Column: Fur Or Feather, We Belong Together
FollowI have cats. I haven't always had cats—in a previous life, I was a dog person, with one regular canine friend waiting for me at home. But even before those dogs, I've had all sorts of animals—a string of short-lived goldfish (RIP Thingummy and Lettuce), a clipped winged parakeet who whistled (a gift from my father's driver who was leaving town), a baby squirrel briefly, rabbits (one stolen by a cat, one made a sacrifice on the altar of a friendship that lasts to this day, thirty years later), and always dogs, dogs, dogs.
There was Puppy who lived too shortly to ever get a proper name, our only purebreed pet, Bobo, named for Boris Becker, who went on to stay at my grandfather's farm after we moved from a spacious house in Kerala to a pokey Delhi flat, Doogie (from Doogie Howser MD, these are 1990s names) who was never really fully domesticated and finally, my last dog, Cookie, a powder puff spaniel-mongrel mix with a nasty temper and a devotion for my mum.
I've never not had a pet, and I've never understood people who don't like animals. I mean, sure, you don't have to touch them, but to proclaim a dislike? Seems a bit intense. I'll not even go into all the recent cases of random, terrible cruelty against animals, even though those people are beyond redemption. But I used the Animal Lover radar to measure the men I dated. If someone said they didn't care for the animal kingdom (which seems a very species-ist argument, you don't like any species that isn't your own? Weird!) they were automatically out.
As the years went by, and I got my first pet on my own as a grown up (a cat called TC who lived with me for eight years before he went off over the rainbow bridge), I used poor old TC as a way to guage whether the man I was currently with was going to be a keeper or a leaver. If he engaged with my cat, if he showed an interest in both of us, not just me, because we were a package deal, he got to stay. If he didn't seem to have any interest, or just said, “I really don't get cats” out he went.
Side note: unlike dogs, cats seem to stir up a whole new level of antipathy. Ranging from the “ugh, cats” to “I don't like their eyes” to the questioning: “but aren't they, like, really sly?”
The men who proclaimed: “cats don't love anyone” were the same men who would also make large blanket statements about women. The men who said, “Ugh, how can you have a cat?” would be the ones who might possibly also be racist. The men who shrank when TC came out to say hello would be the unadventurous ones, never ready to try anything new. And so, we may have indulged briefly in flirtations, but they never lasted beyond a month at the most.
This radar didn't always work though. My Worst Relationship Ever (we all have one) lasted three very long years and he was just crazy about cats. TC just about tolerated him though, maybe that should have been a sign.
Read more by the author: What's the magic word?
Now, I'm not saying this from my perch above as crazy cat lady. It can be summed up very simply: if a person says they don't like animals (or even one particular kind of animal), there's a good chance they might lack compassion, or imagination. Because it needs imagination to have a fellow feeling with other beings that inhabit the earth and it needs imagination to connect with the person in front of you, who is telling you about her pet.
As a test, it works every time.
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, most recently a YA novel about divorce called Split and a collection of short stories about love called Before, And Then After. The views expressed here are her own.
