CAT’S EYE

I was washing up this morning when a passing ginger(ish) cat sat down on the cobbles just outside the kitchen window and stared right at me in that infuriatingly smug “What the hell are you doing?” kind of a way that cats sometimes have, and it made me stop and think.

What the hell was I doing?

I mean, I know that doing the washing up is a pretty vital part of our lives as human beings mulling about upon the surface of this planet we like to think of as home. After all, having clean plates to eat your food off and clean utensils to eat it with are both pretty important food hygiene and health issues, but when you start to consider just how complicated we’ve managed to make our lives in relation to that enjoyed by most of the other creatures sharing the place with us, you really do sometimes start to wonder.

Most of the rest of the creatures on this Earth lead fairly simple lives, which basically seem to be made up of foraging for food, sleeping and avoiding predators, and for many of them the biggest problems they have to face are those caused by the human beings that they happen to cross the path of. That said, if I did have to start each day by hunting down my meals from nothing instead of just opening a box or a bottle that I’d hunted down in a supermarket and divining the fresh water supply by the simple means of turning on a tap, I think my life would seem an awful lot more complicated than it currently does. Equally, if every day was a fight for survival with every other person struggling to get hold of the same food and water supplies for themselves, I really don’t think I’d be enjoying my existence very much at all.

Survival of the fittest would have had me well and truly stuffed decades ago, I fear.

Nevertheless, at that particular moment, that scornful ginger cat seemed to be having a much better morning than me, strutting around with no other responsibilities than to be having a quiet word with the younger cats of the neighbourhood in order to keep them in line and letting them know quite clearly who the boss is. Because of our history of domesticating cats as pets, being fed regularly didn’t seem to be something that it had to worry about, and so, because some of we humans are great big softies when it comes to dogs and cats, a nice long dose of sleeping in the sunshine was probably on the cards for later on that morning when, after finishing the washing up, I would be retaking my place amongst the other working stiffs and trying to earn enough to pay to keep the roof over my head for just a little longer.

Then, of course, the realisation struck me. The cat’s easy life was possible precisely because we human beings strive and work our lives away trying in our own haphazard and sometimes ridiculous way to make some kind of order out of the chaos of the universe. Without our uniquely human quest for knowledge and civilization and our fundamental need to make order out of chaos and comfort out of  anarchy, that smug look that it was giving me would soon have been wiped off its face and I might very well have been snacking on its fleshier morsels instead of feeing slightly intimidated by it presence.

So next time you get one of those quizzical cattish stares from a creature we sometime anthropomorphise into having almost human feelings of superiority, when really they are just looking at you and wondering what you taste like, just remind yourself that it’s actually got a lot to thank we humans and our strange-seeming little habits for, and tell it to get on with its traditional job of keeping the mice out of the grain store.

It will, of course, just look at you precisely in that superior way it has to remind you that you don’t actually have a grain store that needs protecting, and the fundamental symbiosis of human/feline coexistence is based upon some archaic principles that slipped out of fashion centuries ago, and that the ancient Egyptians considered them to be a creature worthy of worship so it really shouldn’t be too much trouble for you to provide the odd portion of fish every once in a while, should it? Oh, and could you wash the dish out whilst you’re at it, there’s a good chap...