by Jon Katz
I broke down, is the simplest way to put it. A nervous breakdown. The animals were swept up in all of it, of course. I let things get out of control. I lost perspective. I was not well.
I had purchased my three goats on impulse. I thought they seemed cute and bright. They were loud and restless. I did not need goats.
I had a helper on the farm who intensely emotionalized all of the animals there. Every day, each one of my thirty-six sheep got its own individual grain and food bowl—my helper didn’t like fights.
The cows and steers were sprayed and brushed daily, sores and ointments applied to their bites and scratches. The goats got grain and cookies and treats all day long, so they bleated every time they saw any human being, and never stopped bleating. Each day, the chickens were fed special treats and mash by hand; they never stopped following me around. The cows mooed and bellowed at the gate; they associated people with an endless rain of treats.
I was oblivious to all this for a long time. I was deteriorating. I was heading for the Great Collapse. Exhausted and depressed, I had turned over much of the animal care to my helper, and I found myself with a life with animals that I did not want or believe in. I was disconnected from my own life and had fallen away from a true understanding of animals. I was not communicating with them, and they were not communicating with me.
One night during this period, I stepped out of the farmhouse to attend to some chore. It was bitter cold; the wind was whipping down from Canada. The ground was icy and I slipped on the ice and fell down, hitting the back of my head. I knocked myself out. I might have died out there in the cold, unconscious and alone. There was no one around for miles, no one to come by the farm and look for me, no one to call and check on me.
But there was Rose. I felt a sharp nipping at my ear. I heard barking and whining. Get up, I heard. Get up. I did. I struggled to my feet, and walked into a new life.
I saw that as much as I loved animals, they were not a substitute for human companionship, for love, for connection and community. I understood I was hiding behind them, using them as a substitute for the love I wanted, for the human being I wanted to lie next to in my bed, and to share my life with.
I knew what I needed to do. I told my helper that things had to change on the farm, that I could no longer afford these animals and did not want to have animals that were surrogate children. She quit in a huff.
This was during the time when Elvis, my steer, started to lose the use of his legs. As I described earlier, I sent him to slaughter and donated the meat to a homeless shelter in Glens Falls. I sent Harold, my other steer, and Luna, the beef cow, to a farm in Vermont.
I put a message up on a goat forum and a young couple in Vermont came to take my goats to live on their farm. I gave twenty-five of my sheep to a farmer in nearby Warren County. I got rid of the six chicks my hens had given birth to. I sold my tractor, and a farmer came to take the round bales of hay away.
I sent the donkeys away along with the sheep. It broke my heart to do that—I was especially close to two of them, Lulu and Fanny—but I had lost faith in my own judgment and motives for loving animals. I could no longer differentiate between what I loved and needed, and the dysfunction and terror that had settled over me like a cloud. I realized I could never understand animals or love them in a healthy way if I did not sort out my own needs and emotions.
I got lucky. In a remote town where one might go to hide from the world, I found what I had really been looking for all along. I met a wonderful woman, an artist, and asked her to marry me. She accepted. Maria and I have lived together in love and connection. Lenore was a wonderful companion for me, but Maria is better.
There are things that animals can do, and things that animals cannot do, and understanding the difference is essential to knowing and respecting them. Once I found Maria, I began to understand an essential truth about animals.
Animals thrive in balance with people. They are not surrogate children, dependent and piteous creatures. Some animals—steers, for sure—are not pets. In our loneliness and disconnection, we increasingly view animals as a reflection of us; we bestow on them our ambitions, needs, yearnings, emotions. I had lost a true understanding of what they are like, what they need. Giant steers are not like puppies; they are something different. They deserve to be treated well, but they don’t need cute names and treats. Goats need to eat weeds and brush, not cookies out of the hands of humans. I needed people and community in my life, not just animals spending much of their lives waiting for me to bring them goodies when in fact they didn’t need the food and could forage and graze for themselves.
I wanted a human being in my bed at night, not just a sweet dog. I needed a community of people around me, human friends in bonded relationships. I needed to confront the reality of my new life, and my new life with animals—one that I could understand, afford, and manage.
Before my new wife, Maria, and I left our farm, we got Fanny and Lulu back. And then we got Simon, an abused donkey taken off a farm by the state police. He was the right animal for me. I loved him and helped nurse him back to health. He repaid me with gratitude and affection.
I was rebuilding my life and creating a new life with animals. Maria and I shared a love of animals and a passion for communicating with them. We taught one another how to know them and talk to them. We bought a home together. Our new farm was not a grand stage; it was simply the right place for us to live together. It was a small place, a sensible place, and we could afford it. It was close to a small town where we could make friends, begin to form a community. We were very happy to have our donkeys back, and after a year or so, they forgave me for abandoning them. We got seven or eight sheep. I got Red, a wonderful dog for us, calm, competent, and loving.
We could know these animals, share them with one another, learn to understand and care for them.
So the Great Collapse was a bridge for me. I was learning how to be healthy, how to be authentic, and in so doing, I was learning how to be healthy and authentic with the animals. I no longer had animals I didn’t know, that I could send away, get rid of, exploit for my own emotional needs. These animals shared our lives, and our lives began to make room for animals who would teach us a great deal.
When we moved into our new farm, a blind old pony named Rocky came with it. We agreed to keep him, and Maria and I began to connect with the world of horses, an evolution that was soon to change both of our lives as well as my writing and work. Another gift of the Great Collapse.
A life with animals is a life of love and loss. They do not live as long as we do, and their lives are less secure. I choose to celebrate my life with these amazing creatures. I do not spend much time in mourning their loss; in a very important sense, they are not gone. They do not leave me, because they are always in my mind and my heart. Their spirits are always present.
I am lucky to know each one, to learn how to talk to them, love them, and be loved by them. To understand the boundaries between them and us, the dignity and respect they are entitled to. My journey with animals, my quest to understand them and communicate with them, came to life on the other side of the bridge.
7
Flo and Minnie: The Barn Cats
It is early morning. The sun is just coming up over the pasture, and it is brutally cold, minus-21 degrees. I am up early, going into my study to work. Flo, a cat who, like so many others, has come in from the cold, is sitting by the woodstove. She leans so closely into the heat that her brown coat sometimes turns orange in spots. We call her Crispy Cat.
I get a cup of tea, open my study door. Flo leaves the stove and comes into the doorway. Not here, I tell her silently, not in my office, I can’t have a cat slinking around in here.
Okay, she tells me, I can try. Suit yourself. She flicks her tail, goes back to the living room, jumps up onto her favorite chair by the fire, and goes to sleep. I will not see her again for hours.
Cats are a new chapter in my life with animals. Flo was either a barn cat who made h
er way to us or a cat abandoned and tossed out of a car nearby. She hid for a long time. Now, thanks to our ability to talk to one another, we are very close. Flo has opened my eyes to the love and connection of cats. She has won me over in late middle age.
Flo is the first cat I have ever loved, and the first cat I have ever communicated with. She is one of the few animals I believe communicate with me instinctively and continuously.
Like many dog lovers, I never considered myself a “cat person,” and yet I don’t think I have ever communicated with an animal more easily, constantly, or clearly than I do with Flo. She is a mysterious cat who lived for some time secretly in the upper corners of our woodshed, who seduced me, got me and my wife, Maria, to feed her, taught me how to understand cats and speak with them, and now lives in our house in cold and wet weather.
As is often the case with cats, we will never really get the full story of Flo’s life. Cats are the orphans and free spirits among domestic animals. They come and they go; some do not seem to really know how to live in our world—they run in traffic, get eaten by predators. Others seem to have a genius for survival. Flo is one of those.
When we moved into our small farm in 2010, we brought two barn cats—Mother and Minnie—from our previous farm. Mother was a fiercely independent and predatory cat. She lived in the barns, and I was mesmerized by her ferocity and her mysticism. She rampaged through the meadow across from the farmhouse, coming out with birds, rabbits, rats, chipmunks, mice, and moles, many of whom she joyously tortured before killing and eating them.
Minnie was a feral kitten I adopted from a waitress in a local restaurant. She lived in the barn with the chickens and slept near them. I think she thought she was a chicken. She was shy and timid, unlike Mother.
Mother kept an eye on me, but always from a distance. She would walk through the woods alongside me and the dogs, but she was always ready to vanish or bolt up a tree at the first sign of trouble.
It took several days to round up Mother and Minnie once we got them to the new farm. We put them in large crates in the big barn and fed them there for days so that they could become acclimated to their new home. Minnie adjusted quickly. She loved to sleep on top of the hay bales and make warm nests for herself, as she had done in her previous home. Mother, viscerally independent and with the wild, proud spirit of the barn cat, vanished almost immediately after we let her out of her crate and moved on, we think, to another home. We can’t say for sure.
Soon after we moved in, we became aware that there was another cat around. We saw glimpses of a small brown tortoiseshell cat rushing under the front porch or up in the woodshed. She never came close to us, would never show herself.
We thought she might be living under the front porch; her tracks seemed to move in that direction. Or perhaps up high in the big woodshed at the back of the house. We climbed up and found a kind of nest up there, made of shredded paper and old rags. Judging from the indentations, a small animal was sleeping up there. But we never saw it.
We were never certain if this cat lived on the grounds, or stopped by, or had moved on, as Mother had. Months would go by during which we saw no trace of this visitor, then we might catch a glimpse of her darting across the yard.
She did not seem to want anything to do with us, and was careful not to be seen. I had this sense that she was watching, though, checking me out. Cats have a very interesting trait: they manage to be wild and domestic at the same time, both independent and needy. Unlike dogs, they never seem to completely give themselves away to people. There is always a part of them that says, “Not so fast, not so close. I get to decide.”
There wasn’t much we could do; nothing we really wanted to do. It was enough to care for the dogs, donkeys, sheep, and Minnie and the hens.
During one raging snowstorm, I was in the woodshed, stacking firewood into the back compartment of my SUV to transport to the house. I looked up and saw a small brown head staring down at me.
As I stared at the cat with big green eyes, I expected her to bolt or hide, but she stared back at me with a kind of impertinent look, as if to say, “What are you doing in my shed?” But also, something softer, something like “What are you like? Should I deign to get to know you better?”
I said hello, and then I started stacking the wood again. I did not grasp at first that I had just experienced the beginning of a kind of communication, of a brilliant and sophisticated campaign that was to upend my own fixed ideas about animals and then lead to a fluid and meaningful communication with an animal whose species was a complete mystery to me.
From that day on, Flo’s head would pop up every time I came into the woodshed. I greeted her and she would stare at me and then vanish. I would chat with her a bit, ask how she was, talk to her while I stacked wood in the dark and cold shed. I thought she was talking to me. I got some images of the box where she slept, some feelings of cold, some sensations of being hungry.
After a few weeks, Flo started climbing down from her perch in the woodshed. She would sometimes come down a few feet, sometimes come level with me. One day I thought I sensed her calling to me. I leaned over and scratched her on the top of her head. She loved it; she purred and tilted her head and flirted with me.
We had begun our conversation. She was getting to know me; she was beginning to seduce me. We are going to have a relationship, she said. I intend to be your cat. I’m not really asking you, I’m telling you. I’m not a cat person, I said, but you are welcome to the shed.
I didn’t see Flo for a few days and got worried about her. Maria and I searched the shed and the front porch, but there was no sign of her.
This bothered me more than I might have expected. I have strong feelings about barn cats being left alone to live their ethereal and somewhat mystical lives—many a night I’ve come into a barn and seen the cats dancing up in the rafters in the moonlight—and I have never been tempted to bring them into the house. Mother and Minnie made it very clear they had no interest in coming inside; they cherished their freedom. And my barn cats had always been lethal mice and rat killers; they kept the barn clean and rodent-free. I had no thought of bringing Flo into the house, but when she reappeared after a few days, I was relieved.
One especially bitter winter night, I brought some warm fish stew to the woodshed. Flo came sauntering down, sniffed the stew, ate it hungrily. I could hear the sound of her purring yards away.
Now I was talking to her. I spoke to her verbally, touched her and rubbed her, and now, with the stew, I had brought her sustenance and warmth. We were deep into it.
“You’re not coming into the house,” I said, again and again.
“Who would want to?” she seemed to reply, almost disdainfully, before vanishing up into the dark recesses of the woodshed roof.
Flo was intrigued by me. She was coming on to me, yet at the same time she made it clear that she was calling the shots, not me. She could take me or leave me.
But the thing is, she didn’t leave me. She kept appearing, purring, presenting herself, staring at me with those green eyes. And I didn’t leave her.
As the cold and stormy winter went on, I began bringing food more regularly. Most often she was waiting for me when I came to the shed. She seemed to know when I would appear. Every now and then there were gifts—a bird, mice, a mole or two—waiting for me on the woodpile. Sometimes Flo came down for cuddling; sometimes she just sat up high on the pile and watched me; once in a while, she didn’t appear at all. I had no clue as to where she was or what she did when I wasn’t there.
Flo and I settled into this routine, and after a few months, we were understanding each other. We were in sync in some strange and new way. Maria saw it right away. “You two just love each other,” she said. “You are talking to each other all the time.”
And we were. With my body, my emotions, and food, I spoke to her. And soon enough, with visualizations. The woodshed was a perfect place for visualizing—dark and quiet. I got a stream of messages from Flo. I saw a h
ouse with children. There were cows in the backyard, a barn. I had the sense of fear, an image of the porch. Suddenly, I knew where Flo came from. She’d been dumped by the front of the house, at night, I think. She became a barn cat and a porch cat. I saw an image of my dogs, barking, of a dark, safe place—the woodshed. And images of me, again and again, a warm glow around me, smells, feelings.
When spring came, I was outside more. Mowing, sitting in the Adirondack chairs, herding the sheep with my border collie, Red. Flo appeared next to the chairs. For the first time, she ended up in my lap. I was startled. I had never had a cat in my lap before.
Flo went from being a shadow, a phantom, to being almost ubiquitous. Whenever I was outside she would come out of the garden, out of the barn, down from the shed. I might be sitting in the chair, or on the rocks by the garden, or having lunch with Maria on the porch. Flo was always there.
If I was eating, she would lie down next to me. Sometimes I got irritated with her getting too close when I was eating, so she stopped. When I was done, she would climb into my lap, purr loudly, and go to sleep. I liked it. It was sweet and comforting having this soft and living thing in my lap. And then she would be gone, and we would go our separate ways. I liked the dynamic between us. Flo was not too clingy or too close; she seemed to sense when I wanted her around and when I didn’t. She never made a pest of herself and had this extraordinary radar that seemed to alert her when I was ready for her. I would smile at her, close my eyes, and picture her asleep in my lap, and she would appear there.
I began to love this cat. It seemed we were perfect for one another. She was independent, and found a quiet corner of the living room—the back of a chair. She never bothered me when I worked, or asked for anything other than to be fed. Once in a while, she crawled into my lap when I was reading and purred softly. It was restful, meditative. I began to appreciate the skill and sensitivity of her campaign to win me over.