Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  After tidying up (and securing) the RV, we left Jersey City and drove toward College Park, Maryland, a suburb of D.C. The four-hour drive—down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then south on I-95—was unremarkable, so I passed the time by catching up on episodes of NPR’s This American Life. One was titled “In Dog We Trust,” but it turned out, disappointingly, to be mostly about cats.

  The program got me thinking about my unexpected foray into cat ownership. Back in 2010, a friend from Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain had waved me down as I drove to the post office. She looked harried, as was her custom, but she seemed particularly discombobulated that morning. I rolled down the passenger-side window to see what the fuss was about.

  “Do you want a cat?” she blurted out, leaning inside the car and staring at me with the slightly unhinged look common to those who rescue cats. “I’ve got a great one-year-old that needs a home.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d asked me if I wanted a cat. She was a one-woman cat-saving operation, using her free time to rescue them from a nearby neighborhood with a feral feline problem. She would then stash them in her office at work and try to palm them off on her friends.

  I was not an easy sell. “You know what I think about cats,” I told her. “They’re moody. And they have claws. Like a tiger.”

  But then she said something astonishing. “Benoit, this cat doesn’t act like a cat. He acts like a dog!”

  A cat that acts like a dog? I was intrigued.

  “You’ll love him,” she continued, sensing my weakness. “Why don’t you meet him? Take him home for a few days and see how it goes.”

  So I did. I named him Eli, and in many ways he did act like a dog. If I wanted to wrestle, he would wrestle. If I wanted to throw him in the air like a football, he would let me throw him in the air like a football. He loved greeting strangers at the door. Being sprayed with water—normally a cat’s worst nightmare—hardly fazed him. He was so doglike, in fact, that one morning I took him to Franklin Park with Casey and tried to walk him on a leash. Eli didn’t move, and Casey barked at me to hurry up.

  “Okay, so you’re not actually a dog,” I conceded.

  There was another important way Eli didn’t act like a dog: He went to the bathroom indoors. I struggled mightily to accept this reality of indoor cat ownership. I tried several brands of cat litter, but none could compete with the noxious odors emanating from Eli’s intestines.

  He also rarely slept. My cat survived, it seemed, on a mere three-hour nap each day, from precisely one to four each afternoon. To be fair, Eli may have also dozed off for an hour or two at night, but I wouldn’t know because he wasn’t allowed in my bedroom. I’d hoped to be able to snuggle up in bed next to Casey and Eli, but Eli treated my bed as if the sheets were made of catnip. He would duck under the covers, hurling himself at my feet and generally engaging in his own Kitty Olympics. I would try my best to wait him out, but he never let up.

  One day it occurred to me that Eli might need a friend to play with, someone to keep him company and tire him out. And that’s how I—a dog person—found myself with a second rescue cat. I named her Chi (pronounced Chee). She was orange, and she looked like a miniature tiger. But she was very much a cat; curious but careful, and affectionate on her own terms. She mostly ignored me at first, but she got along great with Eli and quickly warmed up to Casey.

  Problem was, I had little patience for my cats’ neuroses. They would sit outside my bedroom door at 5:30 each morning meowing their heads of. (My boyfriend at the time threatened to drown them in Jamaica Pond.) There was also the problem of my landlady, an elderly Greek lady who lived upstairs and who grudgingly accepted Casey but inexplicably despised cats. She was not pleased to see Eli and Chi relaxing by my living room window, staring at her as she watered her plants. She finally told me that if I didn’t get rid of them, she wouldn’t renew my lease.

  Had she said such a thing about Casey, I wouldn’t have given moving a second thought. But was I willing to give up a great apartment for two creatures I never really wanted in the first place? Though I didn’t think I loved my cats, I did feel for them and increasingly enjoyed their company. They were growing on me.

  I agonized over the decision. I asked my friends for advice, but their counsel depended entirely on whether they were dog or cat people. Very few of my friends are both, even though chef Dereke Bruce may have been on to something when he said, “In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.”

  (Studies have found significant personality differences between dog and cat lovers. A team of psychologists led by Sam Gosling at UT-Austin conducted a web-based study of nearly five thousand people they divided into groups based on whether they identified as dog people, cat people, both, or neither. Dog lovers scored higher than all three other groups on both agreeableness and extraversion; they essentially tied with nonanimal people for the lead on conscientiousness; and they scored the lowest—which, in this case, is actually the best—on neuroticism. The only category where dog people didn’t fare as well was on “openness,” which Gosling defined as appreciating art, emotion, unusual ideas, and a variety of experiences.)

  Some of my dog friends encouraged me to get rid of Eli and Chi. My cat friends scolded me for even entertaining that idea. “Benoit, I’ll be very disappointed in you if you do this,” one insisted over sushi. “You made a commitment to these animals.”

  He was right. I had made a commitment. And, when it comes to dogs, I’m horrified by the stories I’ve heard from shelters and animal rescue organizations about dog owners who relinquish their pets because an apartment they covet doesn’t allow animals—or, worse yet, because their dog’s shedding hair doesn’t match the color of their new carpet. How could people be so heartless? How could they live with pets, and then just get rid of them?

  In the end, though, that’s what I did. I got rid of the cats. To my credit, I found a family that wanted to adopt them together. But almost as soon as I agreed to the exchange, I started having second thoughts. When the family—mom, dad, and two kids—walked in my front door to claim their pets, I wanted to tell them to leave. Though I couldn’t put my finger on it, they seemed off somehow. Was I making a terrible mistake?

  My gut urged me to slam the door in their faces, but I still handed Eli and Chi over. I immediately felt like the worst person in the world, and as the family drove away with my cats, I surprised myself by walking to my bedroom, collapsing on the bed, and bursting into tears.

  THE CHERRY Hill RV Park in College Park, Maryland, couldn’t have been more different from Liberty Harbor. A popular summer destination for families, Cherry Hill boasts swimming pools, ponds, an outdoor theater, a game room, and a hiking trail. It felt less like an RV park and more like summer camp.

  It also featured a grassy, fenced-in dog play area where I took Casey to pee and play. I laughed when he ignored several skinny tree stumps, urinating instead on a fire hydrant that had been placed in the run as a joke. Fake hydrants are a fairly common sight in dog parks and pens, but they come with a potential downside: volunteer firefighters in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, once lost valuable time when they tried to hook up a hose to a nonworking hydrant in a dog pen near a burning home.

  Other than their primary utility (putting out fires), hydrants in high-traffic dog areas function as a kind of Facebook for dogs, according to Alexandra Horowitz of the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College. She says urine on a hydrant can advertise everything from a dog’s confidence to where he’s from.

  “In this way,” she wrote in her 2009 book, Inside of a Dog, “the invisible pile of scents on the hydrant becomes a community center bulletin board, with old, deteriorating announcements and requests peeking out from underneath more recent posts.”

  Our first full day in Washington was clear and unseasonably warm, so I decided to walk Casey on the National Mall. Signs warned me to keep my dog on a leash, but I pre
tended not to notice them and played fetch with Casey on the grass at the foot of the Washington Monument. Every once in a while, Casey would stop running and roll on his back in the grass as American flags snapped in the wind above us.

  I bought a hot dog from a corner stand and led Casey toward the White House. I hoped to get lucky and catch a glimpse of the First Dog, Bo, but the presidential pup was out of sight. I imagined him dozing on an overpriced doggie bed in the Oval Office.

  During Bo’s official introduction to the media in April of 2009, President Obama had made clear that the dog would be welcomed everywhere in the White House. “I finally got a friend,” Obama said at the time, invoking Harry Truman’s famous quote, If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

  Just about every U.S. president has heeded that advice. (Presidential cats, on the other hand, tend to stay out of sight. “I’m not sure you could get elected these days as a person who owned a cat but no dog,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks.) The First Dog dates back to the inception of the presidency itself, even before the construction of the White House. George Washington, who is credited with the creation of the American Foxhound, kept dozens of hounds at his Mount Vernon estate. At least thirty, including one named Drunkard, are mentioned by name in his diaries.

  Washington understood how much a dog could mean to his fellow man—even his nemesis. When a Fox Terrier wandered into Washington’s Pennsylvania camp during the Revolutionary War, his men considered keeping the dog as a kind of mascot. But when one of them noticed the name engraved on its collar (General Howe, the British commander), Washington insisted they return the dog to its rightful owner “under a white flag of truce.”

  When John Adams moved into the White House a few years later, he brought two mischievous mutts along with him. He named one Juno, after the fierce Roman goddess. He named the other Satan, a name that probably wouldn’t fly in today’s political climate.

  Adam’s dogs were the very first in a long, nearly uninterrupted succession of canine residents of the White House. To not have a dog—or many dogs, as was the case with several presidents, including Calvin Coolidge and John Kennedy—was considered politically risky.

  Thomas Jefferson, for example, can be said to have flip-flopped on the dog issue. In response to a friend who wrote to him complaining of stray dogs, Jefferson had once declared, “I participate in all your hostility to dogs and would readily join in any plan of exterminating the whole race. I consider them the most afflicting of all follies for which men tax themselves.” Yet he kept many on his estate and is credited with introducing the Briard breed to North America.

  But perhaps no First Dog has received such intense media scrutiny as Bo, the Portuguese Water Dog owned by the Obamas. During his victory speech in November 2008, Obama promised his daughters that a puppy would join the family when they moved into the White House. But Malia’s allergies necessitated a dander-free dog.

  Even before Obama took office, the question of breed became a public debate. While an AKC online poll revealed that most Americans wanted the family to buy a Poodle, others scolded Obama for even considering a purebred. When he selected one anyway, the criticism was predictably fierce. “This will fuel the breeding industry, which will fuel the puppy mill industry, which will increase homeless dogs at shelters,” Dr. Jana Kohl, author of A Rare Breed of Love, said at the time.

  But Obama looked great in comparison to his 2012 Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, who was widely portrayed as an animal abuser for once strapping his Irish Setter to the roof of the family car in a makeshift kennel for the twelve-hour drive from Boston to Ontario.

  When I spoke to Democratic strategist Doug Hattaway two months before the election, he said Romney’s dog gaffe “plays perfectly into the narrative of him as an aloof, uncaring, out-of-touch rich guy. A lot of people already think he doesn’t care about poor people, but it’s probably even worse for him to be seen as someone who doesn’t care about dogs. You don’t want to mess with dog-loving voters.”

  WHEN IT comes to the treatment of animals in this country, few people hold more power than the woman Casey and I went to meet on our second day in D.C.

  Ingrid Newkirk looks like a cross between a German nanny and a retired professional tennis player, but she’s devoted her life to a different kind of sport—the rough-and-tumble game of animal rights. She founded and rules over arguably the most successful and controversial animal rights organization in the world, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

  Best known for their attention-seeking tactics, PETA activists have hurled red paint at fashion models and tofu-cream pies at designers, donned KKK outfits in a protest of Westminster, and dropped a dead raccoon on the lunch platter of Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Before visiting Ingrid, I’d asked my Facebook followers what they thought about PETA. The response was immediate—and damning.

  “They hurt the cause of animal rights and hurt it badly,” one woman said. Another lamented that “they started out with a good purpose but let their egos send them into radical fanaticism.” One reader didn’t mince words, calling the organization’s leadership “terrorists.” (Comedian Dennis Miller once joked that “there are even animals out there who are embarrassed that [PETA activists] front them.”)

  Many animal rights groups have spoken out against PETA, condemning it for hijacking the movement and trivializing the suffering of animals. And, yet, even with its battered reputation, PETA remains a fundraising juggernaut that has scored numerous victories for animals. Some of the biggest names in clothing and fast food have bowed to pressure from Ingrid and her relentless activists.

  Ingrid runs her organization like a dictatorship—“This is not a democratic organization,” she told The New Yorker in 2003—and I expected to be faced with a firebrand when we sat down in her sparse office on the second floor of a charming white-brick building near Dupont Circle. (It was a Saturday, and we were the only ones at the office.) But Ingrid offered me a cup of tea and proceeded, even when I disagreed with her, to mostly come off as personable and friendly.

  Though I’d come to talk to her about dogs, I began our ninety-minute chat by asking why PETA seemed willing to do anything for attention. In the New Yorker profile, she openly referred to PETA as “press sluts.” Why, I wanted to know, did PETA so often seem like a kid with a temper tantrum?

  “If you’re a social cause in this country,” she told me, “you’re basically dead unless you do something titillating, something controversial, something that’s seen as extreme. We will use whatever tactics we can think of to get people talking about an issue.”

  “But what if your tactics turn people off from the issue you’re fighting for?” I countered. “Many people can’t see past your tactics.”

  “To me that’s hilarious,” she said, though she didn’t seem amused. “Animals are being skinned alive for fur, they’re being bludgeoned in leg-hold traps, and the pigs that make a ham sandwich have black lung and are lying in filth. Those tactics are okay, but us saying ‘Would you eat your dog?’ ”—a reference to a PETA billboard campaign aimed at getting kids to stop eating turkey—“is somehow upsetting and over-the line? PETA annoys people because it gets under their skin. It makes people uncomfortable.”

  I turned the conversation to PETA’s unusual perspective on dog ownership. In Ingrid’s conception of a perfect world, humans would not own dogs or have the ability to purchase them. On the organization’s website, an entry on the issue reads: “We believe that it would have been in the animals’ best interests if the institution of ‘pet keeping’—breeding animals to be kept and regarded as ‘pets’—never existed. . . . This selfish desire to possess animals and receive love from them causes immeasurable suffering, which results from manipulating their breeding, selling or giving them away casually, and depriving them of the opportunity to engage in their natural behavior. They are restricted to human homes, where they must obey commands and can only eat, drink, and even urinate when human
s allow them to.”

  Ingrid conceded to me that a world without pet keeping is unlikely, and that her own childhood would have been markedly different without her best friend, an Irish Red Setter named Shawnie.

  “Growing up, my dog was like my brother,” she recalled. “Shawnie and I slept in the same bed. We threw up in the car at the same time, because we both got miserably carsick. If I had ice cream, he would eat the top of it. We were the kids of the family.”

  Though Ingrid said she travels too often to live with a pet today, she encourages employees to bring their dogs, cats, and other “companion animals” to work with them. And, in a nod to the powerful bonds inherent in a world of pet keeping, PETA offers bereavement leave—time off for the death of an employee’s pet.

  But though she expects her employees to treat dogs well, she insists that most humans can’t be similarly trusted. “The institution of pet keeping has resulted in six to eight million dogs and cats being abandoned in animal shelters and pounds in the U.S. alone every year,” she told me. “That’s a whole lot of confused, sad, old, injured, unsocialized animals who find themselves on a cement floor in a noisy kennel or cage, and at least half of them will have to be destroyed because people are out buying more animals from breeders and pet shops. And then there are the thousands of dogs who supposedly have homes, but who are neglected—left in their pens, or chained up in backyards. So, while we all see lovely, happy dogs being walked, the reality is that the practice of pet keeping is responsible for a truly awful situation for the very individuals we love.”

  I asked Ingrid what she might replace the institution of pet keeping with. “A system where animals live in peace without being acquired to amuse us and be dependent upon us,” she replied. “Humans should only take in animals who are in need—orphaned, injured, or starving. But only animals who genuinely need a human helping hand.”