Outside The Box

I don’t like cats. Cats are nasty, petty, self absorbed and murderous. They kill songbirds just for sport and ignore the mice that eat the wires under the hood of my truck. The cat in my lap thinks she’s the queen of the universe. I’m ready to be adored. Nowwww. Nowwww.

I like dogs. Dogs are here to teach us things humans need to know, like unconditional love and how to wake up in a good mood. There’s nothing we need to learn from cats. Humans are already adept at begging and complaining, and most of us know how to poop in a box.

Cats sharpen their claws on your furniture. They leave their undigestibles behind the sofa. They enjoy knocking things over. They’re like goats.

I don’t like goats. Goats are escape artists. I once parked my car next to a fence around some goats, the front bumper just a few inches from the wire. As the sun went down, we saw the goats gathering next to the fence opposite my car. We thought they were just curious.

All night they studied the situation and discussed it amongst themselves using that goat sign language they broadcast with their tails. In the morning we heard a strange metallic rumbling. The goats were reaching through the wire and using my bumper as a step up onto the hood, over the fence, onto the roof of my car, and gone. Every single goat escaped, and we spent half a day catching them all. Goats and cats are cut from the same cloth, and I don’t like them.

I like bears. We have an understanding with our personal bear. I leave the gate open to the chicken pen so she can, on occasion, clean up the leftover chicken feed, which I consider a service to our community that deprives the mice of a meal. More meals means more mice, and I don’t like mice. If I forget to leave the gate open, Ursula will make her own. That is inconvenient, but sometimes friendship involves sacrifice.

I like crows. Crows are highly intelligent. They recognize individuals and vehicles. They are better watchdogs than watchdogs. There is nothing that goes on in the cove that they don’t see and report on. Most people don’t understand crows. Farmers shoot them. One distant neighbor puts them on spikes like Vlad the Impaler, but crows have long memories and a highly refined sense of justice. The grandchildren of those crows will remember the offense and continue to steal sprouts from the grandchildren of that gardener.

For as long as I have lived in this house, the crows have nested and gathered on the ridge above us. I have never injured them, and they have never once removed a sprout of corn from the garden they fly over every day.

Like cats, crows are highly opinionated, but they are not demanding. Cats are never satisfied. Special food for tender digestive systems. Special beds for their posture. I’m ready to be brushed again. Don’t stop. If you pull your hand away, I’m going to hook it with my paw. Let me just bite your knuckle a bit to remind you that if I were bigger, I could eat you.

I don’t like cats so much that we reluctantly just added a third member to the clan. Someone abandoned him or threw him away. He showed up begging on a cold winter night. He was rude to our girls. The pups chased him off. I shot over him with a loud bang. I drenched him with a bucket of water. Still, he came.

One day I noticed there were fewer mice around the barn. That’s when I made the classic mistake. I gave him some food. It was a moment of weakness, I know, but I was tired and he was making that annoying, moaning hungry sound cats make that jars the human nervous system to the point where your only choices are to shoot them or feed them. So I fed him, and he rubbed against my leg like they do.

He’s actually quite the handsome fellow, if you like cats, and his head is in the Encyclopedia of Southern Tradition under “cathead biscuit.” So we call him Biscuit. Biscuit Balzac. And, as you might imagine, whoever threw him away neglected to neuter him first, so Biscuit is due to become a tenor instead of a basso profundo. That’s how we get even with the cats we don’t like.