The Psychology of Cats and Dogs

So I haven’t been posting much lately and maybe you’ve been wondering where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Or more likely you haven’t wondered, but oh well, I’ll tell you anyway.

First I lost my dog. I was helping my husband move furniture back into our house after a repair to the floor (you know it’s time to repair the floor when you pass notes back and forth to the basement). And long story short I rushed to steady a falling piece of furniture and failed to close the gate properly. Shortly thereafter our part hound dog, Kyra escaped and we looked and looked for her. People kept saying she was just ahead of us, rushing off to the park, and then she was spotted running across the soccer field. But after hours and hours of searching, mostly on foot, but some by car, we could not find her.

We went home and contacted a pet detective to help us look for her and then we made lost dog signs and went around at about midnight hanging the signs. Returning home after putting up the signs, after our dog had been missing for about seven hours, we miraculously found her, sitting on our front porch waiting for us to come home.

I felt so stupid and terrible, but I’m definitely not going to neglect the gate again. I check it several times a day now.

The Apollo, a cat, turned the knob on our stove top nearly killing us all by filling the house with gas. Yeah, we need a stove with safety knobs, but our house pretty much has the worst and cheapest of everything (installed by the previous residents). It was one of the scariest times of my whole life. We have now disabled the stove until we can get one with safety features.

So there you have it, my absent-mindedness combined with animals paired up to give me several heart attacks in a row and nearly kill all of us. The reason I’m giving for my absent-mindedness is that my one week and two weekends vacation, combined with house repair has exhausted me. It certainly hurt my feet and I still can’t shove the stupid swollen things back into regular shoes.

I had a birthday and we celebrated our eight year wedding anniversary. I made a cake. If you’re still reading this and you know of cakes, I have a question for you—how can you spread frosting thinly on a cake? I made a gorgeous vegan carrot cake and I made vegan cream tease frosting. Then I went to frost my cake—when I tried to spread a thin layer of frosting it just peeled back up taking some crumbs off the top of the cake with it. Then I started glopping on frosting and it looked beautiful. Unfortunately that was just too much frosting so while Sean and I ate our cake we had to scrape off bits of frosting and throw them out. I guess this is not a problem if you love frosting beyond reason, but I have only a medium love of frosting—I like it but enough is enough.

But anyway, I have cat and dog psychology to talk about.

Kyra, our hound mix dog is exceptionally gentle with smaller animals, which makes her an ideal canine resident of a rescuing home. Nikita is a little less sure and affectionate around smaller animals, and has been known to need to be told to play less rough with the cats (though no injuries have ever happened) but she’s also pretty good with rescuing.

The dogs and I on our walks have been trying to look after the feral cats we got sterilized at the clinic. The dogs seemed more successful at first with making friends with the cats than I was. Right now various neighbors feed the cats and the main ones I look after are Pookie and Omar who live at the school and Leelee and Deedee who live near our house. I’m having some difficulty with feral and stray cat psychology I think.

Now Omar was made famous when his picture was featured front and center on the Washington Humane blog and since that time he has grown to be a quite large, very striking cat. After caring for him for about a year I began to feel that Omar simply wasn’t feral. Every single day I walked the dogs out to the school where I fed Pookie and Omar together. One afternoon some children whizzed by on motorbikes and the noise frightened Omar so badly that he leapt into my lap, meanwhile Pookie ran away and hid under a shed. Not such feral behavior.

After this Sean and I started talking about the possibility of looking for a home for Omar, but we were concerned. Buddy who was completely tame and much more socialized than Omar bounced back to us and is now called Apollo (of the gas leak fame). The cats from this colony tend to have hard landings when going into adoptive homes. They are used to roaming at will, even if they like people they are poorly socialized, and they are used to scrapping for food in a colony setting and so have been known to get food or toy aggressive with other animals.

Then Omar got hurt. It was one of the deathly hot days last week and Omar didn’t come to dinner. Finally as I was picking up trash and on my way out Omar limped up, his mouth hung open, he was panting and heavily favoring one of his front legs. My dogs were about to fall over from the heat so I put down some food for Omar and rushed home. I got the dogs inside and then I got some ice water for Omar and set out to see how badly hurt he was. When I got to the school Omar took off. I called him in my normal voice but he was having none of it. It was like without the dogs with me Omar couldn’t recognize me. I searched and searched for him, but he’d hidden too well. Later Sean and I both went to look for him but couldn’t find him.

The next day the dogs and I arrived at the school to find both Pookie and Omar waiting for dinner. Omar rushed up and began rubbing against the dogs. I petted him and then gingerly checked his leg. He had two long cuts, one on the outside of the leg and one on the inside. Both were healing up, nicely scabbed with no sign of infection. So I gave him his dinner and went home to discuss the situation with Sean. Knowing that the only way to get Omar to the vet was to trap him we took a wait and see approach. So far so good, he has been healing very well and still shows no infection. This weekend he was walking without a limp.

I wonder what is in his brain that he can’t trust me unless the dogs are there. In fact as long as the dogs are with him, he’ll eat his food while people walk by. Children can get within 10 feet of him if the dogs are there. But everyone tells me that when the dogs aren’t there nobody can get close to Omar at all.

I’d still love to find a home for both him and Pookie, but that would be a hard landing indeed. Not many people have the patience to go through the fear and freaking out that would inevitably follow bringing cats like these inside.

Meanwhile our dogs have become very protective of Pookie and Omar and will nuzzle and lick them, but they chase away all other cats who try to come over for food. The dogs seem to be saying “Back off, this food is for our friends.” Kyra in particular seems to get mad when other cats want to eat the food, she has howled at them. I for one would be happy to have the other cats come over, so long as they aren’t mean to Pookie and Omar. I got them all fixed so it wouldn’t hurt them to eat a little food from me, even if they then go down to Alberta’s house and get another meal.

So then my next problems are Leelee and Deedee, the other, more feral cats. I cannot touch them, but Sean built a shelter for them and we slowly moved them into our yard. We did this because neighbors were complaining about them and if you remember a while back we had a spate of violence against the neighborhood cats. Someone poisoned a number of the cats and one young cat, now named Shorty, had her tail burned.

Anyway, we moved Leelee and Deedee to our yard, but this has not stopped them from doing the one thing the neighbors complain about most, tearing up the trash on trash days.

I might note that nobody ever tears up our trash as we went and purchased a trash can with a good lid. But many of our neighbors just put bags of trash on the curb. Leelee and Deedee then tear open the bags and eat the trash food contained within.

You would think that an easy solution to this would be for us just to feed Leelee and Deedee enough that they would no longer be hungry for trash, but this hasn’t worked out according to plan. They prefer trash to cat food and will leave the food we put out for them untouched to go forage trash. After a while I started to wonder if this was somehow related to the poisonings. Did they learn by watching the terrible deaths of their friends that nice bowls of cat food are deadly but trash never is? Or is trash just more appealing to them? Whatever the case, it has been frustrating for me since I would like to keep the cats safe and minimize conflicts with neighbors.

If this whole thing has any animal rights message attached it is only that all animals have their own personalities and quirks and that trauma affects them all. We should do better for them. I'm always amazed when people say that animals don't have personalities or souls. How could anyone spend time with animals and deny it?