scarce resource
I recently saw, on social media, the most horrifying study, revealed earlier this year. The research paper claimed that, if a human adult is struggling, a dog or baby will run toward the human wanting to know how to help, wanting to intervene, but a cat will sit back and watch—only interrupting if the cat sees “what’s in it for them.” That is to say, cats are moved to action if they see an obvious personal benefit to them, the research claims.
The study went on to ascribe this to cats having fewer neurons or neurological connections or whatever. Sounds to me like researchers entered the study with a neurological premise in mind—“what does narcissistic self-interest look like on a brain scan”—and used unwilling cats to find an answer. Which is so insipid, by the way. We always talk about brain structure like it’s a set, static thing you’re born with—as if literal experience, trauma and healing, did not constantly alter the physical structure of the brain itself.
I reflexively understood that the study was sexist, but I could not fully articulate why. My good friend bayed when I said this aloud to her. “All women are cats!” she said to me then, snickering. I nodded. (Apparently, there is a documented anti-cat bias prevalent in behavioral science. Who knew!)
I am not speciesist; I’m very agnostic about cats, dogs, and birds. I adore them all. But also, what kind of help1 are you expecting from a cat, a creature without thumbs?
A cat cannot use her words. If she is upset with you, she can only shit in your bed or piss in your shoe. As humans, we also struggle with using our words—locked-in, unable to communicate2, having never learned to effectively articulate ourselves, or maybe we speak another, foreign language, or maybe we are entirely prevented from speaking at all—so perhaps we become territorial, breaking others’ belongings on half-purpose, or burning the meatloaf.
Some of us grow out of this, learning newer, better communication skills, or more covert ones, but not all of us get to. Many of us are passive-aggressive cats until we’re surrounded by people with enough of a commitment to understanding us that we realize we can finally unclench.
Anyway, I read with horror about cats vs dogs and babies, and then I scoped the comments, hoping to see some sort of academic pushback.
Ah, a voice of reason: Cats are obligate carnivores, someone had written. Aha3!! It means cats have less energy to work with—and it isn’t a personal choice a cat has made. Energy expenditure is high; energy doesn’t go as far. Caloric inflation, metabolic taxes. What looks antisocial to a researcher4 is really just a scarce resource. “Helping” is an impossibility of thermodynamics.
As someone who suffers from mitochondrial dysfunction (chronic postviral fatigue), this metabolic clarification had made perfect sense to me. This I could understand. Yes! “Of course I want to help you, but my options are limited here.”
It’s why the love of a cat, her little demonstrations of it, feel so precious and so sacred—because, even at play, she is always a little bit exhausted, a little depleted.
My cat used to sit above me and tend to the crown of my head, grooming the hell out of me. “Aww,” I’d whisper to her. “Am I the baby today?” I’d gratefully accept this meaningful gesture from her—this, from a mother who, I’m told, literally ate her own kittens, all but I think two?, when they were born. This history of interpersonal Greek violence, to me, made her feline ministrations seem all the more tender.
Then she would sit near my lap and I’d coregulate her in the only way I have available: pets, long strokes, sometimes lightly involving fingernails. “Now you are the baby,” I’d murmur cheerfully to her: a tableau, Madonna with Child, taking turns at who gets to be baby.
Ah! I miss her so much.
One of my most nightmarish sleep paralysis episodes occurred while I was sitting in our home library, shortly after a friend had left. The friend had sat in a nearby chair, a drink in hand, talking to us at length about his recent termination of employment, the reasons: profound professional trouble, an uncertain future.
Afterward he’d thanked us; he physically felt “lighter” now, he said. Then I’d experienced my sleep attack. Later I would idly muse if he actually left unencumbered, actually left something behind, in a way we cannot perceive. (After coming-to from my episode, I’d immediately checked the handheld devices around me, which had been fully charged under an hour ago. All three—a phone, a tablet, a game console—had been completely drained of battery.)
I’d, not fallen asleep exactly, but become locked-in to my chair. My eyes were closed but I could still see movement of light and shadow, and I was frantically looking around through the pinks of my eyelids. The room was thunderous. I could hear my spouse at their office desk gaming, chatting with someone online, and I was trying to call out to him. I was able to make little sounds, but with great effort. My spouse could not hear me at all, but our little dog could. The dog was whimpering. Eventually he ran out of the room, toward the office, trying to retrieve my spouse like Lassie. Yes! Good boy! The dog returned unsuccessful, whining harder now. Oh, God.
Now the dog, a small chiweenie mix, was scrabbling hard at my shin and knee. He was on his hind legs, pawing with his little paw-talons frenetically. He scrabbled at me so hard that I eventually gasped and came to life, suddenly released from the thrall of whatever neurological glitch had contained me. I scooped up the dog into my arms and sobbed. “Thank you, Bobby, thank you,” I said, shuddering, “good boy, good boy.” I kissed the panicked dog. We were both nigh inconsolable.
The cats were there, too—a little distance away, both staring at me wide-eyed from under a console table. “No thanks to you guys!” I shouted at them now, still cradling my dog, all huffy.
But is that fair to them. Another time I had a minor episode, and the cat saw it beginning, and she instinctively, or intuitively, put one paw on top of my hand. I immediately came up for air, awake and gasping. My reaction was smaller—I’d not yet entered a panic spiral of distress, so there was nothing to come back down from—but I was no less relieved. “Oh my god thank you,” I said to the cat, affectionately scratching her, tears coming to my eyes. (This short stretch of repeated sleep attacks has since abated, for now.)
Another study once showed that cats prefer to be around their owners over the option of eating. I know this is true in my heart, because a cat will show gratitude to you for feeding them before they hungrily tuck into a meal, whereas domesticated dogs generally never say thank you at all. I do think a cat has to be veeeery unusually food-motivated if you want to bribe and train it like a dog or baby.
A husky is fundamentally more wolf than any other dog, and also—behaviorally—more feline than most dogs. “Isn’t it interesting that the more wolf you are, the more catlike your behavior,” I said aloud to my friend thoughtfully.↩
Because of a new, longer tube for her ventilator (a recommendation from the respiratory specialists in intensive care), the woman I live with has given up speaking—because of the sheer discomfort of using her voice. Ever since this new tube was placed, using her voice now induces an overwhelming physiological panic. It is, for her, torturous.
In private, I explained that she is not making a choice to be panicked: it is a limbic cascade. We have all kinds of important stuff crammed into our throat, which is the command center of the entire polyvagal nervous system. This new, longer tube is better for her blood-oxygen, but it is also, I speculate, vibrating and bumping into the rest of the command center in the throat, which means it’s wreaking polyvagal havoc on her body. (She has a significant spinal injury, making her ‘locked in’ to her body, and her myriad health issues are autonomic in origin.)
“She’s gotten too comfortable with us lip-reading,” my best friend said to me sadly. “I know we’ve all gotten pretty good at it—”
“Not me, I’m getting worse,” I blurted. I shook my head, frustrated. “I’m getting much, much worse at reading her lips. I just can’t understand it.” I was exasperated, upset with myself. I’d fallen out of attunement somehow; I’d lost the ability to accurately fill in linguistic data gaps. “I think I really do just need to hear her voice again,” I sighed.
"We all do," my friend agreed, nodding.
Now, for legal and financial reasons—to prove her own agency and competency—she finally has to learn how to speak around the longer tube, around the block in her throat. It’s incredible. It’s unnerving. Our private lives are not metaphors, but good god, who hasn’t given up their own voice in favor of some degree of comfort, and then had to go back and retrieve their voice again—just to prove to others they’re a full and complete person.↩
As ever, I have idiopathic gastroparesis, a condition preventing me from eating structurally complex or fibrous foods. A restrictive diet pushed me, unhappily, toward eating more meats. Mechanically digesting whole, unprocessed foods requires a great deal of energy, while more digestible foods typically have limited nutritional value and a rapid, unsustainable caloric payoff. Holy fucking shit I am cat. (Many of my symptoms have resolved, enough that I will now eat a wilted salad with extreme caution.)↩
It’s worth noting that the terms defining such a study are rather shady. What does the researcher want? Something for nothing. There is no trust here. The researcher manufactures a crisis, a fake one, attempting to agitate the cat to action. You’re not a team player, the researcher concludes.
And what are we attempting to test here? The neurology of unconditional love? (I suspect so. I suspect people have ludicrous personal reasons for entering the field of neurological research.) But it’s for science, so there are “conditions,” set by the researcher himself. And look at these results! The researcher is defining collectivism, team-building, as self-abandonment. The researcher wants to know under what conditions, if any, labor can be extracted from a cat. The researcher is defining love as constant intervention, as racing over to meddle. “I guess cats aren’t very good problem-solvers,” the researcher decides, “poorly wired for critical thinking”—which, if you’ve ever seen a cat get around an obstacle, versus a dog, you will recognize as patently, observably false.
At a certain point it dawns on you that many ‘projected outcomes’ are just that: projections.
Energy conservation is not a moral issue; it is a mechanical reality, a matter of budgeting, of balancing a ledger. Yesterday two friends mentioned tall poppy syndrome to me—“stop working so hard, you’re making the rest of us look bad,” the opening conflict that incites the movie Hot Fuzz—and I observed that, while neither extreme is ideal, the social policing of “stop being such a try-hard, maybe strive for work/life balance instead” might be a healthier attitude than whatever opposite philosophy underpins the grind of the U.S. work-week.↩