Each day on my way out the front gate, I’ll check the copse at the end of the garden. It’s a big thickety sort of wilderness; a tangle of clematis and some other sprawling, twiggish things that smell of clay and crispness.
There’s almost always something fascinating going on in there. Once I found a small and extremely muddy boy retrieving a football. He emerged with some difficulty, wearing just one shoe with Velcro straps and swearing very inappropriately for a person who couldn’t master shoelaces.
But mostly I find cats in there. Their mysterious eyes glow strangely from inside the gloom. It seems to be where neighbourhood cats retreat to when their disdain for their human families becomes overwhelming. Cats are resentful creatures with extremely high standards. When those standards are breached by an owner who does something stupid such as move the cat’s food bowl slightly to the right, or prevent it from clambering out a small second-storey window, the cat will always leave home in a huff. It will hide somewhere snug until the distraught owner is sure it has been brutally squashed by an articulated truck. Once it can hear the children crying, the cat will saunter back home and vomit somewhere inconvenient, like the hall.
Dog person
I've always wanted a dog. There's a reciprocity to a relationship with dogs that you just don't get with a cat. The dog is a sensitive, friendly creature that flourishes with love and care, and appears genuinely interested in human beings. Domestic cats are just as disinterested as wildcats.
The only thing that stops them from eating us is their size. Yes, they develop a bond with humans, but it always seems to crescendo at the point of mere tolerance, while a dog is boisterously enthused by the mere idea of driving to Tesco with you.
A cat is more like a slightly crap love interest: you spend most of your time trying to impress it, only to find that it has fallen asleep while you were talking about your feelings for it.
I've been reading The Philosopher and the Wolf, a sort of memoir by Mark Rowlands, a professor of philosophy. The book is a fascinating examination of the relationship between Rowlands and his dog Brenin, which was genetically more or less a wolf.
Most philosophical discussions of animals are concerned with ethics, with how we treat them, whether it is morally right to eat meat and so on. These are all important topics, but those of us who have had a beloved pet know there can be something deep and mysterious in our relationship with animals. To befriend one is to make a connection across the void of species. It is to communicate beyond language and to catch a flittering image of another sort of mind.
It’s completely unsurprising that therapy animals exist – there’s much to be said for the warm, fuzzy squish of a docile and well-meaning creature when we feel sad or lonely.
The book is a wonderful narrative of the important bond between Rowlands and the animal, which went everywhere with him, including to the lectures he gave, much to the amusement of the students. Reading it filled me with winsome longing, so I stopped on my way home to chat with one of the wilderness cats, which we call Fuzzycat. She belongs to someone in the neighbourhood and appears to be missing a few of her essential faculties, feline dignity for one.
Like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, she regularly screams below our window, at least until someone comes out to pet her and tell her how important she is. She has always been positively inclined towards me, so I bent over to scratch her head, only to breach some important cat standard and have to prise her large claws out of my face.
While feeling a disturbing quantity of hot blood rush down my cheek, I looked at her blankly and recalled that Nietzsche hated cats.
I’ve always wanted a dog.
