Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
GOODBYE TO A BEAST
Let me make it clear. I have always regarded human beings as my highest priority. I’m happy to admire a handsome dog and compliment its owner. For most of my life I have kept, and enjoyed keeping, a pet cat. But I have never regarded either species as anything other than what they are. They are animals to be respected as all animals should be – but nevertheless they are animals with far smaller brain capacities than human beings; and therefore not to be anthropomorphised. They do not have the feelings or perceptions that some owners project onto them. Sentimental people who think of their pets as members of the family, on equal terms with the human members of the family, are to be either pitied or deplored. Anathema to those who think owning Fido or Felix is as important as having a child. Dogs are essentially servile beasts who, once trained, will faithfully follow their owners. Cats are never owned. Each cat is a complete opportunist that will stay with an “owner” only as long as it is fed, or until it is too old to run away. Cats cannot be trained to jump to commands, as dogs are. In this matter, I admire cats for their independence.
So, taking all this into account, I still feel sorry for the recent, but necessary, death of our pet cat, which happened about three weeks before I am writing this. I am not taking it as seriously as I would take the bereavement of a real human member of the family. Cats are not as important as that. But I’m still missing her.
Artemis lived with us for 17 years. She was already fully grown when we were given her, and some cruel person had given her the undignified name “Sweetie”. A cat deserves more dignity than that, so we called her Artemis after the goddess of the hunt. And - perhaps regrettably if you are interested in conservation – she did hunt, which meant sometimes slaying birds as well as mice.
Artemis was a moggy – a completely nondescript beast; an undistinguished dark tabby, neutered and of no particular pedigree. She was alert when she was young, and as agile as a cat could be, climbing up trees or running at incredible speed from a neighbouring, non-neutered, tomcat when he chased her. When I was insomniac (as I often am) and working in my (upstairs) study in the small hours, I would hear her scrambling up a trellis, walking across the roof tiles, and then meowing to be let in my closed study window. Of course, being a cat, she was frightened by electric storms, and would crawl anxiously on her belly as the thunder claps sounded, before usually squeezing herself in behind my La-Z-Boy for protection from the weather gods. Our two youngest daughters doted on her. One took the trouble to decorate her feeding bowl with her name, while the other was the stalwart in holding Artemis still when we had to administer anti-flea protection. We were never troubled with fleas, so presumably the medicated concoction worked.
But bit by bit, Artemis aged. First there was the loss of teeth, which meant that gradually she became unable to chew the raw meat that I cut up for her. It was mushy food out of tins from then on. But being as fastidious as cats are, she simply refused to eat some of the cat-food we bought for her and we ended up paying a packet by getting only the feline gourmet brands. Then she became visibly disoriented, moving halfway up the stairs and then apparently forgetting where she was. For the last two or three years of her life, she would shout orders at me – Yow! Yow! Yow! – as she came up the stairs each morning demanding that I change the water in her water bowl. Yesterday’s water was never good enough. We could see she was declining. We could see that she was in some sort of pain as she meowed piteously while stumbling around the house.
Yet I still had the illusion that she was my pal. Whenever I sat on my bench in the back garden, she would always trot over to me, climb up onto the bench and curl up next to me… or park herself between my feet, like some sort of guardian beast. And if my wife and I were watching something on television, she would always jump on the arm of an armchair that was between us, actively indicating that she expected to be stroked.
Came the end. She began spitting blood and her whiskers became clotted with it. Remember, we’d had her for 17 years, and she was about one year old when we got her. 18-years-old means that, in cat terms, she was at least an octogenarian. Very old, very feeble, very sick and suffering. We arranged for a vet to put her down, but first we dug a hole in the back garden, having no patience for the idea that we could spend more money to have her cremated. A dead cat is a dead cat. Our two youngest daughters – now adults living elsewhere – came and had an informal vigil, saying farewell to Artemis and stroking her as she spent her last hour in our home.
Then we took her to the vet. The vet administered the fatal jab and handed over the carcass to us in a cardboard box that looked like a cake box. The vet told us that an examination showed Artemis’s mouth to be rotten with cancer. Home we went. I emptied the carcass into the hole we’d dug – but Artemis fell down in such a position that her eyes were looking straight up at us. They were dead eyes, without any consciousness behind them. It had been a mercy to have her killed. My wife poured some lime over the carcass and I proceeded to fill the hole in. It was just a few feet from the bench Artemis had often shared for me.
Only a cat. Not a human being. But in a way I’m still missing her.
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