I’m watching my recently acquired cat — my first indoor feline in decades — weave around the dog’s legs like a ribbon. It took a few weeks, but they’ve become buddies. Buddies with boundaries, which the cat strictly enforces, but friends nonetheless. These are two species that don’t naturally get along and have been thrown into the same household. Each has its own personality, experiences, and habits, and if animals have opinions (cats obviously have lots of views, about everything), I’m sure their opinions differ.
Yet, in a short period of time, they figured out how to cohabitate peacefully. It’s certainly not an indicator of a “disaster of Biblical proportions” as Dr. Peter Venkman declared in the original Ghostbusters movie.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies… Rivers and seas boiling… Dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
~ Ghostbusters (1984)
Does that ability to figure out how to get along make the domesticated dog and ordinary housecat more highly evolved than most people? Possibly. Or maybe it’s just a matter of taking two different creatures and putting them in an enclosed environment from which they can’t leave, where they are dependent on yet another creature for all their provisions and expecting them to get along. Oh, wait! That sounds just like Planet Earth.
At some point in my Saturday morning cartoon-watching era, there was a program on PBS called “The Big Blue Marble” which told the stories of children around the globe and connected them as pen pals, a lesson that taught viewers we’re all just stuck together on a big blue marble, upon which we are entirely dependent, hurtling through the universe. In reality, we have far more in common than we think, no matter what our outward differences may be or how tightly we clutch our personal pearls of preference and privilege.
Let’s try to remember that. As author and speaker Brené Brown wrote, “People Are Hard to Hate Close Up. Move In.” Perhaps that’s what the cat and dog have already figured out, about each other and probably about the person who feeds them.
By NIKI TURNER – editor@editorht1885.com