It’s been quite a political season for cats. First, opposition researchers unearthed some unkind words Republican vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance had said about “childless cat ladies with miserable lives,” though he later clarified that he had “nothing against cats” themselves. Then reports surfaced out of Ohio about alleged cat snatchings, including distasteful claims about what Haitian refugees living in the area were doing with the pilfered felines. “They’re eating the cats!” Donald Trump exclaimed during Tuesday’s debate. The unsubstantiated but unsavory reports were presented as a consequence of Biden administration policies, but even some right-leaning commentators found the fuss over cats in bad taste, so to speak, because there were more significant issues to debate than missing house pets.
Once upon a time, I’d have dismissed all the brouhaha, given that for years I didn’t consider myself a cat person. Then, some 16 years ago, a kitten abandoned by her feral mother appeared in a shed on our property, and we became accidental cat owners. We never gave her any other name except Kitty, she never ran to the door to welcome us home the way our dogs do, and most of our friends had no idea that we had a cat, because she rarely appeared when others were around. Yet when she died a few weeks ago, it affected me far more than I’d thought it would. There’s a reason why humans and cats have developed together for some 10,000 years, and why most societies came to treasure the contribution of cats and to nurture them, rather than sacrifice and consume them. As an account of the life of Sir Henry Wyatt—who claimed that when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London a cat brought him a pigeon to eat—said of the nobleman, he “would ever make much of cats, as other men will of their spaniels or hounds.” As do many of us.
We would never have known that Kitty was even in that shed except for our dogs, who discovered her. All told, three kittens would scamper and hide from me when I tried to nab them, so we called the town animal control to come trap them. No one showed up, and I was told that the shelter was already bursting with stray cats. When I got home that day, my wife told me that two of the kittens and the mother had disappeared, but that the black tuxedo one was out there and had been crying all day. We brought her inside, fed her, and made a bed in an oversized dog crate. At our vet’s, she clocked in at a mere 1 pound, 2 ounces. Blood tests showed that she had traces of feline HIV, though the vet couldn’t say for sure whether she was infected or merely carried the antibodies from her mother’s milk. In any case, it was unlikely that she’d be adopted anytime soon. That, and the fact that my daughter, two years old at the time, walked around the house for two days calling out “Kiiitttyyy” almost continuously, persuaded us that we should keep her.
Being new to cats, I was struck immediately by Kitty’s resourcefulness. We have a “doggie door” in our house, which our dogs use to go out into our fenced-in yard. We’ve had to train every one of the four dogs we’ve had over the years on how to use it, and lots of visiting dogs couldn’t figure it out. As a tiny kitten, Kitty sat, Budda-like, watching the dogs go out the door, and waiting for as long as it took for them to come back in. Eventually, she went up to the door and figured out how to squirm through it, no training required. Outside, her favorite place was the shed. My daughter thought she was looking for her mother. Not knowing much about cats, I had no grounds to disagree.
Kitty survived our first two dogs, then welcomed two more that we adopted as puppies. Both seemed confused at first, probably because they’d never seen a cat. So, they investigated. Kitty quickly put them in their place with a left paw jab when they got too close. I’d seen her use that tactic on visiting dogs as well. One jab was all it took to settle things.
Cats don’t love you the way dogs do. They don’t slobber all over you and act like you’ve been gone for two years when you return home after being at work for the day. But cats are sneakily affectionate. Kitty would come into the family room and hop on my lap, then go to sleep. Sometimes she would creep, cat-like, into our bedroom at night and leap onto my chest. She did it so nimbly that I sometimes didn’t know she was there. I’d wake up in the morning and wonder how long she’d been asleep on me.
Eventually her kidneys stopped working so well. I thought about when it would be right to have the vet put her down, but before I could make that decision, she rapidly deteriorated one evening. Even our dogs knew something was wrong. One of them kept going up to her and licking her face. She died a few hours later.
Given how much less of a constant presence cats are compared to dogs, I imagined that I’d miss a cat a lot less. But maybe because cats live a somewhat shadowy life, I now sometimes imagine I’ve seen Kitty, even though I know she’s gone. Occasionally I’ve even mistakenly opened the phone app that I used to track her. Now it tells me that she’s in the drawer in our kitchen—that’s where I’ve stored her old collar with the tiny Bluetooth transmitter on it.
I suppose cats have wriggled their way into this presidential race because they’ve become so ubiquitous present in Americans’ lives—a stark change from when I was young. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, where most parents were first-generation Americans. Families had lots of kids, and houses were small. Most of our parents had grown up without pets themselves because their parents were poor immigrants; resources were scarce. Cats were especially rare. They were used mostly not for dinner but for rodent control in local food stores or, of course, on farms. It’s not for nothing that Mercutio provokes Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet by calling him a “rat catcher” and the “king of cats.” Though he meant those as insults, I suspect that cats themselves would consider them compliments.
Richer but with fewer kids, we’re much more of a cat-and-dog society today. In this unpredictable and at times unhinged presidential campaign, it’s not surprising that for a few days one of the key debating points was whether Haitians really were consuming cats. Even fact-checking services got in on the controversy. Social media jokers, meanwhile, have created hilarious memes that purport to show cats hunkering down in Ohio. Are the votes of America’s multitudes of animal lovers at stake? And what would cats, if they could talk, say about the hullabaloo? I’m pretty sure that mine, on hearing the rumors, would have yawned, jumped in my lap, and fallen asleep.
Photos courtesy of the author