Time for Cats In Space (an essay in progress)

This week I am reading Stephen W. Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time. On the first page it asks, "What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end?" My immediate response was, "Only in our minds."

Then my mind began playing tricks on me. I began wondering if other animals experience a sense of time passing. I decided that some do, but probably not in the same way as humans do. Dogs and cats, for instance, seem to experience it in a limited way, or perhaps that's just MY limited perception. Perhaps they experience it in an expanded way compared to ours. (Offhand, I would say that: [1] Pets never use an alarm clock to interfere with natural sleep cycles. [2] Nor do pets overcommit; only humans, with our complicated minds, are foolish enough to do that!)

So while pets don't use human-style markers to denote the passage of time (days, months, years), they probably have marker systems of their own, perhaps based on concrete rather than abstract phenomena. (I'm thinking of cats that seem to know roughly when their owners will return home from work, or, even more concretely, those that spray certain locations to mark their territory.)

How about seasons, though? Or growth cycles? Some interval-markers are beneath the level of conscious behavior, as anyone who has ever witnessed an animal shedding its winter coat or outgrown skin can attest. In any case, I wonder how the cat concept of time differs substantially from the dog's, or the Westernized human's. My cat Judy, whom I lived with for over 15 years, would become increasingly fraught the longer her "human" was away on travels, though after a certain point (based on anecdotal evidence from cat-sitters), her sense of anxiety or grief flattened out somewhat, and she seemed to adjust to the presence of the sitter in her environment.

Of course, I don't really know how my cat perceived time, and I'm probably just projecting my human experience onto her feline one. Yet I know that most pets, like most people, eventually adapt to the absence of certain humans and the presence of new ones. Cats in particular seem more put off by the presence of new cats than the absence of humans because the former is tied to their territorialism. They will far more readily claim a new human than cede territory to another cat. And they can certainly make their feeding time known to any available human by encroaching upon said human's aural, visual, and physical turf!

Have you noticed how I can't seem to talk for long about time without invoking space?

I don't "do" regret, yet if there is one incident in my life for which I harbor any regret, it is for the circumstances surrounding my cat Judy's death. I could not keep her because she never adapted successfully to being housed with my partner's cat when we all moved in together in 2001. After a year of constant catfights and bodily function messes, I finally gave up. I had her checked out, then gave her antibiotics orally for two weeks (which was about as much fun as we used to have together with flea-baths). Once she had a clean bill of health, she continued to spray, so I gave her to a catless friend who wanted companionship. Since there was no longer another cat's scent to "spray over," Judy no longer sprayed, but the friend gave her back two weeks later nonetheless, after Judy bit her one night when my friend rolled over in her sleep. ("There's only room in the apartment for one alpha female," she told me, although she was gracious enough to keep Judy while I searched for another replacement home for her.) After an unsuccessful attempt to find her a second home, I finally took Judy to the animal shelter, where they classified her as "unrehomeable." (That's cat-psychologist jargon for "hella mean old bitch who bit the cat-shrink when she tried to remove Judy from the cage.")

I'd asked the shelter to call me if they couldn't place her. I took her in on a Friday evening, and by Tuesday, I was so bugged by my decision and the ensuing silence that I placed a call to inquire about her. It turned out that they'd killed her about 90 minutes before I called.

I learned a few years later that I could have taken her to a vet and paid a fee to hold her in my arms while the vet administered a lethal injection, instead of leaving her to suffer for days in pet-prison where the last person to touch her was someone she was quite understandably hostile toward.

I don't want to sentimentalize my cat too much — she was a cranky old female who was set in her ways and could not adapt gracefully to sharing a small apartment with another cat. Also, she probably had arthritis pain in her lower spine and was fairly ready to be done with her life. My mind knows that regret is pointless — the world moves on, and you can't undo the past. Still, to quote Pascal, the heart has reasons that reason cannot know.

So, if I could turn back time, I would script that ending to be a happier one. I was playing God with my cat's life, yet "God" was working with incomplete information. So reading this introductory page in Hawking's book caused me to reflect on how I had some degree of control over her death, although to Judy, who had no capacity to contemplate her own mortality, much less the nature of time, maybe it was all one day.

What is tougher to bear is the thought that maybe the day ended for her when God walked away, and her sense of time stretched into a bleak and pointless night as her life compressed down to one tiny space, namely a cage at the pound.

But that really is my projection, and a rather absurdly existential one at that.

In any case, having derived that much introspection from Hawking's two opening paragraphs, I am excited to be reading this book, which will doubtless continue to raise many more questions in my mind than it answers.

Comments

[narKy]

I was there that day, this past spring, when my bro gave up on one of his dogs and decided to have him put down.

Dude was a pit bull, and had had that killer instinct triggered by an incident with the neighbour's dog a couple years before. My bro spend a lot of time since the dogfight incident to train Dude to be a good dog, and he did a great job at training Dude, but that pit bull killer drive once triggered is unstoppable, apparently.

That day last spring, Dude went for my bro's other dog without provocation and it was the last straw. If for no other reason than that my bro & his wife have two boys, now at ages 1 & 3. Either of them or both, could so easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time and horrible things could accidentally happen.

My bro does not want to take any chances on any freak accidents.

A week later he took Dude to a vet we know and after a fun weekend of play had him put down, in his arms like you mentioned. Then he went and dug a hole & buried Dude.

I still tear up when I think about the situation. Dude was a cool dog, and my bro did not take the easy way out.

[melody]

R.I.P - Judy the cat

meeow !!