July 27, 2006

People accuse cats of being selfish and antisocial; what they don’t get is that cats don’t give their love easily and openly since they have very high standards which sadly most mortals don’t match up to

“You can keep a dog but it is the cat who keeps people because cats find humans useful domestic animals”
George Mikes

There, I admit it: I prefer cats to babies. Ooh how can that be? There must be something seriously disturbing about someone who would rather stand in the pet food section of the supermarket and compare flavours of cat food rather than buy diapers. Ah, but then again, were you a fellow feline lover you might just understand where I am coming from, and empathise with me.

Ever since I can remember, I have always loved cats, which was rather easy for me since I have a mother whose love for all God’s creatures great and small is legendary. My early childhood memories are filled with being forced to take the pet dogs out for walks, holidays in which we were dragged from one zoo to another, and the deaths of long cherished pets mourned like relatives with mandatory funeral meetings with black dress code and prayers.

Unfortunately, my family liked dogs more than cats, so, as there could only be room for one species in the house, the dogs won, and for years the dog brigade had their fun. Wisdom and sanity finally prevailed when my father got sick of the garden being regularly dug up and gruesome corpses of neighbourhood felines turning up regularly on the front porch, much to everyone’s horror and shock.

Since then my house has been filled with the sound of meows and hisses, my furniture ruined by the now too familiar sight of scratch marks and occasional encounters with hair balls. Not all my pets have been expensive pedigrees, as I have been a surrogate to several orphaned moggies (British slang for feral cats). But it has been one heck of a ride, and I am proud to call myself a member of the cat lovers’ fraternity.

Cats come across to me as the ultimate control freaks –– not for them the desperate desire for affection and the openness that characterises their canine counterparts. No cats want to call the shots; you can do what you want to make them come to you, but if they don’t feel like being nice there is nothing one can do about it.

People accuse cats of being selfish and antisocial; what they don’t get is that cats don’t give their love easily and openly since they have very high standards which sadly most mere mortals don’t match up to!

They know they are beautiful, so why should they work for anything? After all the advantage of being a cat is having the world at your beck and call and being admired. A cat knows that there will always be people around to spoil them with goodies, adore them and give them all the luxuries their hearts could ask for, since it’s their birthright, so why worry?

Even the ugliest moggie knows that its chances of dying of starvation are slim, since people will always love them no matter how many chickens they run off or how unsuccessful they prove as rat hunters.

All my cats have had rather definite personalities and understanding what makes them the way they are has given me such incredible memories. My first Siamese, Misha, was quite a neurotic character who liked men that she thought had wealth and class, and who disliked any child entering our house. When my niece and nephew were born she seemed to develop symptoms of schizophrenia and began walking around strangely, acting as if she was convinced there were people out to get her. In psychiatry a person having such symptoms is considered to have a “brief psychotic episode”.

After her there were several orphaned feral cats that I ended up being a mother to, not the easiest task to undertake since for the most part they were wild, vicious and very bratty. My favourite one out of them was Plato, a kitten whom I found hiding under my car at Karachi University, because she had so much spunk and guts in her.

Not scared of anyone, she would pounce on my male Persian Spook as if he was her size and then succeed in making him rather angry –– not the easiest of things to do considering that he was docile to the point of being asleep practically all the time.

But of all the cats I have had, and I know I am playing favourites here, my favourite has been Spook. How can you not adore a cat who goes on hunger strikes when you go on holidays, who believes that the air conditioner is the greatest invention since tinned sardines and is firmly convinced that he, too, is a member of the family and so his opinion must be taken when it comes to matters regarding it!

Whenever we all gather around either having dinner or playing cards he has to be around, and if he had his way he, too, would be sitting at the table with us discussing politics, religion or my brother’s forthcoming wedding! But like all cats he, too, knows who is in charge and so he is the one who decides when he wants to be nice or when he wants his ‘alone time,’ except in his case it involves being near us.

Over the years I have learned that it is not us who choose cats to be our pets, it is rather cats who choose us to be theirs. It’s easy to make friends with a dog but you need to be really special for a cat to consider you worthy of it.

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