Last week our 16-year-old gray house cat made a decision for us. She’d been getting thinner and stumbling, hardly eating at all. We’d made an appointment at the vet. But the morning before the appointment, she just curled up and died.
We’d got her in 1997 from a friend, who’d named her Princess Joan, in honor of her cousin. Since cats don’t care what you call them, that got shortened to Princess, which seemed silly. Martha came up with The Cat Formerly Known As Princess.
My friend and colleague Hal Walter, who lives on 35 acres in the Wet Mountains, discovered that naming his barn cats was a death sentence in a land of coyotes and rattlesnakes. Thus, his only survivor has remained nameless. But ours was strictly an indoor cat.
Cats live just about everywhere, although a prominent writer in 1914 missed that. Julian Street, writing for Collier’s Weekly, observed that “Cripple Creek is not only above the timber-line, it is also above the cat-line. I mean this literally. Domestic cats cannot live there.”
That would be news to the animal shelter there, where I was told that “we have a big problem with cats, bunches of them. They do quite well here.” At 9,494 feet, Cripple Creek is also below timber-line; so much for trusting a travel writer.
Our Cat Formerly Known As Princess had a clever name, but it was also a mouthful, so somehow she became Lulu. Whatever we called her, she wanted to be the queen, maybe the only pet in the house. Every time we got another pet — another house cat named Magpie in 2003, our dog Bodie in 2005 — Lulu would hiss and scratch and make it unwelcome. Lulu even hissed out the window when she saw cats in the yard.
Cats can be affectionate pets, but they also can be obnoxious housemates, jumping on tables when they’re not occupying your easy chair, chewing upholstery and clawing woodwork. My theory is that you can have cats or you can have mice. Both are annoying, but cats don’t mistake bread and cereal containers for litter boxes.
Their rodent-hunting ability is likely why cats were “domesticated” about 10,000 years ago. The wild ancestors were native to the hot north African desert, which may explain why even modern cats always sleep next to the wood-burning stove.
The ancient Egyptians let them hang around their granaries to reduce the loss to mice and rats. The Egyptians apparently worshiped the cat as well, and our arrogant Lulu seemed to think a return to that old-time religion was in order.
These days, pet cats have come under considerable criticism for killing birds. And there’s also the attack on the whole idea of humans “owning” pets as a form of specism or some other affront to enlightened modern sensibilities.
OK, I’m exploiting another species when I enjoy their antics — flipping light switches, playing the answering machine, sleeping on the computer because it’s warm, reeling under the influence of catnip, chasing spiders.
As for knowing when it’s time for one to go, our main criterion has always been pain: Does the critter appear to be suffering, without reasonable hope of treatment? Or, to be more precise, treatment we can afford. (We’re not people who could spend $5,000 on a pet’s care, although we know people who do.)
Granted, it requires some guesswork and projecting and perhaps anthropomorphism to decide when the time has arrived. But when you acquire a pet, you also acquire certain responsibilities, and this is one of them. I’m grateful that the cat took the decision out of my hands.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
