Switcheroo on Cats--but No One Is Purrfect

The trouble with a kitten is

THAT

Eventually it becomes a

CAT

Ogden Nash’s insightful couplet has been proved once again at our house.

Some months ago two kittens appeared on our front porch, along with the motley crew of wild cats my wife feeds every morning. The wild cats almost never miss their appointment, but they almost never come into the house. If they do, and are shut in, they go crazy, running around the walls, looking for an exit, and ripping at the window shades.

Oddly, the kittens were tame. They not only came into the house, they stayed, exploring every room, trying every chair, knocking over the waste baskets, jumping into the sink, and generally wreaking havoc.

They delighted my wife. They were obviously sisters. They were gray tabbies, one with tiger stripes, one with leopard spots. They were, I had to concede, adorable.

It became obvious that they had moved in. My wife put out a litter box and they used it as if they had been trained. I began to suspect that someone had planted them with us. All of our dogs but one have been visited upon us in that way.

My wife was only slightly disenchanted when she found out the woman across the street was feeding them too. She had also given them names. Frick and Frack. We had been trying to think of appropriate names without success. Most cat names, it seems to me, are too cute.

Since my wife regarded the kittens as hers, she did not want to accept the neighbor’s names. I suggested Mata Hari and Lucrezia, trying to evoke the eternal feminine, with just a subtle touch of the sinister. It has always seemed to me that cats are sinister.

They were very entertaining. They fought one another with much spitting and clawing, chased one another about like Mack Sennett clowns, then curled up in blissful companionship in my padded rattan rocking chair. When they were in they wanted out. When they were out they wanted in.

We soon began leaving them in overnight. Oddly, almost as if by design, one of them would curl up to sleep on my wife’s bed, one on mine. I suspect they were deliberately trying to work their way into our hearts.

One of them became fatter than the other, and my wife was afraid she was already pregnant. I stuffed them both into our cat box and took them down to the vet. He spayed them both and found that neither was pregnant. “The fat one just eats more,” he said.

We let them stay in most of the time now. The attrition on the hill is fearful. At one time my wife was feeding 13 cats every morning. All of them are gone--even the few she managed to half-way tame. We suspect they are poisoned, shot, run over by cars, picked up by the animal regulation people or carried off by coyotes.

Over the years I have lost most of my animosity toward cats. What I didn’t like about them, I finally discovered, was that they were too much like me: independent, insolent, indolent, intractable, inquisitive, infuriating, morally intemperate and intellectually inaccessible.

Possibly I have mellowed--toward cats and most other creatures. I still have no compassion for ax murderers, terrorists, or defensive linemen who do a war dance over fallen quarterbacks. However, I no longer advocate capital punishment for people who talk in theaters, jaywalk, litter, run red lights, block intersections, steal coupons out of our newspaper or get in quick-check supermarket lines with more than 10 items in their baskets. I simply hope they don’t have a nice day.

I have grown to respect cats for the very traits I used to despise. Their independence is admirable. I would not go so far as to credit them with wisdom; I do not think cats and dogs and other animals have intelligence in the human sense; but they seem able to make decisions that will add to their well being and ease. Only in the choice of sexual partners is their appetite unbounded and their taste abysmal.

Anyway, for better or for worse, we now have two house cats. They are kittens no longer. They still have no names. I’m leaning now toward Lorelie and Pandora.