About Animals Who Don’t Know It’s Impossible

You don’t take cats for walks.

Everybody knows that.

You take dogs for walks. Cats are allowed to roam. Dogs come along; cats go their own way. That is simply the natural order of things. Or so it seems, and presumably there are people somewhere who consider it a law of nature.

Frieda knows nothing about it.

If I take Ronny out late enough in the evening, when the street has grown quiet, she often comes along. Sometimes she sets off with us. Sometimes Ronny and I are already on our way when she appears from somewhere and joins us. Jacques occasionally does the same.

On a quiet street, a man and a dog are neither particularly difficult to see nor particularly difficult to hear. The cats soon notice that we are out and about.

One cat, one dog, one tomcat, one human. We are quite a formidable little pack.

Not one particularly well suited to a textbook on orderly walking.

Why should we be?

Frieda does not walk to heel. Of course she doesn’t. She falls behind, investigates something, suddenly comes racing up, overtakes us and runs ahead. Sometimes she seems to take particular pleasure in teasing Ronny in the dark. Frieda can see better there than he can, and it would surely be a waste not to demonstrate a natural advantage every now and then.

Occasionally, she positions herself next to him while he has one leg raised.

Then he suddenly notices her.

Ronny jumps.

Frieda apparently finds this entertaining.

Quite often there are two humans, two cats and one dog. It is just that nobody can guarantee that everyone who happens to be part of the group actually set off together.

Then Frieda discovers a tree.

Frieda is very good at jumping up trees. I know that. Frieda knows that I know that. Nevertheless, every so often she seems to consider it important to give me another demonstration of her abilities.

Then a car comes.

Frieda disappears.

I am glad she does.

That is part of our agreement.

Frieda comes with us. When a car approaches, she is allowed to run away. More than that: she is supposed to. One day, that behaviour may determine how long she lives.

Running away does not end the walk.

So I wait.

The car passes. Then you wait another little moment.

And usually Frieda is already back.

Often she comes racing towards us at full speed and jumps straight over Ronny, who then looks roughly as though he had been entirely unaware until that moment that he was part of an obstacle course.

Then we carry on.

This kind of patience is part of it.

Perhaps that is already part of the misunderstanding when people say that you cannot take cats for walks.

Of course you can.

You just mustn’t expect a cat to pretend to be a dog while doing it.

The same applies to another sentence I have often heard:

You can’t train cats.

In my experience, that is mainly true if by training you mean giving an animal orders and then expecting obedience.

A cat is a different animal. Anyone who fails to understand that naturally has little chance of training one. The fact that a cat is different from a dog does not make training impossible. It merely requires a different kind of training.

You can offer a cat something. You can entice her, praise her, play with her, stroke her, give her a treat. Through your own reactions, you can show her that something is pleasant or unpleasant. And you can achieve a surprising amount if you are prepared not to decide after three attempts that the cat is simply untrainable.

My partner, for example, used to be afraid of cats and their claws.

That is perfectly understandable. Cats carry small curved instruments on their paws whose effectiveness is well known to anyone who has ever become acquainted with them. A cat’s claws are its weapons. It uses them to defend itself, to hunt and to kill prey. Obviously, you would rather not have those claws embedded in parts of your body to which you have grown attached.

Unlike dogs, cats can retract their claws. They do not have to learn that. But they can learn when it would be better not to use them.

A young cat can learn that human skin is sensitive. That claws are perfectly acceptable when playing with a toy, indispensable when hunting, but somewhat less enthusiastically received when inserted into a human thigh.

The earlier a cat learns that, the better.

She does not learn it because you read her the house rules.

She learns through repetition, reaction and experience. Through gentle encouragement, play, affection, the occasional treat and, above all, through a human who does not expect a cat to understand after the third reminder exactly how humans imagine living together should work.

You do not order a cat around.

At least not successfully.

It is more a matter of explaining to her why, from her point of view too, doing or not doing a particular thing might be an exceedingly sensible idea.

The cat is perfectly welcome to know that her human is much more relaxed and much more inclined to play with her when her claws are retracted. Those very paws with their dangerous claws are incredibly soft and delicate when the claws are tucked away. Naturally. Those paws are designed to let a cat creep up on prey as silently as possible.

Cats are also very clean animals. If kittens remain with their mother long enough, they learn from her how to use the litter tray. That, too, makes sense for an animal that needs to approach its prey unnoticed. Not being heard is useful; not smelling of cat from a considerable distance is useful too.

It helps to understand needs like these when you live with a cat. Some people create a little “cat corner” somewhere. Everything belonging to the cat goes there: the litter tray directly beside the food bowl – and then the human wonders why the cat is less than delighted.

Living with cats requires patience. And understanding. And at least some basic idea of what a cat actually is.

A cat is a predator.

And even if, at first glance, she looks rather less impressive than a tiger, she is much more like one than she is like a dog.

Her needs are too.

Frieda is not the first cat I have gone walking with.

The story began long before her.

An archaeologist friend of mine acquired a cat named Mousti. She had grown up with two German Shepherds, which was probably why she could not stand dogs.

Quite the opposite.

Dogs apparently belonged in the category: I shall make the limits of my patience immediately and unmistakably clear before you get any strange ideas.

He began taking evening walks through Rödgen with Mousti. Through the village itself, but also along the neighbouring fields and meadows.

It did not stop there.

Mousti had kittens. Some of them later lived with me or with other neighbours. The next generation, too, grew up knowing these evening rounds. Later came grandchildren.

And not every cat who took part in a walk had to be there when it began.

You could set off with one, two or three cats and acquire company along the way. A neighbourhood cat would notice the procession and join in. Another might disappear again at some point.

Naturally, this does not work with every cat or everywhere. Cats have territories, and anyone crossing the territory of an unfamiliar cat may discover that the local border authority has declined to issue an entry permit. Unsurprisingly, strange cats could react accordingly when an entire pack of cats marched through their territory.

Rödgen was a special case. Many of these cats had known one another from an early age, and some were related. This created larger shared areas in which it was not necessary to renegotiate at every property line who had any business being there and who did not.

And so one man who went for an evening walk with his cat eventually found himself accompanied by as many as sixteen cats.

I doubt my friend planned it that way. It seems more likely that his nightly walk with one cat gradually turned into a walk with an entire pack.

That sounds considerably more orderly than it looked.

Sixteen cats do not march through a village in pairs.

Cats are not really pack animals.

Unofficially, sometimes they are.

Especially when they are accustomed to exploring the neighbourhood together.

One runs ahead. Three fall behind. Two investigate a garden. One sits somewhere contemplating something whose significance remains entirely obscure. Others suddenly come racing up, leap around or roll on the ground.

Then a car approaches.

Mass evacuation.

No cats.

You wait.

One comes back.

Then another.

Somewhere, the next one appears.

And eventually this peculiar pack starts moving again.

This kind of patience is part of it.

Once, precisely this caused a minor problem.

My archaeologist friend was out at night with a torch, looking for one of his cats, and apparently shone it into somebody else’s garden. The resident understandably found this suspicious and called the police.

The police arrived by car.

The cats disappeared.

After all, a car had just arrived.

The timing could hardly have been better.

The officers wanted to know what he was doing there.

He explained:

He was out walking with his cats.

There are sentences that sound perfectly reasonable as long as the cats in question are actually visible.

Without a single cat in sight, “I’m out walking with my cats” is not necessarily among the more convincing explanations for standing outside somebody else’s property at night with a torch.

The atmosphere apparently became somewhat tense.

The officers thought he was taking the piss.

Then the first cat came back.

Then the second.

Then another.

What had sounded like an exceptionally poor excuse only moments earlier became more plausible with every arriving cat.

In the end, as he later told me, the officers had little more to say than:

“Well, it could have been.”

Yes.

It could.

There is, however, a reason why I am glad today when Frieda runs away from cars.

Because not every cat came back.

One of Mousti’s sons was called Chrissy. He lived with me together with his sister Jessie.

Chrissy was run over directly outside my friend’s house.

Because there is a primary school near the entrance to the village, a permanent speed camera is installed there. Many vehicles slow down for it and accelerate again afterwards. I do not know whether the car that hit Chrissy was speeding.

The driver did not stop.

The pool of blood, the splashes across the road and the other traces made it difficult for me to believe that the collision had happened at low speed. It looked more like a tremendous impact.

My friend and I buried Chrissy outside the cemetery wall.

The humans lie buried on the other side.

Mousti was there for the burial.

The following day, we had to bury Chrissy again. Some animal had tried to dig him up. Probably a raccoon. So we made the hole deeper, placed a stone slab over him and filled it in again.

After that, he was finally able to rest in peace.

Jessie changed after her brother’s death. For two weeks, I saw her in a state of distress unlike anything I had ever seen in a cat before.

So much for animals having no feelings.

Later, Jessie disappeared.

I searched for her. I called for her at night, put up notices and reported her missing. Once, someone thought they had seen her a long way away. I searched there too.

I never found her.

To this day, I do not know what became of her.

Perhaps that uncertainty is one reason why, today, I do not immediately confuse a cat running away with a cat being lost.

Sometimes you have to wait.

With my archaeologist friend, I saw that even years of waiting and repeatedly looking can eventually succeed. Even when logic tells you that you are hoping in vain. In the case of one of his tomcats, it took several years.

Later, one of Mousti’s daughters had kittens of her own. Two of them came to me: Crystal and Jacques.

They moved with me to Buseck.

Jacques made his own decision about responsibilities fairly quickly.

While I was busy moving and renovating, he discovered my housemate’s lap as a place where a tomcat could sit undisturbed.

At first, I assumed this was a pragmatic temporary arrangement.

Jacques apparently did not.

Even long after the renovations were finished, the matter remained settled as far as he was concerned. My housemate had recently lost his dog and wanted another animal anyway.

Eventually, I had to accept that the two of them had already settled the staffing question without consulting me.

Fair enough.

Jacques’s life, Jacques’s decision.

Crystal, on the other hand, remained my cat.

And of course she went for walks with me.

At first, my partner was surprised by this. Until then, she had not known that people could go walking with cats.

Crystal, meanwhile, was entirely unaware that there was anything unusual about it.

Ronny even more so.

He already knew this kind of life from Rödgen. In fact, he grew up around more cats than dogs. Sometimes I get the impression that although he is biologically quite definitely a dog, culturally he is at least a part-time cat.

He may well be the only Ratonero Bodeguero Andaluz who thinks he is a cat.

Perhaps even he is startled whenever he happens to bark.

Only Mousti was never one of his friends.

He got along well with her children and grandchildren. Mousti herself, however, took a distinctly offensive approach to dogs.

Once she attacked Ronny in the middle of the street.

I could not help the poor fellow nearly as quickly as the confrontation had begun.

In the end, we did something unlikely to appear in any reputable dog-training manual:

Ronny and I ran away from the cat together.

Eventually, we found ourselves standing in the fields below the village.

If dogs’ faces can form sentences, his said something like:

Do we really have to go back past her? Couldn’t we just live here from now on?

We had to.

We did not live there.

That was the day I had taken Chrissy and Jessie home with me. Why Mousti reacted so violently to Ronny on that particular day, I do not know. Perhaps she thought: I know him. My children are with him.

Ronny was my dog, after all.

But a guess does not become a fact merely because it fits nicely into a story.

Later, Crystal walked around Buseck with me just as she had been accustomed to doing in Rödgen.

Then she too was hit by a car.

She was found dead on the road in Beuerner Weg, opposite the cemetery gate. I had just come out of the swimming pool when I received a text message from the animal shelter.

That hurt.

An acquaintance noticed how deeply her death had affected me. Some kittens had been born in his neighbourhood. He asked what was going to happen to them and gave me a telephone number.

That is how Frieda came to us.

Her name really is Frieda.

People laugh at the name surprisingly often.

“Frieda!”

As though a cat could not possibly be called Frieda.

My partner chose the name. Her beloved grandmother, who had died long before, was called Frieda.

That settled it for us.

Frieda is called Frieda.

She is not part of Mousti’s family. She never knew Mousti, and Crystal could no longer teach her anything.

And yet she goes walking with us.

Because by then, we were the ones who had learned something.

From Mousti, from Crystal and, eventually, from Frieda.

Ronny knew cats who came along.

I knew that a cat did not have to walk beside me.

I knew that she did not even have to set off with us.

I knew that disappearing did not necessarily mean being gone.

And I knew that sometimes you have to wait.

So Frieda did not join a family of cats who went for walks.

She joined humans and a dog for whom it had long since become perfectly normal that cats could do exactly that.

And sometimes a tomcat joined us too.

Jacques.

Frieda made her own version of it.

Sometimes she sets off with us.

Sometimes she joins us along the way.

She falls behind.

She runs ahead.

She teases Ronny.

She disappears when a car comes.

And sometimes she leaps joyfully up a tree as though she absolutely has to show me how exceptionally good she is at it.

Crystal loved doing that too.

Sometimes I think of her when Frieda is sitting up there.

Frieda is a completely different cat from Crystal.

But they have that in common.

And suddenly something that belonged to my life with Crystal appears in front of me again.

Now it is Frieda who wants to show me that she can do it – and just how well she can do it.

Not long ago, I was out walking at night with my daughter, Ronny and Frieda when we encountered an unfamiliar tomcat who made his opinion of Frieda’s presence quite unmistakably clear.

We stopped.

The tomcat looked at Frieda.

Then at Ronny.

Then at us.

Apparently, he conducted a brief reassessment of the strategic situation.

Our pack may have been a little too formidable after all.

He left.

A short while later, Jacques joined us too.

He had apparently noticed that we were out and decided to come along. To this day, Jacques will not let me touch him. That is his decision.

He still likes joining us for a walk now and then.

Belonging, apparently, does not always look the way humans imagine it should.

My archaeologist friend is convinced that his cats communicate with him.

After Chrissy’s death, he told me that Mousti had shown him at the scene of the accident how her son had stood there, how the car had approached, and how Chrissy had apparently hesitated a moment too long over whether to run to the left or to the right.

Did Mousti tell him exactly that?

Perhaps.

I cannot see inside a cat’s mind.

But not knowing does not mean that I therefore know the opposite.

We humans are quick to dismiss something as nonsense when it does not fit what we believe we know about animals.

Cats don’t go for walks.

Cats can’t be trained.

Cats don’t tell humans anything.

The first statement is wrong.

I believe the second one is wrong too.

With the third, I am not even sure where “telling” begins.

That seems to me the more interesting question anyway.

Anyone who tries to train a cat like a dog will probably conclude that cats cannot be trained.

Correct.

A cat is a different animal and behaves differently.

Anyone who tries to walk with a cat as though it were a dog will discover that cats cannot go for walks.

And anyone who recognises communication only when another creature uses our language will live in a very quiet world.

I know that animals are not humans wearing fur.

Precisely for that reason, I do not need to keep telling them how an animal is supposed to behave according to my expectations.

Perhaps, in the end, it is not all that complicated.

Cats and humans do not have to expect the same thing from a walk in order to walk together.

Sometimes they merely have to wait for one another.

Frieda runs ahead.

She falls behind.

Sometimes she begins the walk with us.

Sometimes she joins us later.

Sometimes she waits for us.

Sometimes we wait for her.

When a car comes, she runs away.

She should.

I wait.

The car passes.

Another little moment.

Then Frieda comes racing back.

Often at full speed.

Sometimes she jumps over Ronny, who every single time looks as though this particular development had not been covered by the Highway Code.

Then we carry on.

Whether Frieda calls it “going for a walk”, I do not know.

She probably does not call it anything at all.

She simply does it.

This kind of patience is part of it.

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