A Great Canadian Who Loves Cats

Conrad Black: The truth about cats and dogs

The ancient struggle between dog-lovers and cat-lovers traditionally has favoured the canines, at least in the English-speaking world. Dogs were the manly animals, guarded the hearth, herded the sheep, helped at the hunt and shoot, retrieved the newspaper and were usually gentle with children.

Cats cannot really be put to any domestic use, except apprehension of mice and rats. They are often affectionate, but are not very demonstrative companions. But they require almost no attention, don’t need help or advice going to the bathroom, rarely mind being left outside, because even pampered housecats can usually catch their own dinner, and they are magnificent physical machines. The feline faction has gained ground in recent years, because of the profusion of working couples who could not leave a dog indoors all day.

My purpose here is to de-escalate, even slightly, the friction between the vast opposing armies of feline and canine admirers. This reflects my own circumstances, as my wife Barbara has become, in my brief and untoward absence (he's in jail), a caricature of a dog-lover, setting out from our homes in Toronto and Palm Beach kitted out like a British girls’ public school games-mistress with a variety of leashes, whistles, timepieces, enticements and fecal-disposal apparatus. She defiantly sends me, a traditional cat-fancier, photographs portraying her as an apparent fugitive from an Agatha Christie movie who has turned walking the dogs into exotic simulations of an all-weather, open-ended, search and rescue mission.

In general, I find dogs are perhaps often more loveable than cats, but cats are more impressive. Dogs can have a sense of humour; their loyalty and eagerness to please can be very affecting. They often bond to their owner in a way that is total adherence. And they have almost human qualities. They wag their tails in happiness, whine and cry in sadness, are embarrassed when they try and fail, as in chasing a squirrel, and are contrite when they make a mess. They are almost guileless and only a heart of stone does not find a good-natured dog very endearing.

The pleasure of cats is in their confident bearing, their elegance. Even when startled, their responses are so agile, they are not even momentarily awkward. Almost everything a cat does is graceful, down to, but not quite including the most mundane acts. Even tomcats, unkempt and with tangles in their fur, have a certain inseparable dignity, like a feline John Malkovitch. Cats can jump up to a crowded mantelpiece and walk along it without disturbing the most fragile curio, and move on, almost silently. All but the most feral cats scrupulously manage their own hygiene, and even when they clean their paws and claws, they are graceful; the only creatures that make fastidiousness interesting to watch. Some dogs, whatever their virtues, are silly or ungainly, but cats are neither. I have always thought that to like or even understand the French, you should like cats: the intelligence, confidence, elegance, self-absorption and cynicism.

I have generally always had an aversion to the time-consuming aspects of being a pet-owner. I first developed a deep admiration for cats when, as a 12-year-old at my parents’ cottage I was entrusted with keeping the interior of the boat house ship-shape, including the boats. The chief problem was bird-droppings. My older brother’s efforts with a large-bore shotgun displaced nests, scattered feathers, and put out a window, which effectively aggravated the problem. Even the sparrows, who aren’t particularly tactically astute, realized that my brother was pursuing a Pyrrhic course and didn’t budge.

I borrowed the neighbour’s domestic, long-haired, grey cat. After three days, the birds had fled for their lives and did not return. I watched some of this. At no point was the cat agitated, embarrassed, triumphalist; he did not waste a unit of energy and made no effort to frighten the birds by being threatening. It was an astoundingly professional, natural and efficient performance. He caught two birds and it was clear that he would catch them all if they didn’t leave. I have never since considered “pussycat” a pejorative description.

At our home in Toronto there is an extensive property tapering off into a ravine, and we often have foxes around the house. It has been interesting to see them interact with the cats. They are about equally clever and devious and fascinating to watch. Usually the foxes become exasperated and chase the cats, with evidently unplayful intentions. The cats run up the trees and preen themselves with insolent nonchalance. Sometimes, when we put the dogs and cats out together, they formed a unitary home team and the cats bait the foxes, who pursue the cats but quickly retreat when facing the heavier canine units. It’s a bloodless preliminary round of nature’s regime of fang and claw.

Cats are always the worthy miniatures of lions and tigers. They slink and stalk, rest vigilantly and sleep easily, like their huge and fierce relatives. Their habit of psychopathically killing birds and chipmunks even when they are not hungry is unattractive, but is the nature of the beast. Watching the prides of lions hunt on the Discovery Channel reveals, writ large, the cunning instincts of even the suburban domestic housecat. They intuitively enfilade and surround, and try to surprise their little prey. Before you dog-owners become too sanctimonious, canines chase almost anything that moves, including, if the dogs are large enough, cats, but are not so often successful at it.

My bona fides as a feline supporter should now have been established but I must admit that Barbara is winning our tug-of-war. She likes cats but loves dogs, and her dogs are splendid and good-natured, though they would be dangerous to any assailant of her. As others take care of them, it is challenging not to fall for them and I miss them. I am now an equal-opportunity liker of individual cats and dogs, though I still find cats a more interesting species. They are after all, generally more intelligent. I have never seen a stupid cat.

A friend of mine in England who was a brilliant zoologist and owned two private zoos, including magnificent groups of tigers and lions, and often went into the tiger cages himself (although he lost three keepers to them over the years), told me that the intelligence of the great cats was clear in their relative inactivity. They only did what was necessary to eat, and apart from that were sedentary, dormant or sexually occupied. No creature bothers them except armed men. And they never have trouble eating adequately, though in the severest droughts, lions sometimes take extreme and undignified measures, such as climbing trees and stealing from the leopard’s larder, driving the occupant farther up the tree.

These domestic quadrupeds enlist the fierce devotion of almost everyone. Even monsters such as Hitler and Goebbels loved their dogs. So did Mackenzie King, John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson. Richelieu, Salisbury and famously, T.S. Eliot, loved their cats. The multi-faceted Mr. Churchill liked both.

We had two well-loved dogs die recently. It was very upsetting, even though I had not seen them in over a year. When my greatest of cats, Sidney the Siamese genius, died 20 years ago, I did something of which I would never have thought myself capable. He was the cleverest, friendliest and most elegant cat I have known. We had a game of trying to confine him to the basement, but within five minutes, he would casually reappear, like Houdini, once via a dumb-waiter. The long-term score in this match was 30-something for Sidney and for the bumbling humans, zero, but he was a sportsmanlike champion. He was even patient with our young children, except when my son, then three, “patted his whiskers,” and even then his reponse was measured.

When he died, I had him buried in our garden, under a small marble slab, bearing the lines, from Arnold: “Composed and bland, Imperious and grand, As Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.”

More like Augustus, Hadrian or Constantine, I think, but these are the hopeful biases of a proud owner. We get very attached to our dogs and cats, but they do tend to bring out the best qualities in us.

Northern Bushape, on 13 March 2010 - 04:28 PM, said:

And they have almost human qualities.

My greatest of cats, Sidney the Siamese genius.

The names he gives his pets tell a lot about the man himself. And hidden agenda of the ESFJ: to be perfect, to be genius, to stand out.

My mom does not like dogs that are too human like (she likes breeds like german sheppards and siberian huskies or others that look more wolf like). They were obviously bred by humans to resemble the humans themselves in personality/temperament (thus appearance) so they could help humans. One thing I learned in Anthropology class in university was that to domesticate an animal means to retain their juvenile features. Dogs were bred to lose (a little) the savage and fierce instinct that wolves possess and selected for the juvenile features of puppies. I think it's beautiful to watch creatures with instincts free to do what they're best at.