Do cats understand us? Yes, if they want to, if it suits their current needs or desires, they do understand us. Very well. And if it doesn't suits their current need or desire, or interferes in any way with their comfort, they don't.
They don't, for example, understand 'get off the comfy chair' unless it is said with an unshakeable, firmly grounded sense of purpose and determination. You have to speak from the very core of conviction, be as certain about the neccessity of this as you are the need to protect and provide for your children. Nothing less will get the cat off off the chair. Exasperation, pleading, the slightest suggestions or taint of servility or sense of incipient defeat they understand clearly to be an invitation to ignore. Threat of undignified removal they understand to mean they'd better do ...sigh... as the fool wants, or, in the case of my current feline mistress, as the mean-minded, graceless and insenstive sod that I honor with my presence ....
Every cat I have owned has known who I am and what it is I can be made to do. They have all known what is necessary to get from me what it is that he or she, at this moment, requires. Their teaching methods have varied according to the personality of the cat, just as it does with my childrens' school teachers. Some have been excellent teachers, sweet and deceiptively submissive, some have been a mix of gentle and fanged, and some have been outright tyrants.
Mitty, for example, established his position on arrival at our house by immediately getting rid of the semi-wild farm cat we already had. Although the word 'had' is probably an overly optimistic word for the relationship Blacky chose to allow us.
Blacky kept us in constant thrall by requiring much begging and leaving open of doors and careful positioning of delectable foodstuffs to get her to come in or allow the slightest physical contact. We competed to caress her on the very rare ocassions she allowed any one of us close enough to even touch her soft, satiny coat. I think her childhood may have been a little harsh. She was born under a veranda and spent most of her baby days rolling around in the dust under its sheltering overhang. Inside was a bit too much I suspect. But she liked it enough to play to our begging, enough to stay when I think she really wanted to go.
Mitty marched in, took one look, and changed into a snarling, spitting orange fuzzball every time poor Blacky came anywhere near the back door. He glared and stomped angrily towards the door whenever any of us opened it to try and tempt Blacky in. And inevitably Blacky, who hadn't been crazy about town living anyway, took off. It could have been funny given that Black was a strong and lithe, fully grown cat, and Mitty was a small, round, heart-breaking beautiful blue-eyed orange kitten at the time. But it broke my daughter's heart to lose Blacky, and Mitty's arrogance enraged me - he is, dare I say it, the only cat I have ever actively disliked.
Not that it meant anything to him. Mitty didn't care. The other cat was gone, Mitty marched triumphantly through the house, settling down to full martial rule of all of us. He adored my step-son and my husband, neither of who liked cats (and I'm sure he knew that, I'm sure that is why he chose them), and ignored me and my daughter, wearily tolerating our pathetic attempts at affection with disdain at best. My husband tried delicately to disenchant Mitty but Mitty liked him, liked his big round stomach to sleep and sit on, and liked my step-son. He marched onto their laps and beds and in his ecstasy dribbled over both of them. When they ignored him he would manouevre them expertly into position, on the rare ocassions that he failed he would sit pointedly in front of them with his back turned. Wherever they went he would be there, Ignoring them, til they broke. Then he would rumble loudly in joy. And drip.
Where Mitty was a marmalade cannonball in his methods of communicating his needs CJ (Cool Jazz) was a gentleman of the old school, polite, restrained, dignified. CJ communicated his distastes, of which there were many, with an air of cool restraint, and a slightly startled demeanour when anything loud or uncouth happened within the rarified air of his world.
CJ was a big-boned soft grey cat with exquisite emerald eyes. He had been dumped in his middle years and the hurt of this rejection remained in those lovely eyes to the end. Like Blacky CJ communicated a distaste for closeness through body language, but his was a shying away, gently and quietly, with a vaguely started expression on his face. He never scratched or ran or snarled but managed to let us know our proximity was barely tolerable just as effectivey as if he had.
CJ loved my daughter however and would come to her for little pats and admiration.He didn't sit on her bed or lap, but would come near her when she went outside, and sometimes sit beside her on the grass, at a slight distance. Unlike Mitty CJ would give me and my daughter eye kisses, half closing his eyes in response to us doing the same for him. If we called his name his body would stiffen and he would turn his noble head to us with a 'moi?' expression on his face, shocked at the rudeness of our interruption, acknowledging it had happened, but nothing more.
CJ both loathed and feared Mitty and it was sad to see his gentle, unhappy withdrawal when Mitty marched outside. Because Mitty annoyed my daughter and I we would shoo him away and let him know that as far as we were concerned CJ was no. 1 cat. And immediately CJ would rise, stretch, yawn, check where Mitty was (and that he was watching), then elegantly and precisely make his way down the fence to where we were. Before he died when we went out he would call, one quiet little mieows and look anxiously from Mitty to either one of us, refusing to move until Mitty had been shooed away. I have no doubt that instructions were being communicated, and a little power exercised and enjoyed. With dignity.
And then there was Lady, who came and sat beside me one memorable evening when I was drowning in misery, depressed and confused about things that were happening in my family, and without making a sound cause me to turn around to see her lovely, anxious little face peering at me, her eyes filled with concern and loving, barely inches from my shoulder.
Lady was another farm cat, in her case, a badly neglected one. I was a visitor to where she lived and one morning we passed one another. She was a dirty off-white colour, fine-boned with a huge dragging stomach. I stopped to look at her and as I did she also turned her head towards me, then stopped and looked me over, long and coolly. Two weeks later the owners of the farm bought her to me, they had stolen her from her owner because I had mentioned seeing her and they wanted to save her. I took her to the vet and what we had thought was a part siamese cat, because of her bony, graceful angles, turned out to be a diseased (worms and skin), malnourished, pregant common cat. She had six silly, insanely beautiful white kittens, and slowly got fatter, though never lost her scrawny, badly treated look or beaten air.
Lady and I chatted everytime we sat together. I would check her skin and her coat and ask her how she was and she would look at me with her beautiful heart smiling out through her eyes, one blue and one green. When I die I know she will be waiting for me.
Peppy was another cat which we inherited, this time from a rented house where the owners simply left her. Peppy communicated verbally. If any of us spoke to her she would mieow back, matching our tone of voice, responding everytime, always having the last say.
When Peppy was dying of cancer she spent her last three nights after the diagnosis at home with us. On the first night she slept on my bed, something she never usually did. On the next she staggered to her favourite cupboard in my daughters room. On the last night she crawled to the edge of my bed and fell to the floor, refusing to stay where, I thought, was most warm and comfortable. She pulled herself through the door to the hall and then stopped, slumped against the wall, and unable to go any further. Her eyes were fixed on my son's room so I picked her up and checked with both her and him that this was what was wanted. My son moved to one side and Peppy half fell half stepped onto his bed, then curled up against him and fell immediately asleep. The next day she couldn't lift her head, and went for her final visit to the vet. It wasn't til a few weeks later that I realised she had chosen to sleep with each of us before leaving, like a farewell.
Finally, our current cat. Sophie. Sophie invites us to play, stands at the door and welcomes us when we come home from work, beams when we pick her up and cuddle her like a baby, pulls gently away when my daughter hugs too enthusiastically but not so far that feelings would be hurt, goes to each of us when we feel sad or lonely or frightened, and lets both my son and I know our respective duties re the filling of her food dish.
I am the morning snack, he the afternoon. He is the one most likely to forget and give her two feeds instead of one. Me she yowls at, with him she sits silently and reproachfully where he can see her, jumping up to follow closely at his heels when he moves away. Sophie is like this 98 per cent of the time. In the evenings, just after she has been fed, and for about ten minutes, she is a mad woman. She thunders from one end of the house to the other, demanding chasey games, leaping and attacking chairs and other errant pieces of furniture, hiding under curtains, beds and chairs attacking feet that pass or hands that dangle, drawing blood. If outside she perches on the clothesline and attacks the head of the person hanging out laundry. When she is sworn at in pain and shock she is pained, affronted, angry, revengeful, then, just as suddenly, it stops, and she is round and fat and white and a model of decorum, sweet-natured and a bit lazy.
With all the cats I have been blessed with throughout my life I have felt an unbreakable, perpetual stream of communication and understanding. An assumption that we are in this together. Even Mitty - with his arrogance and his commands undeniably connected with us. They shared their wisdom, their love, their beauty and grace, their dignity and their manias, giving, always, far more than we gave in return, and making sure, at all times, that we know just how priviledged we are - and if we didn't, I still believe they are genuinely shocked, and in the saddest cases, can be deeply hurt.
I know all this, because my cats told me.