Reflections from the Calypso

"The question of taking sea lions captive has been on my mind for some time. I have asked myself to what extent man's urge to accustom animals to his own way of living is actually an unnatural, or rather an anti-nature, attitude. It seems to me that it is basically symptomatic of man's desire for approval by animals."

-from Diving Companions, by Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Hard Truths

President-elect Barack Obama met with some Chicago schoolchildren today, along with Joe Biden and handsome new education secretary Arne Duncan. They talked decimals, they talked Iraq, and they talked business. Dog business. From the AP:

The president-elect talked about how his daughters, 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha, will get a dog when they make the move to the White House next month.

"They've been asking for a dog for years now," he said.

Obama said the girls would need to take care of their pet. And that didn't just mean feeding and walking the dog.

"You know, if they do their business, if they've got some poop — you got to make sure that you're not just leaving it there," Obama said.

This is absolutely true, and it takes a brave leader to say it. You cannot just leave it there.

Katie Finds a Job

This is Katie, as you may have figured. She spends entire days basking in a spoiled, sybaritic reverie, as cats do. Katie appears to live a retiring sort of existence, but she recently had an interesting adventure that she might need resting up from.

I awoke last night to the sound of a loud metallic crash and found her jumping around the kitchen like a maniac, as cats also often do. I looked a little closer and noticed a thin little tail hanging from her mouth. Katie had caught a mouse, which she then proceeded to un-catch. She set it down, gave it a brief chance to escape, and then pounced again. The mouse goes back in her mouth, Katie trots some distance to the other side of the kitchen, then repeats the cruel charade.

M. and I, being stupid people with a deep ambivalence regarding nature red in tooth and claw, decide that we must save the mouse from the cat. We try to distract Katie with treats, to no avail. Finally, when she releases the mouse again, we snatch Katie up and hold her until the mouse escapes. Under my desk.

As I said, we feel ambivalent about this household carnage. On the one hand, it's gross. We feel bad. On the other, it’s nice to see Katie challenged intellectually and physically. She clearly enjoys her savage game. We also, apparently, are facing a mouse invasion, and it’s Katie’s legal obligation to eliminate the problem in whatever way she sees fit, however brutal. When it was up to us alone, in the pre-cat days, we put down various horrible traps and then felt queasy at the sounds of piteous squeaking when they worked.

So at the thought of a mouse, possibly injured and bleeding, making its little home under the desk where I work, I reconsidered the intervention. “Hey Katie, wouldn’t you like to try again?” We see now that the mouse has escaped to the alcove, where it cowers in plain site. “Hey Katie, why don’t you look over there?” The cat ignores us now. She is either on strike, or her hunting skills are of very poor quality. I consider picking her up and placing her in front of the mouse, but this strikes me as perverse. We go to bed bedeviled by our moral cowardice, and unhappy that the mice have returned.

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life

My dream made manifest; consequently revised

I've often imagined how nice it would be to have a massive cat here as a pet. Not in the manner of Antoine Yates, not a giant tiger whose vast quantities of wild tiger urine will leak down into the apartment below mine, but something more medium-sized, with brown stripes and spots.

Yesterday, a friend directed me toward these people who seem to be living the dream. But by the end of the photo-essay, I realized that my dream is kind of gross.