Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  Behaviorists have long argued that cats, almost alone in the animal world, choose humans as their companions. They use their extraordinary instincts to sense the people who would best care for them. They are only partly domesticated, unlike dogs and carriage horses, but they are astute survivors who seem to grasp that humans are a source of food and safety. Unlike many dogs, cats are often very content being alone in a way that dogs are sometimes not. Cats spend the great bulk of their lives sleeping, they don’t need the same amount of attention that dogs often require.

  Flo had clearly chosen me. She tracked my movements around the farm and followed me, often at a discreet distance. When I sat and read in an Adirondack chair, I would look up and see her in the garden, a few yards away, basking in the sun, keeping an eye on me.

  This became our new routine. If I sat in the chair, she came over and looked at me. If I shook my head and looked away, and imagined her staying away from me, then she did.

  Flo never came to me when I wished to be left alone, but once in a while she would come close and stare at me. She was telling me she needed to be in my lap, needed some connection with me. And so I would oblige her.

  It is important to understand the place of the barn cat in rural life. There is much controversy surrounding these wild creatures. Many animal rights groups believe it is cruel for barn cats to be left outside, never inoculated or given complete shelter.

  Yet, if you have ever been on a farm, the issue seems much more complex. Wild cats are drawn to barns with livestock because there is often warmth, water, and grain there. Many farmers leave giant bowls of milk for their barn cats, yet very few farmers can afford to take twenty or thirty barn cats to the vet for shots every year, even if they could catch them. Money is never spent on barn cats. They get shelter and milk, but are otherwise on their own, living and hunting freely.

  I embraced these conventions, with a few exceptions. I had only two barn cats, and I did catch them and take them to the vet for their shots every year. I would also leave food out for them on cold or snowy nights.

  One night, Maria and I were awakened by the sound of a cat shrieking. It was a more urgent sound than we had heard before, and we both rushed outside, but could see nothing—no cats or other animals, no sign of a struggle.

  We did not see Minnie the following morning and became concerned. She was always out trawling for food first thing after the sun came up. But barn cats often go off on hunting sprees, disappearing for days and then showing up when they need a warm or dry place to sleep. Later in the day, when we went out to the barn to do the afternoon feeding and chores, I heard Maria call out to me in alarm. “I found Minnie, I think she’s dead!” I came running. Maria had seen one of Minnie’s legs protruding from the sliding barn door. We rushed inside and found her. She was not dead, but close.

  It looked like she had been attacked by an animal—a fisher or raccoon, perhaps—and had made it into the barn to hide. Her right rear leg was hanging loosely, almost as if it were disconnected from her body.

  We rushed Minnie to the vet just down the road. We left her there for X-rays, but the vet said it looked bad. Something had grabbed and wrenched the leg so badly that there was massive nerve and muscle damage.

  An hour later, the vet called us back. The leg was severely damaged and not treatable, she said. The options were to take her to a specialist in Albany—where they sometimes did elaborate and expensive reconstructive surgeries in cases like this—amputate the leg, or euthanize her.

  Reconstructive surgery would cost many thousands of dollars, a minimum of $5,000. Amputation would cost around $2,000. Euthanasia would be around $100. If we amputated, the vet said, the prognosis was good. Three-legged cats can’t do all the things four-legged cats can do, but they can get around, adapt, and lead healthy, relatively normal lives.

  I know there are some people who judge their love of animals by how much money they are willing to spend to heal them and prolong their lives and by how quickly they accede to elaborate and expensive treatments and surgeries.

  I am not one of those people. While technically I am not a farmer—I see myself more as a writer with a farm—I have many farmer friends and feel very connected to them and their values. I respect these hardworking and honest people. I agree with their opinion that there must be limits on the impulse to save and rescue animals, if our understanding of their lives is to be genuine and our relationships with them healthy. Money does matter, and so does perspective.

  I was unsure about what to do next, ambivalent about the choice we had to make for Minnie, who remained in a crate on sedatives and painkillers while Maria and I made up our minds.

  Maria and I both instantly ruled out the surgical reconstruction. We didn’t have five thousand dollars for specialists and complex surgery, especially when it was far from clear the leg would be saved. I could tell Maria was leaning heavily toward the amputation. She loved Minnie and because she knew I was not especially drawn to the cat, Maria was especially protective of her.

  Aside from cost, I am rarely comfortable subjecting animals to prolonged and often painful medical procedures. The vet had assured us that cats do well on three legs and I had no doubt that that was true, but I was also certain that amputation would be a painful and disorienting process, especially for a barn cat. Minnie would never be able to run as fast or seek shelter as quickly as she had done before—that ability may have saved her life.

  Maria and I went back and forth. I decided to try to talk with Minnie, to see if I could get a sense of her, a sense of what she wanted. I had often brought food to Minnie and she was comfortable around me, even if we were not close. I had rarely tried to talk with her, and yet here I was, faced with one of the most important reasons for learning how to communicate with animals. We don’t have to always play God, to try to figure out what is best for a particular animal. Sometimes they can actually tell us, if we learn how to listen. They can help us reach good decisions.

  The vet said she wouldn’t be able to operate for a couple of days, so we had some time to decide. Just after the clinic closed, I showed up—with the vet’s permission—and asked if I could go see Minnie alone. It was quiet in the holding room in the back. Minnie was sedated. She must have been in considerable pain. She lay facing me in a large crate with some food and a bowl of water next to her. Her leg lay limp by her side. She looked miserable but calm. Much of her food was uneaten.

  I slipped a chunk of tuna fish through the slats in the crate. Minnie sniffed it and ate it quickly. The office was quiet, I got close to the crate and let Minnie sniff me. I wanted her to know what I was feeling. Mostly, it was confusion.

  I may not have been particularly close to Minnie, but I did have an attachment to her. We had been through a lot together. She was one of the first animals I brought to Bedlam Farm, and I loved looking out the farmhouse window and seeing her perched up on a fence post, watching the meadow eagerly for any of the host of mice, moles, and rats who lived there. The life of a barn cat was rough, but in many ways it seemed wonderful to me. How many more-or-less domesticated animals got to live their lives in so free and independent a way?

  Do you know that you’ve been lucky? I tried to ask her. Then I ran though some images in my mind, the operating table, Minnie with three legs. I didn’t know how to project pain.

  Minnie began meowing softly, and was focusing on me. She was smelling me, for sure, and she was also looking at me. I had the feeling she was gathering information.

  We sat like that for four or five minutes. I thought I was probably kidding myself. The cat was sedated and in pain, and I was also ambivalent about what we ought to do. But then, as I was preparing to leave, I got a message. Minnie lifted her head, and she showed me the spark in her eyes. There is more life in me. I’m not ready to leave.

  Minnie didn’t speak to me in words, but she showed me images. I saw her sitting in the sun by the barn with three legs. I saw her hopping around the pasture. I saw her with mice in her mou
th and some moles. I have sat down with a number of dogs and sheep—and one donkey, too—whose spirit was gone, who were exhausted by life, who were ready to leave. Minnie wasn’t. I went home and told Maria what I had experienced, what Minnie had said. We agreed to go forward with the amputation.

  It’s been more than two years since the operation was performed and I have to confess that I am as ambivalent about it today as I was then. It was a very painful procedure for Minnie and she has never regained the confidence or mobility necessary to live the life of a barn cat. I’ve watched her struggle to get to the high spots that cats love. I see her fearfulness of being out in the open too long, even on sunny days. She is essentially a house cat now.

  During the day, she sits on the carpet by the woodstove or goes down into the basement—it looks like a barn down there; it is dark and quiet and safe and there are mice rushing around.

  At night, she loves to curl up with Maria and sleep next to her. Minnie’s wound has healed, and her body has compensated for the loss of a limb, but she can no longer live the life she was meant to live, and she suffered more than I am comfortable seeing an animal in my care suffer.

  Maria has a different view. She believes the surgery was a success and Minnie has a full and loving life. While I may have a different perspective on Minnie’s story, I do believe that she was not prepared to die, that her spirit was alive and she wanted to go on. She told me so. For that reason, I am glad that she is here with us now. Her message made a difficult decision much easier.

  Flo’s second winter on the farm was even more brutal than the first. Wave after wave of frigid arctic air sent temperatures plummeting to well below zero. Storm after storm dumped more and more snow around the farmhouse. We let Flo inside the farmhouse in January and she didn’t leave until March.

  The very first thing that Flo—a small and slight cat—did when she came into the house was to communicate with the dogs. We had three at the time: Frieda, a Rottweiler-shepherd mix, a hunter, a guard dog, a chaser, even a killer of cats (we were very worried about Flo being inside the house with Frieda); Lenore, a genial Labrador retriever, an old pal of Minnie since they had grown up together; and Red, a workaholic border collie and therapy dog.

  Flo wasted no time in establishing herself. As we stood by nervously, Frieda came marching over to her, ruff up and tail and ears stiff. I moved closer. Frieda had caught and killed many a rabbit, chipmunk, raccoon, and skunk in her day—a few barn cats, too, I recall. She had been abandoned in the Adirondacks for years, and lived in the wild there before she was captured and adopted by Maria. If Flo couldn’t handle Frieda, we would have to find a new home for her, and initially we were not optimistic. Frieda was brimming with prey drive.

  As Frieda loomed over Flo, the cat turned calmly, hissed at the dog, and swatted her on the nose with her paw. Frieda froze, stunned, and then backed away. She never challenged Flo again, and for several months she would not even walk past her. She would go to any length—walking around sofas and the perimeter of the living room—to avoid her.

  A day later, Lenore came bounding over to Flo, her big tail going back and forth. She too received a swat and a hiss, and never bounded at Flo again, although she would come closer than Frieda.

  As for Red, a hiss was enough for him. Border collies don’t need to be told twice. He never went anywhere near Flo. Over time, things became more peaceable. Red and Lenore would lie down close to Flo when she was sitting by the fire, but they did not bother her or approach too closely.

  It was astonishing to me to see this little cat subdue, even terrorize, three large working dogs effortlessly. She quickly became the queen of the farmhouse. She slept where she wished, hogged the space in front of the woodstove, cleared a path when she walked to the kitchen or the litter box.

  Here was another example of effective communication. The hiss was a clear statement to keep away, the claws a reminder and enforcement, her posture and demeanor a signal of confidence and dominance.

  And that is how animals work. They don’t traffic in human narratives. A human being would have assumed that Flo was too small to handle any one of these dogs, that they could have stomped her, run over her, or torn her to bits in a flash. Animals rely on a different kind of logic, based on a different system of communication. Smell, posture, images, demeanor, eye contact—these speak volumes to animals, and we can use the same methods in our own interactions with them.

  After she got the dogs firmly under control, Flo took over my reading chair, a big stuffed chair next to the woodstove. I didn’t want her sitting in my lap or bothering me in the other chairs in the living room—where I ate or talked on the phone or looked at the news on my iPad. She came up to me once when I was reading there—I got uncomfortable, bristled a bit, thinking she would be pestering me all through this long and hard winter.

  I am certain she sensed, or perhaps smelled, my irritation. My body language shifted. I crossed my legs, turned away from her, put a book in my lap.

  From that moment, she has never approached me in any chair but the big stuffed one, and this is our deal: when I am not in the chair, she can sleep in it; when I am in the chair, she can lie in my lap. She didn’t sit on any other piece of furniture, and won’t bother me when I am anywhere else in the house.

  Like many people with complex childhoods, I was put off by cats, by what I thought of as their “slitheriness.” It made me uncomfortable to have a cat rub against my legs or jump up on me unexpectedly.

  Flo never does any of these things. Our understanding is clear; she senses my comfort level and respects it, as I respect her need for human contact, her desire for a warm lap to curl up in.

  We were both changed by this relationship. Flo and I met in a place where we were both comfortable. And we talk all of the time. I have used all of my tools to communicate with Flo. I’ve also studied up, poring through scores of journals and behavioral studies on animals, looking for information on the particular ways that cats communicate. Not surprisingly, they are different than dogs.

  Dogs are pack animals; they travel in groups. Cats are solitary; they move and hunt alone. Dogs are omnivores; they can eat plants and meat. Cats are carnivores; they survive on meat and prey.

  Because they often live and hunt alone, cats make more decisions than dogs, so their minds and instincts often develop more intensely. Because they eat more often than dogs, they also need to make decisions more frequently.

  A cat is generally more comfortable being alone than a dog. Some dogs are more prone to being anxious when they are by themselves, if they are not used to it. It is very difficult to measure the intelligence of an animal, but behaviorists do say that cats communicate much more intuitively and indirectly than dogs. Dogs seem easier with people and respond to direct commands. But cats intuit—they sense who is their friend and who is not. They are less trusting. Dogs approach one another—and people—more directly. They sniff, even lick one another, communicating through eye contact, tail posture, and body language.

  Like dogs and donkeys, cats smell emotions in humans, and look to body language for cues. Flo will watch me to see where I sit before she decides where to go. When she wants to go outside, she doesn’t bark or wag her tail; she goes near the door and circles, sending a psychic signal—I believe she is. I can be sitting around the corner in the living room and I can sense when she is at the door, wanting to go out and hunt.

  I do not assume Flo knows every word I am saying, or even many of them. But I believe we talk to one another. We work out the details of our relationship, telling each other what we need and don’t need, what makes us comfortable or uncomfortable.

  I see Flo very much as a partner, and I have grown to love her in the same way I love my dogs. I now understand the independence that cats feel and project, and why that is so appealing to so many people. I grasp their intelligence and intuitiveness, which often seems superior to that of dogs.

  There is a sense of entitlement about cats that many dogs do n
ot have. Flo takes her role for granted. She does not work for it, demand it, or wag her tail or chase a ball for it. She takes it as her birthright.

  I believe there is a spiritual dimension to talking to animals like Flo. If you see them as piteous or dependent or try to talk to them in words they don’t understand, if you approach them in an atmosphere of anger or frustration, then they almost visibly close up, and turn away.

  Animals are in many ways alien creatures, but there is a point, a contact point where we can break through to them, and they to us, if we are willing to open our eyes, ears, and minds to the wiser understanding, to the more mystical nature of that contact.

  Cats are very different from dogs.

  They are generally more independent and less needy, less demonstrative in their affections, and harder to communicate with directly. They are not pack animals, so they are not as social and are much more difficult to train. People love them for their aloofness, an interesting counterpoint to dogs, whom many people love for their ability and desire to be close to us.

  With cats, there is the sense they are not giving it away, that you have to work for it. But the intense devotion and attachment people have to their pets is the same whether it’s a canine or feline.

  8

  Saving the Animals

  Ariel Fintzi is a legend in Central Park. The homeless men who sleep in the park call him an angel because he gives them food and money. Some of the lost boys of New York, most of them African-American or Latino, come to Central Park from the outer boroughs to talk to Ariel. They pet his horse, Rebecca, solicit his advice about staying in school or off drugs, ask him for a loan.

  He is Mr. Fintzi to them and some will tell you that he has saved their lives.

  But it’s not just the homeless who rely on Ariel. Every morning, Jane, a ballet dancer left a quadriplegic by a nerve disorder, calls Ariel on his cell phone and asks to meet him at the Bethesda Fountain in the center of the park. Ariel, she says, will not accept payment for his time and is always—always—waiting for her when she arrives. She looks up in her wheelchair into the eyes of Rebecca, Ariel’s horse, and she says these visits are what she lives for.