I Love My Cats. Do They Love Me?

Chili, the angel.

Our cat Chili is an angel. All she requires is regular food and water, a little daily string chasing, a warm lap to curl up in every time she gets a chance, and a hefty amount of independence.

Lemmon, on the other hand, is a whiny pest. She follows us around, mewling and trilling and stretching up to try to turn the doorknobs of doors she wants us to open. When I open the pantry for any reason, she runs across the house hoping to be fed. She stations herself in the path where she knows I will walk next, desperate even for the attention of being kicked accidentally. I can never feed her enough food or play with her for a long enough period of time to satisfy her insatiable desires.

Lemmon, in a calm moment.

Or so it used to be. Although I love her desperately even at her whiniest, I was concerned that she wasn’t behaving in a healthy way. I did quite a bit of reading online about needy and demanding cats and finally happened upon an article stating that focused attention for a few minutes a day could turn these behaviors around. The author wrote of the importance of holding and petting a needy/whiny cat like Lemmon, looking in her eyes, and telling her how much I love her, repeating her name over and over again. Believe it or not, it works! At first it was hard for her to get used to being held like a baby, and she seemed to feel a bit strange about all the eye contact (as cats do). But now she settles right in and blinks at me happily as I repeat her name and coo at her. Sometimes she reaches her paws up towards my face, and a couple of times she has even bitten or licked me softly on my nose and cheeks. Five or ten minutes of this special time calms her down for a long time; a couple of sessions usually last the whole day.

Recently my husband and I watched The Lion in Your Living Room, a Netflix documentary about cats and how, even after millennia of domestication, they retain their wild behaviors. It was fascinating. But the documentary didn’t cover the emotional lives of cats, didn’t seek to explain moments like my special times with Lemmon. Is her growing calmness in my arms simply a reliving of her days as a kitten, turning instinctively to her mother for food and warmth and security? Or do we share an emotional relationship that exists beyond instinct?

Scholars in Animal Studies are currently studying this question: do animals experience emotions and, if so, what is the nature of those emotions? The field bifurcates: domesticated animals whose lives are wrapped up with those of humans may or may not have an emotional life different from that of free-ranging animals. The problem is that scientists cannot ask animals to explain their emotions, so they must infer them from their behaviors. (Of course, just because humans can explain their emotions doesn’t mean we fully understand those either!) Moments of play, courtship, and sharing of food suggest that animals are experiencing such emotion as joy, love, and care, respectively. The behaviors of hanging onto a dead relative or mate with a dejected air - which has been documented in many species of mammals and birds - suggest grief. The next question is how long these “emotions” last. Can animals be said to have real emotions if they are fleeting, unlike humans, who can remember and dwell on emotions such as grief for years?

There are also promising directions in research involving brain imaging, showing what areas of the brain light up when animals see other animals or humans or food or toys. And physical measurements can be taken: heart rate, eye movements, and so on. But then there is the problem of interpretation, as in studies of the human brain: explaining what is happening is much easier than figuring out why.

I think about these questions as I hold my little Lemmon. I’m glad we’re trying to answer them even though I’m not convinced we’ll ever really know the nature of animal emotions. Some scholars argue quite convincingly that humans are simply projecting our own emotions onto those animal behaviors. But it’s amazing enough to me to me that two such very different creatures as Lemmon and I can snuggle, let everything else go, look each other in the eye, and simply feel good in each other’s company. Isn’t that already pretty remarkable? And it sure feels like love to me.

Pacing Oneself

I’ve been noticing lately that the pace of nature is very slow. I started to understand this in the past few years by watching one of our cats, Lemmon, hunt mice in our house. When she detects a mouse, say, behind the stove or refrigerator, she will sit in that part of the kitchen for hours and even days at a time, waiting for it to move. She knows the mouse will come out eventually, and she’s in no hurry.

A few days ago a toad moved into the rotting old stump near my flower garden. There’s enough erosion underneath to provide room for a toad to sit in the cool mud, a happy spot that benefits from water trickling down from the bird bath that sits on top of the stump. And there’s tall grass around the stump to make for good bug and slug-hunting territory. So the toad seemed happy to be there, and I was happy to watch it for hours at a time, fascinated. One morning I sat there reading for three hours, and the toad moved one inch in all that time. Like Lemmon, it was waiting patiently for bugs and slugs to come its way.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about reproduction and loss in nature, and that speaks to another kind of slow pace in terms of the endurance and rise and fall of population sizes. This year I’m fascinated in particular by the killdeer. Our resident killdeer pair have their second nest of the season in the garden right now. The first nest, as is typical, produced four chicks. One of the chicks survived the dangers of our neighborhood and is now as big as the parents, and we await the hatching of the next four eggs. A 25% yield is pretty darn good, but knowing that 90% of baby birds don’t survive their first year makes me realize that the little chick isn’t safe yet. It’s also likely that only one or none of this next brood will survive after hatching.

In other words, successful breeding is a slow business. Over the course of their lives, these two killdeer may produce anywhere between eight to eighty eggs, and for population maintenance we can really only hope that two will survive and reproduce. That means six to seventy-eight eggs and chicks may be lost. Similarly, I saw a mallard mama in our neighborhood start spring with nine little ducklings in tow. By the end of a two-week period, they were all gone, probably because of a combination of the red fox I’ve seen in the area, the barn cats at my neighbor’s horse farm, and the enormous snapping turtles in the creek where they swam. Now she’s on her second nest, on the edge of a neighbor’s house. Yesterday he came over to tell us that rat snakes had gotten into the nest and eaten all but three of the eggs. Such a sad loss of nine-plus lives so far, with little chance that one of the remaining three chicks, if hatched, will survive and grow to adulthood. But mallards are one of the most successful species in the world in terms of expanding their range and increasing their population, so obviously Mother Nature knows what she’s doing in the end.

So the lesson learned is that nature moves slowly, producing lots and lots of young over time so that a tiny minority will survive to reproduce. But, in the meantime, that “waste” goes to feed lots of other animals so that their young will survive to reproduce as well.

All of that is hard to grasp from my human perspective, especially given that I come from a society that values speed, efficiency, and immediate gratification. The hours I spend watching wildlife are painfully slow and bearable only if I’m reading or making to-do lists or something else so that I won’t be “wasting” my time. I don’t understand why Lemmon even bothers to hunt mice, knowing that there will be a bowl of food set down in front of her three times a day by busy, efficient me. But there are age-old lessons in the slowness of nature that we should heed.

First, slow, careful work yields a lot. One day I noticed a growing pile of teeny wood shavings at the bottom of that old stump. Finally I looked for the source and realized there are ants inside, digging out passageways; each ant works hard to dig out the wood and bring the shaving to a crack in the stump to dump it out. It’s amazing how the pile has grown in a few short days! Likewise, tons of research on writing shows that a little bit of writing every day produces many times more pages over the course of the year than a fast and furious spurt of occasional writing. The tortoise and the hare principal applies in nature and in our lives, otherwise Aesop wouldn’t have bothered writing a fable about it.

Another lesson is the importance of patience. Lemmon and the toad eventually get what they want (although we always take the mouse away from poor Lemmon and release it in the field across the street), and they do so by waiting patiently, saving themselves a great deal of exertion. Needless to say, developing that kind of patience is a tough one for all of us. But how many self-help books advocate patience and endurance, setting and working toward long-term, important goals, rather than chasing after short-term goals, urgent matters, and immediate gratification? We know that kind of patience is better for our emotional, mental, and physical health.

And there are other lessons, perhaps less satisfying, about the inevitability of death and loss and grief, but also about moving on, laying the next nest, hatching the next brood, trying again, optimistic that all of those efforts will produce much over the long haul.