, maintains that if cats were going to be truly domesticated—predictable, obedient, non-predatory—surely, at some time over the last ten thousand years, they would have been. At least a little.

I don’t know how you feel about this idea of eugenic improvement of cats. Isn’t it an essential part of catness to be sort of a pain in the neck?

There are terribly many ways to misunderstand cats, equally many cats’ lives that are not good. Almost always it comes down to denial of their nature—as if they didn’t even have an inner life. The philosopher Bernard Rollin makes the fundamental case. Besides all the good that having pets does for us, “we must also remember that they possess intrinsic value, value that does not derive from their utility for us but is part and parcel of their moral status as living, feeling, sentient creatures; creatures whose lives matter to them.” Once we grant them that status—the value of their existence—then we have engaged in a contract. By protecting, feeding, sheltering, and loving them—owning them—we owe them their lives. We owe them good lives.

Rollin has no mercy for the many who “violate this contract in the most essential ways”—the people who return cats to shelters knowing that except in the relatively rare cases of no-kill organizations like the San Francisco SPCA, there’s a good chance (41 percent 32) that the outcome will be euthanasia; the people who bring their cats to veterinarians to be put to sleep (100 percent) when there’s nothing the matter with them:

Equally intolerable from a moral point of view are our flagrant violations of the pet animals’ right to live their lives in accordance with their natures—natures we have shaped.

Rollin is on such a tear that once having admitted that ignorance is the main reason people don’t grant their pets “lives in accordance with their natures,” he’s accusing them of stupidity as well, and culpable stupidity at that: “The average person who acquires a dog or cat is worse than ignorant, worse because such people are invariably infused with outrageously false information.” You kind of want to say, Hey, professor, how about a walk outside and a nice cup of tea before we go on with this?

Fact is, once cooled, he’s right. Hence this book.

Some of the most egregious violations of catness come in the ever-proliferating form of cat videos. Let me quickly say that they’re not all bad. But even the cute and relatively harmless ones often dwell on deformity or fear. The highly respected Walker Art Center of Minneapolis founded the International Cat Video Festival in 2012 and curated it with care, in order to exclude the sadistic and highly manipulative exhibitions that characterize so many cat videos, and drew more than ten thousand people to the first festival. By the next year the festival had become a tour of fifteen cities, and its stars were internet sensations like Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, Pudge the Cat, and Old Long Johnson.33 Grumpy Cat’s ha-ha permanent frown is due to an underbite and a birth defect. Old Long Johnson seems to speak in human-like sounds, but it turns out that there’s an off-camera cat annoying and scaring him; he is prevented from getting away, and those are his particular expressions of anger and fear.³⁴ Many feline internet stars are physically deformed in some way—often harmlessly, it’s true—and their admirers’ reaction to them is sympathetic at one level and mocking at another. It’s a strange brew. But it’s a very successful one. No one seems to have any definitive measurements of its success, which strikes me as extremely odd, considering that YouTube is owned by Google, the universal master of big data. YouTube does say that it alone has more than two million cat videos at its command. As of October 2014, the last date for which there is published data, they had attracted some 24.6 billion views.³⁵

Cats dressed up as Santa Claus. Cats falling off porches. Cats with people waving their front legs so they can “conduct” some music. Cats running into boxes, as we all know they will do, and getting stuck, and nobody helping them out but rather making a video of it. Cats seeing themselves in a mirror, jumping to attack “the other cat” and smashing their heads against the glass. Cats confused. Cats angry. Cats scared shitless. Ha ha. And I know, sometimes the video is perfectly innocent, just funny, but I’m sorry, the whole thing is beyond me, and beyond the scope of this book, except insofar as you, the reader, may well be one of those viewers, and I, the writer, am here with a gentle caution to think about the experience of the cat in the video.

Every cat has a right to a life in accordance with her nature. Look at the video and ask yourself, Is this cat’s life a good life?

Thirteen days after she disappeared, at six o’clock in the morning, Augusta appeared on the bedroom windowsill, meowing to be let in. I was still back East, in New York again. Elizabeth called, in tears, barely able to speak. She had burst outside and run to the cabin window in her nightgown, barefoot, and grabbed Augusta. She kept clinging to her, hard, as she rushed back in and searched for Augusta’s food and her bowl, which in despair she had already put away in a cabinet.

The next day, a deer jumped over a pasture fence and half across the hood of Elizabeth’s car as she drove home from a visit with friends. The front end was crushed and the deer was dead. There seemed to be something missing in our conversation. Why had she been away instead of home with Augusta? Everything seemed, somehow, still awry. I didn’t come home right away, I waited three days. Coward, fool.

Augusta was fine. Skinny. Fur funky. But ready to resume her routines, and sweet as ever. What did you do, little doodoo head? Where did you go?

Across the river, across the bridge that Augusta had been crossing that night when she may have thought we had abandoned her, there was a house with a part-time caretaker who had been mowing the lawn on the day Augusta disappeared. He kept the lawnmower in a shed and the door was open. The next day he was gone and the shed door was closed, locked. We had called him—he lived in Billings, as did the owner—and he said, no, he was sure there had been no cat in the shed. I remember now he was kind of a jerk, irritated by the question. Why hadn’t we somehow found a way to get into that shed and check anyway? At least call through the door and then listen? It was too near the noisy river—we wouldn’t have heard her soft voice. So I told myself.

The day Augusta returned, the caretaker also had returned. We believe, now, that what happened was that he had unknowingly locked her in that shed and she lived on mice for almost two weeks. Augusta had not meant to run away. So I tell myself.