Cat-egorically Family
Early in the dreary Connecticut February of 1997, I brought my elderly tabby cat named Spy to his veterinarian for euthanasia. The word "inconsolable" barely approximates how I felt that day. The next morning I pulled myself together just enough to teach my classes. Seeing my red, puffy eyes, one of the administrative assistants in the departmental office asked what was wrong. I broke down in tears as I explained, and she nodded in sympathy and told me how sad she had felt the last time she had had to put a cat to sleep. "They get to be just like family," she said. "No," I thought to myself. "Not like family. He was family."
Five years and some months later, I have just completed the manuscript for a book that takes this realization seriously. The presence of a companion animal can make a single person or a couple into a familial social arrangement. Animals have a profound effect on household rhythms. Moreover, animals do things for us that families do when they are at their best. They help us feel needed. They give us a sense of playfulness. They challenge our interactional abilities. They share our emotions. There is ample evidence that animals are good for people in all sorts of ways. Animals contribute to our histories so much that one woman I interviewed for the book suggested that instead of measuring dogs' lives by human time, we should measure our own lives by the animals who have populated them!
I am and always have been deeply, unabashedly fond of animals. By "normal" standards, my house is a hectic menagerie. At present my husband and I live with two dogs and four cats. Some nights the number of cats on our bed makes it almost impossible to move. For much of my adult life, my alarm clock has been neither bell nor buzzer, but a paw on my cheek. In addition to our four "permanent" cats, we house an endless string of foster cats who come to us through the humane society where I volunteer. A spare bathroom serves as a feline ICU and sick ward. The foster cats stay with us for weeks or even months while they recover from surgery, injuries, or neglect. When they are healthy, they go back to the shelter and eventually to new homes. All six animal members of our family are with us now because they had become inconvenient in some way for someone else; they live with us because they had no place else to go.
In addition to being an animal lover, I am also a sociologist. This means that my work and my life are often intellectually at odds. For sociology, the things that matter are the things that humans do. Our classic texts tell us that animals lack culture, language, and a host of other things that would make them sociologically relevant. George Herbert Mead claimed that because animals lack the capacity to use "significant symbols," or language, they do not have meaningful social lives. Animals' behavior was, for Mead, simply stimulus and response. Any "mindedness" or emotion that we might ascribe to animals is sentimental anthropomorphizing. Oddly enough, Mead thought this despite having had a bulldog who accompanied him everywhere.
My experience with animals tells me that the social world is not exclusively a human one. Some of my most meaningful relationships have been with animals. Many sociologists (and others) would dismiss this as anthropomorphizing or chalk it up to misanthropy, but I disagree. Here, I present my view in the form known as a "layered account" (Ronai 1992, 1996). I weave together reflections of my life with Spy, scholarly (even sociological) interpretations of that life, findings from studies of human-animal relationships, and a critique of sociology. My goal is to open up several perspectives and to allow readers to participate in the construction of the meaning of this piece.
Spy lived with me in three different states and far more states of mind. Although other cats shared my household at the time, and I loved them dearly, Spy was special. He had kept watch over me through a divorce and countless emotional highs and lows. He had napped with me through two bouts of pneumonia, an appendectomy, and numerous other afflictions of body and soul. I returned the favor when he developed diabetes and I learned to give him insulin shots instead of having him euthanized. I arose every morning at six to give him a measured amount of food. As he devoured his breakfast, I drew up the insulin and injected it into the scruff of his neck. I fed him dinner in another 12 hours, and his schedule structured my days until, while browsing in a pet store, I found an automatic cat feeder. This marvelous invention had a spring-loaded lid run by a battery-operated timer. I winced at the forty-dollar price tag, but it helped me fit Spy's needs into my life.
My friends were amused and some were downright dismissive; after all, he was only a cat. However, anyone who got to know Spy understood why I went to the trouble. Spy charmed everyone he met. Even people who were not fond of cats found themselves liking Spy. His white "bib" and boots gave him a formal look, and his green eyes against his brown tabby coat were striking. But it was not so much his looks; although I thought he was handsome, in truth, he was rather flabby and had one squinty eye that watered chronically. He was missing a toe on one foot. His fangs—it seems unjust to call cats' teeth "canines"—were longer than normal, making him slightly vampirish. His looks alone could not charm people. It was something else. Spy had presence. He had a dignity about him. One veterinary technician told me that she wished Spy were human so she could date him. Meeting him made anyone appreciate why I gave him his six a.m. insulin shots without reservation.
The source of this feeling was Spy's sense of self. Skeptics will scoff, but my research has documented ample evidence of animal selfhood. As Arluke and Sanders (1996, 42) point out, the idea that animals have no sense of self comes "more from anthropocentric ideology than from systematically derived data or thoughtful examination of . . . personal experiences . . . with non-human animals." In studying people who planned to adopt animals, I found that if they had simply projected onto animals the qualities they wanted them to have, then any animal would make a good companion. It would make the adoption process as easy as ordering a pizza. You could simply ask for, say, a gray female cat and take the one you get. Even if you were able to meet the animals, making a match would be a matter of selecting a cat or dog whose appearance or behavior you liked. However, I found that quite often the cat or dog who looks "right" is all wrong for a particular person. In observing people as they met, adopted, and surrendered animals, I learned the importance of feeling a "connection," to use the word that people used themselves. Appearance and behavior mattered, to be sure, but not as much as having a "connection" with an animal. The term suggests that there must be something with which to connect, and this is the animal's sense of self. Animals have a core self that becomes present to us through interaction with them. Other researchers have found core selfhood in infants; it does not require the use of language. Finding the "right" animal is a matter of finding one whose core self confirms our own sense of self. When the interaction develops into a relationship, additional dimensions of animal selfhood become available as the animal's intersubjective capacities become apparent. Relationships present opportunities for humans and animals to share intentions and feelings. We not only share them in an "I know what you know (or feel)" way, but also in a more complex " I know that you know that I know what you know" manner.
Spy got his name from the way he peered in on my then-husband and me before deciding that he wanted to live with us. We called him "The Spy Cat" at first, in keeping with our practice of naming neighborhood animals after physical or temperamental traits; "Grey Cat" and "Good Old Dog" come to mind immediately. The Spy Cat quickly became "Spy."
The practice of naming an animal suggests both the presence of animals' selves and the cultural acknowledgement of their individuality. In her study of researchers' conduct toward laboratory animals, Phillips (1994, 121) argues that "in giving an animal a name and using that name to talk to and about the creature, we interactively construct a narrative about an individual with unique characteristics, situated in a particular historical setting, and we endow that narrative with a coherent meaning." Scientists do not name lab animals because they see them as parts, rather than whole coherent beings. Lab animals are sources of cells or tissue, or "containers" for responses and reactions. Proper names, Phillips (1994, 123) writes, "are linked to the social emergence of personality, which engenders a matrix of ideas and behaviors unique to one individual." We name animals that we see as individuals, and the practice of leaving research animals nameless calls attention to the need to erase their individuality.
Spy watched us for weeks before he let us touch him or invite him inside. During the day, he perched on a wrought iron railing at our front door and leaned over to peer in the window to the left of the door. If either of us looked back, off he ran. At night he often sat at the front stoop. Because we were in Florida, we often had the door open, and Spy could observe us through the screen door. He seemed to appear whenever we listened to classical music. He also liked to watch us as we watched TV at night. We learned to ignore him so that we would not scare him off. Before long, he began to appear at the back door when we were fixing breakfast. We offered him milk, I am sorry to say, in that cow's milk is not good for cats. Then we offered him food, and his appearances became more regular. Before long, he ventured into the kitchen for his breakfast. Then he would run off, preserving the mystery about him.
The aura of mystery surrounding cats originated in ancient Egypt, where cats were first domesticated from the North African wild cat, Felis sylvestris libyca. However, "domestication" seems too mild a word in that it involved "deification" as well. In any case, both processes apparently began about 5,000 years BCE, with the emergence of large agrarian societies. The Egyptians valued cats because cats hunted the rodents that threatened stores of grain, the basis for Egypt's economy. Cats ultimately attained the status of the deity named "Bast," the goddess of fertility and motherhood. In Egypt, laws protected cats, temples honored them, and art paid tribute to them. Egyptian laws prohibited exporting cats, but they were smuggled through Greece into Europe around the sixth century BCE. Archaeological evidence reveals the presence of domestic cats in Britain from the middle of the fourth century and throughout Europe by the tenth century. Cats did not arrive in North America until much later, when they accompanied White, European settlers.
One thing about Spy was easy to decipher: he was not well cared for. His coat was coarse, brittle, and bare in spots. His skin was flaky, and he was broken out in raw welts that made me itch just to look at them. He was thin to the point of being bony. He was always scratching himself. His head was the only place where the fur was still in good shape, and he loved to have his chin and ears rubbed. He had a distinct dark "M" on his forehead, as many tabbies do, and when I traced it with my finger, he would lower his head to the ground and turn over in a somersault. He loved to be spoken to, and his body rippled with pleasure when I said he was handsome. He craved simple human kindness. If anyone "owned" him, he or she did so only in the remotest sense of the word.
This notion of owning a cat raises a point about the importance of keeping cats indoors in North America. Many people bristle at the very suggestion of keeping their cats indoors, but there are good reasons to do so. North American birds and small animals did not evolve alongside cats, so they did not develop defenses against them. To native wildlife, the cat is an exotic predator. Cats who go outdoors have a tremendous advantage in hunting. Well-intentioned humans who put bells on their cats thinking that the sound will warn birds are mistaken. Birds have no reason to associate the sound of a bell with impending attack. People who think that well-fed cats will not hunt are also mistaken.
Hunger and the drive to hunt originate in different areas of the cat's brain. A cat who is not hungry will continue to hunt. Cats are responsible for declines in numerous bird populations, especially hummingbirds, who are particularly vulnerable because they must hover to feed. In an article in Nature, Crooks and Soulé (1999) studied the activities of "indoor/outdoor" cats in a residential area in San Diego. Each cat killed 15 birds annually, along with nearly double that number of small rodents and lizards. Crooks and Soulé claim that at these rates, native bird species will soon become extinct. They estimate that in the San Diego area alone, 75 percent have already disappeared. The solution is to keep cats happy and well exercised indoors by providing window perches, scratching posts, toys, and, most importantly, companionship. For more information, see the website for Cats Indoors!
One evening I heard a strange sound from the back yard. I went to the door, listened, slowly opened it, just a crack at first, and in walked Spy, sneezing and sniffling. I wore my blue bathrobe that night. I sat down and Spy—who until now had ventured only a few feet into the kitchen—ran to me and jumped in my lap. His skinny body was hot with fever. He was so congested that he was trying to breathe through his mouth. After holding him for a few minutes, I knew he needed help. I called the after-hours number of the nearby veterinarian. He would see us right away. I dressed, wrapped Spy up in my robe, and drove the short distance to the clinic. The vet diagnosed an upper respiratory infection. Spy would need antibiotics, but the vet was not optimistic. His symptoms were severe. He was so badly underweight, and there was the skin ailment. In addition, Spy was not a young cat. The vet offered euthanasia as an option, and considering the circumstances it was not an irrational one. But I decided that the determining factor would be the results of the test for Feline Leukemia, a highly contagious, incurable, albeit manageable disease. The negative results bought Spy some time. I took him home, along with the pink antibiotic drops that he learned to tolerate twice a day. I set up a "sick room" in the den, with a heating pad and towels for a bed. I put food and water close by and brought in a radio—tuned to classical music.
Many people who have cats fail to provide adequate veterinary care. In my research on the relinquishment of cats to a shelter, I found that only half of the guardians who surrendered cats because of a health problem had ever taken the cat to a veterinarian. This is similar to the findings of national studies. Patronek and associates (1996) found that cats who had never visited a vet were at increased risk for relinquishment. I found that relinquishment was the alternative of choice among people whose cats urinated outside the litter box. Granted, this is difficult to live with, but many people decide not to do so. It is often due to urinary tract problems, but few guardians who surrendered cats had taken even the step of seeing a veterinarian. When urination becomes painful, cats, perhaps associating the pain with the litter box, will try in vain to find a less painful place to go. Most infection and other pathological urinary conditions are treatable with medication or manageable through diet.
Lack of veterinary care is often compounded by a paucity of knowledge about animals. In studies sponsored by the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, a majority of people (61%) thought, incorrectly, that dogs and cats should mate at least once before sterilization. Only 20% knew that female cats are seasonally polyestrous, meaning they can go into heat repeatedly, bearing several litters over a season. Nearly half of all dog owners did not know how often female dogs experience estrus (the answer is twice a year). In my research, most dog guardians mistakenly thought that female dogs could not be spayed while in heat and that neutering male dogs before adulthood would stunt their growth. About half of the cat guardians thought that declawing involved simply removing the nails. (It involves amputation at the last toe joint.) Sanders (1994) found similar ignorance among the clients in the veterinary practice that he studied. Much of the vets' time went to educating clients and providing instructive literature.
With time and care, Spy recovered. At his follow-up appointment, I asked the vet about treating his skin. It was a flea allergy; Florida is a paradise for fleas, and keeping animals free of them is a struggle. The vet prescribed medication in conjunction with a concerted effort to drastically reduce the flea population. Within weeks, Spy's coat filled in and the itchy welts healed. He took long naps on the couch, following the sun from one end to the other.
One day a girl from down the street came to the door asking if we had her cat "Bootsie." Bootsie? No, I thought. Not Spy! She said he was her cat and that she wanted him back. I remember the panic as she walked away with Spy—Bootsie!—in her arms. Spy had just arrived and had worked his way into my life as if he had always been there. Now he was gone. His absence made it clear just how much he had given texture to my days. The feeding, the treatments, and the time spent with him, as well as the simple reality of his presence, doing nothing but "stirring up the dead air in the house," as Thoreau put it, had made him "family."
About a week later, as I pulled into our driveway, I saw something streak across the lawn. Spy appeared by the front door, looking dirty but otherwise unaffected by his week away. I let him in and gave him a royal welcome. A few days later, I went to the girl's house. Her mother was there. "About your cat," I said, beginning the speech I had prepared, but she interrupted. "He seems happy with you," she said. "You can keep him."
Keep him, we did. It would be more accurate to say I did because when my first husband and I divorced, there was no question about who would keep Spy. Through graduate school and my first academic job, Spy was a constant. He and I had habits that remained reassuringly the same no matter where we lived. Whenever I unpacked the boxes labeled "Kitchen," I always put cups and glasses in the cupboard to the right of the sink, and the holder for mail and keys always went next to the front door. Likewise, Spy always claimed the front window of whatever house or apartment we occupied, and the other cats never challenged him for it. Whenever I came home, I would see him perched there on the sill; he would often appear there at the exact moment that I looked for him. His presence there was so reliable that he trained me to look for him as I approached our house. One Saturday afternoon about six months before he died, I returned from grocery shopping and noticed that he was missing from his post. Immediately I knew something was wrong, and as I entered the house it was strangely quiet. Ordinarily, the cats greeted me. I knew that something had happened, and then I saw the tear in the front screen. Someone had broken in through Spy's favorite window, and the cats were hiding. Fortunately they were unharmed and the theft was minor; I valued the cats' company more than ever that night and for many to come.
Spy had a distinct type of female feline companion that he liked. He preferred younger, smaller, tortoiseshell cats. He and his "girlfriend" of the time would sleep together, play together, groom each other, and occasionally squabble, making it clear that they were very much a couple. In the case of one female, Spy played an active part in rescuing her from what was certain to be a brutish and short life. She had been born in a feral cat colony in the Florida neighborhood where I lived at the time.
The term "feral" means unsocialized. Feral cats run and hide from humans, and, if caught—which is a difficult task—can be extremely frightened and aggressive. Although the word "feral" is often misused as a synonym for "wild," it more accurately refers to the offspring of cats who were once pets but were abandoned outdoors. Feral cats are typically one or two generations away from having had contact with humans. Life outdoors is extremely hard on domestic cats, and the average lifespan of an outdoor cat is two years, compared to nearly twenty for a housecat. For more information, visit the website of Alley Cat Allies.
Over time I watched members of this colony become sick and injured. Typically the only time I was able to touch a feral cat was to collect its broken remains from the road. One by one I buried these feral cats in the yard near an opening in the fence that was the cats' passageway. Then one spring, this particular young female who would become Spy's "girlfriend" let me touch her. I eventually picked her up and carried her indoors, where she went berserk. My hands and arms still bear the scars from her scratches. However, I sat with her off and on that evening to show her I meant no harm. As I regained her trust, I had to betray her again by putting her in a carrier and taking her to the vet. My intentions to spay, vaccinate, and release her were derailed by surgical complications and a subsequent slow recovery, during which she began to eat meals with Spy. She soon followed him onto the couch for naps, and at some point, she decided that indoors was where she wanted to stay. She and Spy remained inseparable until just before he died, when he began to lose interest in her—along with everything else.
When that happened, I took Spy to his vet to make sure that he was not in pain. The vet reassured me, but added that my dear old friend did not have much time left. About a week later, his progressive frailty worried me, and I brought him to the vet again. I left him over the weekend for intravenous fluids and monitoring. I visited him each day. When he heard my voice, he perked up a bit, but when he did not improve, I knew the time had come to let him go. I took him home first for a proper goodbye. I bought a can of tuna and we shared a last meal: I ate a sandwich of the meat and dabbed drops of the water drained from the can onto his tongue. He had no interest in it, but he curled up in my lap and slept that deep, old-animal-sleep as I ate. Next morning, weeping desolately, I drove back to the vet, where I said goodbye to my old companion. I was so distraught that the vet suggested I not watch the euthanasia. Because I could not bear to bring the empty cat carrier home, I left it at the vet's office.
I grieved more deeply for Spy than I ever have for the loss of a person. For a long time, I felt guilty about doing so. Scholars from outside our discipline have pointed out that "grief after the loss of an animal is appropriate for children but not adults" (Beck and Katcher 1996, 202), but to my knowledge, sociologists have not yet studied the loss of pets. We have left the task to psychologists, and that is a shame, for several aspects make the topic ripe for sociological analysis. First, my guilt suggests the existence of "feeling rules" and "expression rules" surrounding the death of an animal (Hochschild 1975, 1983). Second, the experience is usually a child's first encounter with death, something of a "rehearsal" for the loss of a grandparent and ultimately a parent. Third, the ubiquity of animals in our lives means that most people will experience such loss. Fourth, the shorter lifespan of animals means that people will likely lose several dogs or cats over the course of a lifetime.
I will not hold my breath waiting for the discipline to recognize cats and dogs as family members. Yet animals are such an important part of our lives that their presence warrants rigorous sociological analysis. Their ability to become family deserves the same kind of investigation already given to marriage and parenting. Recent surveys indicate that the share of households with children has declined to below one-third, while nearly sixty percent include one or more animals (AVMA 1997). Scholars have studied how a couple's dynamics change when they have a child, but we know nothing about what happens when an animal comes into—or leaves—the home. Animals raise many of the same issues that parenting raises, such as discipline, training, feeding, and health care, as well as the division of labor concerning these tasks. However, the study of animals should not conceptualize them as surrogate children. It should examine the roles that animals have as animals. It should shed light on the ways that animals influence and are integrated into everyday interaction.
Because animals factor into countless aspects of the social world, no account of that world can purport to be comprehensive without addressing their presence. In addition to their roles as companions, animals contribute to the domestic and global economies, to our diets, our wardrobes, and to products ranging from cosmetics to brake fluid (see Plous 1993 for a review). As Kruse (2000, 124) points out, "human action is embedded in a world populated by many species. With some of these we have little or no contact, with others we share our homes and our lives. By any measure, the role that animals play in human society is enormous. If they were truly as far removed from our lives as they tend to be from sociology, it would be a bland existence indeed." Fortunately, some sociologists have begun to acknowledge the role of animals. An ASA section dedicated to Animals and Society has now been recognized. A partial bibliography of scholarly works includes Clinton Sanders' (1994, 1999) research on living and working with dogs; his research with Arnold Arluke (1996) on the ways we think about animals;
Clifton Flynn's (1999, 2000a, 2000b) studies of animals and family violence; Adrian
Franklin's (1999) research on attitudes toward animals; Jennifer Lerner and Linda Kalof's (1999) study of animals in advertising; David Nibert's (2002) investigation of animal rights; Steven and Janet Alger's (in press) work on the culture of cats, and my own work on various aspects of animal companionship (Irvine 2001, 2002, under review).
Other sociologists will continue to protest that animals are marginal to the discipline's "legitimate" topics. To those who believe we have no business studying animals, I would respond that we already do. After all, human beings are animals, too, and the distance between non-human animals and us is an empirical question. Including animals in the analysis of social interaction can only enrich our conceptions of what it means to be social.
- Alger, Janet M., and Steven F. Alger. In press. Cat Culture: The Social World of a Cat Shelter. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
- Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders. 1996. Regarding Animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
- American Veterinary Medical Association. 1997. U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook. Schaumburg IL: Center for Information Management of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
- Beck, Alan, and Aaron Katcher. 1996. Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship. West Lafayette IN: Purdue University Press.
- Crooks, Kevin R., and Michael E. Soulé. 1999. "Mesopredator Release and Avifaunal Extinctions in a Fragmented System." Nature 400:563-66.
- Flynn, Clifton P. 1999. "Animal Abuse in Childhood and Later Support for Interpersonal Violence in Families." Society & Animals 7:161-172.
- 2000a. "Woman's Best Friend: Pet Abuse and the Role of Companion Animals in the Lives of Battered Women." Violence Against Women 6:162-177.
- 2000b. "Battered Women and Their Animal Companions: Symbolic Interaction Between Human and Nonhuman Animals." Society & Animals 8: 99-127.
- Franklin, Adrian. 1999. Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity. London and Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.
- Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1975. "The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities." Pp. 280-307 in Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science, edited by Marcia Millman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Garden City NY: Anchor Books.
- 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Irvine, Leslie. If You Tame Me: Human Identity and the Value of Animals' Lives. Under review.
- 2001. "The Power of Play." Anthrozoös 14:151-160.
- 2002. "Animal Problems/People Skills: Emotional and Interactional Strategies in Humane Education." Society & Animals 10:63-91.
- Kruse, Corwin. 2000. "Animals and Human Society: Expanding the Sociological Imagination." Paper presented at annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, Chicago IL.
- Lerner, Jennifer E., and Linda Kalof. 1999. "The Animal Text: Message and Meaning in Television Advertisements." Sociological Quarterly 40:565-586.
- Nibert, David A. 2002. Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Patronek, Gary J., Lawrence T. Glickman, Alan M. Beck, George P. McCabe, and Carol Ecker. 1996. "Risk Factors for Relinquishment of Cats to an Animal Shelter." Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 209:582-588.
- Phillips, Mary T. 1994. "Proper Names and the Social Construction of Biography: The Negative Case of Laboratory Animals." Qualitative Sociology 17:119-142.
- Plous, Scott. 1993. "The Role of Animals in Human Society." Journal of Social Issues 49:1-9.
- Ronai, Carol Rambo. 1992. "The Reflexive Self through Narrative: A Night in the Life of an Erotic Dancer/Researcher." Pp. 102-124 in Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience, edited by Carolyn Ellis and Michael Flaherty. Newbury Park CA: Sage.
- 1996. "Multiple Reflections of Child Sex Abuse: An Argument for a Layered Account." Pp. 24-43 in Private Sociology: Unsparing Reflections, Uncommon Gains, edited by Arthur B. Shostak. Dix Hills NY: General Hall.
- Sanders, Clinton R. 1994. "Annoying Owners: Routine Interactions with Problematic Clients in a General Veterinary Practice." Qualitative Sociology 17:159-170.
- 1999. Understanding Dogs: Living and Working with Canine Companions. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
