Beautifuls...the Name I Call My Cats

 

Brewsky and Sage

"What greater gift than the love of a cat." --Dickens

Peggy and I were lifelong dog lovers until we made a spur of the moment decision to get a cat (Brewsky) the day after our schnauzer died. That was seven years ago, and I soon started amassing a small library of books about cats and spending a lot of time thinking about the nature of cats. We now have four of them, and if we had any confidence that they would welcome a dog, we would get one of those as well, but it's their home too, and we're all but positive that they would hate sharing it with a dog. What follows are some observations and reflections about the nature of catness.

The love of a dog is a given. The love of a cat is a reward. The tragedy of dogs is that they have no place within themselves to call their own. Kick a dog, and he will still love you. Neglect to feed her, and she will still love you. Leave him tied to a stake on a sleety night, and he will still lick your hand in the morning. Dogs resolutely deny the wickedness of their humans, and this makes the life of an abused dog tragic beyond measure. By contrast, a cat reserves a part of herself for her alone, and will loathe you and avoid you if you deserve it. 

Our most sensitive cat, Ollie, can't compete for even his most treasured treat, and will quickly upchuck his entire meal if the least thing upsets him (Scully likes to eat the vomit). When I think of the millions of cats like Ollie who are abused, neglected, abandoned, or tormented by scientists, it's obvious that the larger part of my species are less deserving of good than are those animals that we regard as our inferiors. 

While dogs are respected for their willingness to die for their masters, cats are dismissed as "only in it for themselves," but while my friend, Sheryl, was napping, a burglar broke into her home, and was it her dog, Eliot, who alerted her to the danger? Noooo. Elliot hid under the sofa while Sheryl's cat yowled and stomped on her chest.

Ignorant people think that all cats are the same. Scully is the first to greet me when I've been out. Sage is our only cat who likes to ride on people's shoulders, and he and Scully will sometimes watch nature documentaries from start to finish. If I hear galloping feet when I crawl into bed for a nap, I know that Ollie is coming to join me. He is also the first on the scene if anyone is in distress, his compassion being so great that if he were human, I'm quite sure he would be a vegan.

Even so, our cats share some traits. For instance, if one of them is on a chair, and I move the chair, he or she will go along for the ride, something that I've never seen a dog do. Likewise, if I'm walking through the house, and a cat is in my path, the cat won't move when I will step over him or her. I've never tried this with a dog but what the dog would leap to his feet in a panic, threatening to wreck both of us.     

Brewsky, Ollie, Scully

I had imagined that, because cats are less gregarious than dogs, they would be less forgiving, so when we got Brewsky, I spent a couple of weeks worrying that the least mistake on my part would destroy our relationship. I went from that to chasing him through the house while cursing and waving my arms when he had been bad, which was much of the time. I had to conclude that he wasn't taking me as seriously as I hoped when he stared interrupting our chases by rolling onto his back so I could rub his belly. The fact is that if I step on the tail of a dog or a cat, he will look to me for assurance that I didn't do it on purpose, and then life will go on as normal. Likewise, if I scold a member of either species, she only asks that I quickly get over my anger.

The fact that cats aren't pack animals doesn't mean that they deserve their reputation as unloving. I rarely see one of my cats sleeping alone, and all of them want to be petted more than I want to pet them. As I write this, I have to get up every few minutes to shoo Scully away from Peggy's door because Peggy is asleep, and Scully is impatient for her to get up. Once she and Peggy have greeted one another, Scully won't ask for further attention, but it's vital to her that a greeting occur.

One trait that is shared by dogs and cats is their extreme alertness to their humans' movements. Neither species ever sleeps so soundly but what they know when I unwrap the cheese.

Cats are exceedingly tolerant, and so it is that at least one behavior which can lead to bloodshed among dogs goes practically unnoticed among cats. I refer to the fact that if one cat steals another cat's food, the victim will stand aside and watch the aggressor eat. This is true even if the victim is bigger and stronger, and even if the food is practically stolen out of his mouth while he's picking it up to eat it. I know from watching nature shows that lions exhibit no such tolerance, but then lions are pack animals.

From the many books I've read about cats, one seemingly unremarkable sentence stands out: "Cats are small predators," the point being that their thin bones make them susceptible to injury and therefore incapable of the rough play I enjoyed with dogs. The speed, strength, and agility of cats had blinded me to their delicacy.

I discovered another trait of cats on my own. Namely that they're sprinters, not endurance runners, so even a mediocre human can run down a fleeing cat if the cat has no place to hide.

Although our cats are content with living indoors, their teeth still chatter when there's a bird at the feeder.

Ollie's chair

Until they reach old age, dogs love to play. While I expected grown cats to play less than kittens, I had no idea of the extent to which adult cats would continue to change in this and other ways, or how abrupt and permanent the changes would be. For years, Ollie spent hours a day sitting on his hind legs in my office chair, his front legs resting on the chair's left arm. This behavior so represented his Ollieness to me that I couldn't imagine that he would suddenly and irrevocably stop doing it, but he did. Such changes are like little deaths.

Our cats clean our dishes, something that we never allowed our dogs to do. This isn't because we love our cats more, but because little dry tongues gross us out less than big wet ones. Brewsky tries to eat Peggy's food right from her plate, so she'll push him away, and a few moments later, he'll start slowly reaching out his big tabby paw in the hope that she won't notice. Our other cats are content to wait.

Every time I think that, finally, I'm starting to understand cats, we'll get another cat and I'll be made humble again. For instance, I had imagined that cats were finicky eaters until we got Sage, and I couldn't find a single food that we like that he doesn't.

Nowhere is the fabled curiosity of cats more evident than when their humans are doing something unexpected. Last week, I was in the laundry room drying the interior of a freshly washed bird feeder with Peggy's hair dryer when I chanced to look down and see Sage and Ollie looking up at me in wide-eyed wonder. "What in the HELL do you think you're doing?!" they demanded. 

The winter we got Brewsky, he took enormous interest in some shelving I was painting in the laundry room, so I had to choose between letting him join me at the risk of tracking paint all over the place, or locking him out of the room and listening to him cry at the door. I chose the former, it being difficult for me to say no to my cats unless the decision is a no-brainer. I'm forever reminding myself that, while I have all the power in the relationship, love and respect demand that I use it sparingly.

Everyone knows that cats spend a lot of time bathing (30% of their waking hours), but I hadn't realized that they are enthusiastic bathers of one another. I often find up to three of them in a circle, each one bathing another, and nothing confirms the group's acceptance of a new cat like bathing him or her. When we got our second cat, Ollie, Brewsky, who had lived alone for two years, immediately gave him a bath. It was one of my life's high points.

Please consider supporting my friend Jody's cat charity: https://catwomanflix.blogspot.com/

The State of Medical Care in America

The following is from a letter that I just wrote to a British friend.

It is my understanding that many in your country want to replace your public healthcare system with a private one. I will preface my comments by saying that few Americans can even afford medical care unless they have insurance, yet they can't afford insurance unless they are able to get it through their employer because the cost of anything beyond "catastrophic coverage" can easily exceed $20,000 a year. It doesn't help matters that insurance companies do everything possible to discriminate against those who are deemed likely to actually need medical care. 

Under Obama, such discrimination was banned, but Trump has returned to doing everything possible to allow companies to price "poor risks" out of the market or even to refuse coverage altogether. Those who support such discrimination tend to be healthy young Republicans who argue that they shouldn't have to pay more because other people enjoy less than optimal health (the unstated motto of the Republican Party is, "Me first and screw you"). Peggy and I had employer-sponsored insurance until we turned 65 and could go on the government plan called Medicare. It is the best insurance we've had had, but even so, we have to supplement it with private insurance, and insurance companies do their best to fool people into thinking they're getting more than they actually are.

Here are three examples that people in your country might bear in mind in regard to the imagined success of privatized healthcare. All three of these examples were in the news here last week.

(1) Nearly all insurance plans have "in network providers," i.e. medical providers who have agreed to accept a lower level of reimbursement in return for insurers throwing business their way. If, for whatever reason, a person elects to see an "out of network" provider, his or her insurance company will pay a much smaller percentage of the bill.

Because the Republicans are doing their utmost to deregulate and privatize anything and everything, more and more of America's ambulance services are going from being owned and run by municipalities and county governments to being owned and run by private companies. This means that if you have an emergency and have the bad luck to be taken to the hospital in an out of network ambulance, you can, and almost surely will, end up many thousands of dollars in debt because ambulances are damned expensive, and god help you if you need to be taken on a second ambulance ride from, for example, a small community hospital to a remote big city hospital; and double god help you if your condition is so dire that you need to be transported in an air ambulance.

(2) Insurance companies are moving in the direction of refusing to pay any of your ambulance and emergency room expenses if they (the insurance company) decide that you didn't really need to go the emergency room. One problem with this is that it relies upon the honesty of dishonest insurers. Another is that patients are often in no position to know whether or not that they can get by with either waiting to see a doctor during regular office hours, or, in the case of the larger urban areas, going to an "urgent care center," which is a clinic that provides speedy medical care to people who, although their condition doesn't appear to be life threatening, are in too much distress to wait until regular office hours. Obviously, there will be people who die because of this policy, but as every American with an IQ above 60 knows, the priority of insurance companies isn't with getting people the care they need but with maximizing profit. I suspect that the same is true of private anything.

(3) America's drug manufacturers have shown themselves especially eager to buy up the exclusive rights to manufacture drugs that are the only approved treatments for life threatening illnesses, and then jacking up the prices of those drugs by hundreds or thousands of percent, a practice that is entirely legal in the U.S., and that insurance companies refuse to pay for. The most infamous of these drug company profiteers was a man named Martin Shkreli who, literally overnight, raised the price of the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill (a 5,000% increase). Even so, Shkreli doesn't stand out for what he did, but for not bothering to offer the usual bullshit lie for why he did it, even claiming from behind his perpetual smirk that he deserved appreciation for not raising the price of Daraprim even more. After all, he said, it would have been legal. Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison last week, but it wasn't for the deaths he caused, but for fraud in a non-related case. He cried in self-pity in the courtroom, self-pity being the only pity of which he is capable.

America has the highest cost of medical care of anyplace on earth with 25% of the money going to insurance companies. The cost of healthcare in America increases yearly at a rate that is far beyond what almost anyone can afford, yet there is no end in sight because well-funded lobbies--like Big Oil, Big Pharma, the National Rifle Association, and the insurance lobby--owns Congress. Despite what it spends, America doesn't even have a high standard of medical care compared to other first world nations. 

I'll throw in a final example that didn't hit the national news but very much hit the news in our household.

(4) Peggy spent hours last week fighting over the costs of her drugs while in the hospital for back surgery. Her hospital bill alone--the surgeon and anesthesiologist will bill separately--for the twenty hour stay was $17,000). When it comes to their charges and business practices, hospitals appear to say, "If you can't trust us, the people who work to keep you alive, who can you trust?" but the fact is that "the people who work to keep you alive" are the last people you can trust because they: (a) refuse to give estimates, although charges for the same services differ dramatically from hospital to hospital; (b) are notorious for charges that are excessive and downright fanciful; (c) after their services are rendered, they refuse to send out itemized statements. In Peggy's case, her phone call was transferred from one office to another before she finally learned that she was being charged for at least one drug and one medical device that was neither ordered nor received. As is typical, she is unable to get the mistake corrected simply because it is not in the hospital's financial interest to correct it, this at a Catholic hospital that boasts of its "Christian values." 

The older I get, the more I become convinced that unregulated capitalism (which is what America's Republican Party assures us is the remedy for all of our ills) brings out the worst in people, and nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to medical care. It speaks to the immorality of our system when a mugger with a gun receives a death sentence for murdering someone for $20, while a white collar thug like Martin Shkreli openly laughs about raising the cost of an essential drug to the point that only the rich can afford life.

It seems to me that people who voted for Trump fell into three main categories: the super rich who believed he would make them richer, which he has; fascists who believed he would inspire hatred and division, which he has; and the naive poor who believed that he was "the friend of the little man," which he most certainly is not. The people in the first two categories knew what they were getting; the people in the final category had no idea, and it is they who are being increasingly left to suffer and die as the government-funded medical care and economic assistance that they disproportionately rely upon is being slashed. Sadly, the Republican Party enjoys its greatest popularity among the very people whom its policies hurt the most, but how it does this will have to wait until another post.

My Personal History with Carrying Firearms; Thoughts on Arming Teachers

The political response to school shootings is always the same.

1) Republicans say, "Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families."

2) Democrats call for "stricter measures to keep guns out of the wrong hands."

3) Republicans say, "This is not the time to talk about gun control. This is the time to remember the victims."

4) Democrats continue to call for "common sense gun control."

5) Republicans say, "The only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

End of debate until the next time, and the next time, and the next time...


I used to have a concealed carry permit, not because I felt the need to carry a gun, but because I knew someone who did and thought it would be fun. I had been around guns all my life, and had kept one in my car as a teenager, but it never occurred to me to regularly carry one on my person until I talked with that friend. After completing a minimal permit training course, I started out by carrying a .357 magnum that I kept in a special belly pack that was designed for quick access. When the gun's size and weight became burdensome, I switched to a .38 special. When it too became unpleasant to carry, I gave up carrying a gun. The fun part about carrying a concealed weapon was that it was my secret, and that it made me feel powerful. The not fun part was the gun's weight, and the fact that carrying it focused my thoughts upon the possibility of violence, which made my world seem more dangerous than it really was.

I'm cautious and orderly to the point that I lack spontaneity, yet during the short time that I carried a gun, I unknowingly let a .22 caliber bullet roll into the burner on my kitchen stove. When I lit the stove, the bullet exploded and hit Peggy in the stomach, but no damage was done (a bullet that explodes in a stove doesn't have the force of a bullet that comes out of a gun because the slug goes one way and the cartridge casing the other), the incident alerted me to the fact that even careful people have accidents. A few weeks later, I took my gun to a dinner party, took off my belly pack, and didn't even know I had left it there until the people called me at home. When they asked why I had taken a gun to their party, I didn't know what to say, so I said that if I had left it at home--or in my car--someone might have stolen it. As I look back upon the incident, I realize that carrying a gun was like having a new toy, and that I was experimenting with whether I wanted to do it full-time. My conclusion was that walking around with a gun is a lethal version of walking around with a fire extinguisher in that while it might come in handy, it's probably not worth the risk and aggravation.

I share these stories to show that guns are inherently dangerous (the nearby Portland, Oregon, police chief accidentally shot a friend as did Vice-President Dick Cheney). President Trump echoed the NRA recently by proposing that "qualified teachers" carry guns to school. I can think of so many obvious objections to his proposal that I regard it as being like much of what Trump says, i.e. blindingly stupid. For instance: 

(1) There is NO evidence to suggest that armed teachers could protect children while there IS evidence to suggest that they couldn't.* (2) Trump gave no clue as to whom would pay for the extensive and ongoing training that would be required to make teachers safe and proficient with firearms, and no evidence to indicate that teachers would have the time and inclination to take such training. (3) A school shooter could arm himself by assaulting a teacher and taking his or her gun. (4) If cops are capable of snapping and murdering people due to job stress, teachers probably are too. (5) A gun-toting teacher might find it harder to instill in students the value of peaceable solutions than would other teachers. (6) Teaching is enough work without the added responsibility of being perpetually prepared to shoot one's students. (7) Arming teachers would imbue in children the belief that they are always and everywhere in danger. (8) Just as I accidentally left a gun at someone's house, a teacher might accidentally leave a gun in a classroom or bathroom. (9) Guns can go off accidentally. (10) When we take extreme measures to feel safe, we increase our belief that we are unsafe. (11) There is no evidence to suggest that giving more guns to more people would make us safer, while the scarcity of gun deaths in countries with few guns would seem to prove otherwise. (12) A society in which people need to carry guns to protect themselves and others is by definition a society that has failed to insure the safety of its citizens, and this implies that the work we must do is societal rather than individual. 

I'll just add one more thing. The NRA insists that being able to own and carry guns is both a human right and a Constitutional right under the Second Amendment. The former is not evident to anyone outside the NRA, but neither is the latter. The Second Amendment reads as follows: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." How the NRA makes the leap from that to AR15s is a mystery to me, but if AR15s are legally allowable, then why not .50 cal machine guns or even grenade launchers? I don't think this is what the founding fathers had in mind, yet if the Constitution really does justify something that, instead of promoting the common good, harms the public good, then it's time to change the Constitution because the way the NRA would have us live is insane.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=181&v=8QjZY3WiO9s