Sally was last seen in Kansas, where she fell out of my car—a 1998 yellow Toyota Corolla, Indiana license plate FJ3-JR57. To tell you the truth, Sally didn’t actually fall. My ex-husband was trying to push me and my suitcases out of the car and Sally was in the way. I’d opened the door to throw out a pair of pants and some other garbage of my ex-husband’s. I hate a messy car. My ex-husband says he was leaning over to close the door, but I definitely felt a nudge. Sally and the gourmet-cooking cassettes that I had taken out of the library landed all over Route 23 in Kansas. Sally ran toward Nebraska. We were on the ramp toward Missouri. My ex-husband’s sister Sugar lives in Nebraska. I don’t like Sugar and I know Sugar does not like me. She sent me a bathroom scale as a wedding gift. Normally, I have nothing to do with Sugar, but I called her just in case Sally had turned up there. Sometimes animals have a sixth sense about knowing who your relatives are and how to get in touch. As usual, Sugar was unpleasant. She said I sounded like I had gained weight.
Sally has been missing for more than a year, and I am losing hope. Her mother belonged to my grandfather, and now my grandfather is dead. Sally is my last link to my grandfather. If you find Sally and she is dead, send her back anyway. My parents are dead, but I have their steak knives. Once, I had a locket of my grandmother’s. I gave it to my daughter for Christmas, since my daughter was named after my grandmother, who was named after her grandmother, who was named after Sally, but not that Sally. When I lost my daughter in the custody suit, I lost the locket, too. I lost everything. Well, not all of the steak knives. Or the weight—I didn’t lose that, either.
In spite of what the judge said, my ex-husband is not fit to care for my daughter, pony or no pony. The only things my ex-husband can cook are Texas Tommies. My ex-husband’s girlfriend cannot cook, either, but I have to admit, she knows good food.
If I still had Sally, I think the judge would have let me keep my daughter. Pets are a sign of a loving home life. I know the judge would have been impressed if I had been Pet Owner of the Year. I might have gone into politics if I had been Pet Owner of the Year, maybe alderman. I am not too old to get into politics, and I have a lot of ideas. Let’s not forget that after the Russian Revolution they turned the stock exchange into an aquarium. For the people! We could do something like that. If Sally came back, I would take a picture of me holding her and use that on my campaign poster. And if she didn’t my slogan could be “Help me help you find my cat!” Even if you don’t find Sally, please send cash. It’s not the same thing as a cat, but it is a consolation.
| 2003 |
“I’m sorry, but I think it’s uncatlike.” (illustration credit col19.2)
THE CAT LADY
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LIVING ROOM LEOPARDS
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ARIEL LEVY
When Anthony Hutcherson was a little boy, what he wanted most was something wild. But he was growing up in a very tame place: Helen, Maryland, a small farming community named after the mailman’s daughter. “I wanted a kinkajou and a monkey and a skunk, a pet leopard,” he recalled—something unlike the cows and sheep out in the meadows nearby. One day, when he was ten years old, waiting with his mother to check out at the grocery store, he saw something that thrilled him. It was a picture in Cat Fancy of a pretty woman in California, holding an exotic golden cat that she’d bred by crossing a domestic shorthair with an Asian leopard cat—a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat. She called the result the Bengal, and touted it as “a living room leopard.”
His family didn’t understand his passion, he told me one recent afternoon. Hutcherson, who is African-American, offered a cultural explanation: “Generally, black people don’t like cats.” So he wrote to the woman in California, Jean Mill, and, to his delight, she wrote back. They have been friends and collaborators ever since. Hutcherson, now thirty-eight, is the chairman of the International Cat Association’s Bengal Breed Committee and a past president of the International Bengal Cat Society. He and Mill, like many of their colleagues, share a dream: to breed a cat that “looks like it just walked out of the jungle.”
We were sitting in Hutcherson’s living room, in Aquasco, Maryland, across from a glass cage where his kinkajou, a ferret-like nocturnal creature, was sleeping under a blanket. Hutcherson works as an event producer, and also runs a cattery, called JungleTrax, out of his house. When I visited, he had half a dozen sleek Bengal kittens, coppery creatures with well-defined dark spots—“rosettes,” in cat-fancier parlance. As we talked, he flung a cat toy in the air, and they leaped after it with astounding speed. Several times, they scratched us as they went by. Hutcherson decided to trim their nails, holding the scruff of their neck in his mouth while he clipped. “When I’m gardening or mowing the grass, they all come outside with me,” he said. “And they really do look like little leopards. It’s really rewarding and humbling when you forget the bead of time, and you are watching a cat chase a bug up a tree—two thousand years ago, somebody probably watched a cat that looked like a leopard chase a bug. It is beautiful and transcendent.”
But two thousand years ago anyone who saw a cat that looked like a leopard would have immediately run for shelter, or for a spear. The big cats that enchant breeders, with their dazzling coats, stalking gait, and ferocious reflexes, were our predators. For the first time in history, humans are trying to reverse, at least aesthetically, the process of domestication. The result has been voguish hybrids like the Savannah cat, a cross between a domestic and a serval, an African native that preys on gazelles and springbok.
Exotic cats have become a particular kind of status symbol (in a recent Rick Ross video, a scantily clad woman alternately fondles hundred-dollar bills and a spotted cub), and people pay as much as thirty thousand dollars for the privilege of owning a hybrid that looks as if it could prowl the wilderness. Natalie Fraser, who runs a business in Oklahoma installing central-vacuum systems, bought her first Bengal when she was just finishing college. “It was definitely the exotic look” that enticed her, she said. She has since bought a second one, and a Savannah: “They look like something you’d find in Africa.” A half-wild cat is like a feline S.U.V.—an indicator that its owner is rugged and adventurous, if only in her habits of consumption.
Before Hutcherson started breeding Bengals, he had some truly wild cats, and “it didn’t work out so well.” In high school, he worked a summer job as a veterinary technician and saved up eight hundred dollars to buy a jungle cat, a native of Southeast and Central Asia. “It was friendly, but it pooped all over the house. My parents were, like, Cat’s gotta go.” His next cat was a caracal, an African lynx. “It was beautiful, but it was challenging,” he said. “Once it’s not a kitten, sixty pounds of cat that doesn’t do what you want it to do ain’t so cool. You can’t really, like, brush it off the counter.” In their native habitat, caracals hunt antelope. “A friend of mine bought it who lived in downtown D.C. in an apartment, and she had three Siamese cats. By the time it was a year old, it weighed about forty pounds, and it ate her three other cats. Just left, like, half the head. She was just doing what a wildcat’s supposed to do.”
Because of the risks associated with wildcats, part-wild hybrids are controversial. The Cat Fanciers’ Association does not recognize Bengals or any other hybrid breed. In New York State, it’s illegal to own a Savannah, unless it’s at least five generations removed from a wildcat. “There are, even to this moment, states like Hawaii that do not allow Bengals,” Hutcherson said. “There is a Bengal breeder in Ohio who had all her cats confiscated, because Animal Control there decided they were wild animals.” So breeders tend to be secretive. “There’s this kind of dividing line where we really have to emphasize domestic for policy and politics—versus the actual scientific truth,” he said. “It’s kind of like, What’s being black? People will have these really philosophical and long-drawn-out conversations about what
it is to be domestic, what it is to be wild. Can we call it a hybrid and be honest about what’s really in the past? And I’m, like, one drop: that’s all it takes. It’s how society views that one drop that can make it O.K. or not O.K. to be honest about what you are.”
Hybrid aficionados are aesthetes, but they are also excited by the suggestion of the primal. “Breeders, we tend to like the more extreme versions,” Hutcherson said—the equivalent of a domestic dog bred with a wolf. But he is skeptical of Savannahs, whose first-generation crosses can be the size of a tricycle. “That is fairly troublesome to me,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how domesticated your cat is. When they play or reach out or jump on you—a ten-pound cat who does that is one thing. A thirty-pound cat that does that, or scratches your daughter when she tries to pick it up, is a totally other thing.” It would be fine, he said, if people bred Savannahs to be small. “But there’s so much money to be made making them big. People are literally on waiting lists, paying ten, twelve, fifteen thousand dollars—for a cat.” He sighed. “I know many servals. They are a different character than leopard cats,” like the ones that his Bengals descend from. “Leopard cats are shy; servals are much more confident. They are intimidators. They play rough.”
“Margo, I think it’s time we talked about us.” (illustration credit 18.2)
Martin Stucki, the proprietor of A1 Savannahs, in Ponca City, Oklahoma, is prone to bluster, like a cat who makes his hair stand on end to exaggerate his size. “People either love me or hate me,” he said, and, if it’s the latter, “it’s jealousy. Me, I don’t know jealousy. If you are running the No. 1 cattery in the world, you’re doing something right.” There’s little agreement about which cattery is the world’s best, but Stucki, a Swiss-born former musician, has an undeniably impressive operation. He keeps seven helpers at work, bleaching the indoor nursery, where he has dozens of kittens in paper-lined wire cages, and checking on the hundred and twenty servals and Savannahs that he keeps in two enormous converted horse barns. For years, every cat he bred had its DNA mapped and recorded at Texas A. & M. University. On the day I visited, his wife, Kathrin, was delivering a cat to a client in Shanghai.
A1 is surely the most upscale business in Ponca City; Stucki advertises in Town & Country, and a Savannah can cost nine thousand dollars for a breedable male, or stud, and as much as thirty-five thousand for a female. But he resists talking about money. “A lot of the people say, ‘Oh! Nine thousand dollars for a cat?’ That’s not the point!” He added, “We have people who save for four years to buy one of our cats. Regular, hardworking, blue-collar people who say, ‘This is what I want! I want something exquisite—I don’t care if I don’t buy any new clothes this month.’ ” There is something powerful, he said, about “the desire to have something wild in your house.”
Stucki breeds Savannahs exclusively. “I had Asian leopard cats, I had caracals; I sold all of that, because I’m a firm believer that, if you do something, you specialize and you be the best,” he said. He pointed to an accordion on the kitchen table. “If I play music, I only play the accordion—I apologize, but I’m good at it. I know people, they play accordion, piano, and violin, but when it comes to the accordion? I say, Hey—I know what I’m doing.”
Stucki is very careful with his cats. A1 is the only cattery I visited that required a waiver to protect the proprietor if I was injured by an animal. Not that Stucki worries much about such things. He has two young children, and, in videos on YouTube, they roll around the kitchen floor with a Savannah named Magic, who was once listed in Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest pet cat. Therein lies one of the paradoxes of the hybrid-cat world: people who love these cats tend to boast in equal measure about their wildness and their tameness.
“The kid’s good.” (illustration credit 18.3)
In Benicia, California, Nicholas Oberzire, the owner of the Styled in the Wild cattery, introduced me to his prize cat: Big Kahuna, a muscular orange creature the size of a cocker spaniel, who resides in a tempered-glass cage attached to Oberzire’s house. Wire cages present a problem for studs. “They get their hands through, and they chew each other up fighting,” Oberzire explained. “There’s definitely still wild left in ’em. They can rip you to ribbons.”
Oberzire, an aeronautical-and-fuel-science engineer by profession, works with a relatively new breed called a toyger—a Bengal-domestic cross designed to look like a tiny tiger. He pointed out an iridescent quality in Big Kahuna’s coat, known to enthusiasts as “glitter,” and told me that it was the result of his wild blood. (Hutcherson insists that all the glitter in such hybrids can be traced to a feral cat named Millwood Tory, whom Jean Mill found sleeping in a rhinoceros pen at the New Delhi zoo.) Oberzire said that he takes Big Kahuna out to restaurants and to wine tastings, where he entertains the other patrons by roaring like a jungle cat. “He goes to the dog parks, but I keep him on a leash,” Oberzire said. “If a dog thinks he’s going to attack him, it’ll be the last thing that dog ever does.”
Oberzire has an eight-year-old son, who sleeps in a bunk bed next to a wall of caged cats. I asked Oberzire if he ever worried about his child getting hurt, but he was confident that his cats were perfectly trained. “No means no; gentle means gentle!” he said. “The claws retract on command.”
“You want to see something that’ll blow your mind?” he asked, and brought another toyger into a bathroom. He turned on the tap, and the cat leaped up on the sink to sip from the spigot. As I waited in silence for the trick, Oberzire turned to me expectantly and said, “I bet you’ve never seen a cat do that!”
Actually, I’ve seen both of my cats do that: cats like to drink running water, even if they don’t have a wild hair on their body. The expectation that cats can be made to change their nature, like wayward teens in a Scared Straight course, is a new development in feline-human relations. Humans bred dogs to be loyal and companionate; cats domesticated themselves. Biologists call them “commensal domesticates,” meaning that they can live with humans, and yet, unlike most other domesticated species, they can revert at any time to feral status. What you glean from the general feline vibe is evolutionary truth: cats can take us or leave us.
Recent DNA studies suggest that cats entered the human sphere during the Neolithic period, at the dawn of agriculture, when Felis silvestris lybica, the Arabian and African subspecies of wildcat, developed a high tolerance for living among people. (In 2004, researchers in Cyprus found a cat skeleton carefully buried with a human in a ninety-five-hundred-year-old grave.) As grain storage became common and mice became a problem, cats wandered into settlements in the Fertile Crescent. And when the technology of agriculture was transferred to other cultures cats went with it: the genetic fingerprint of all domestic cats can be traced back to the delicate wildcats that decided to improve the human experience with their presence about twelve thousand years ago. It was an anomaly; in 1903, the naturalist H. C. Brooke described the European wildcat, which is genetically almost indistinguishable from F. lybica, as “probably the least amenable of all living creatures.” But the adaptation was evolutionarily profitable; it provided a distinct survival advantage for those of the species who aligned themselves with humans. “Basically, some of them didn’t eat the children,” Stephen O’Brien, of the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, at St. Petersburg State University, said. “Eventually, they were invited into the living room.”
The mutation that encourages domesticity has never been found, but scientists on the Feline Genome Project—including O’Brien and a consortium of geneticists at U.C. Davis and the University of Pennsylvania—are looking for a “tameness gene.” The idea is borrowed from a Russian scientist named Dmitri Belyaev, who, in the late forties, became fascinated by the way dogs evolved to have coats different from wolves’. He had a theory that morphology was connected to temperament, and, as the director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, he initiated a fifty-year study of silver f
oxes. The foxes were given limited contact with their caretakers, and were scored on their friendliness. (One crucial measure was how often they bit the researchers.) Only the least fearful and least aggressive were bred. After thirty-five generations, Belyaev found, the tame foxes had a much higher than normal percentage of floppy ears and short or curly tails, and had lost the musky fox smell of their wild brethren. The tameness gene, it seems, brought with it a more doglike aspect. As the animals came to act less wild, they came to look that way, too.
But what hybrid-cat breeders are after is the most exotic look with the tamest possible temperament. In the end, the animals they produce are as far from wild as can be. At Styled in the Wild, Oberzire showed me a cat named Tiki Wild, who was lying in the sink next to several syringes and a bottle of oxytocin—the hormone that stimulates contractions during labor—suckling two day-old kittens. Oberzire lifted one of the thumb-size creatures away from her, and she didn’t protest. “This is the time when you see what you have,” he said. “You see the stripes? You see the white belly?” He gave the resigned Tiki Wild back her kitten.
Most breeders seem to love their cats, but there’s another impulse at work, too. It’s a tinkerer’s sensibility—the thing that H. G. Wells had in mind when his villain Dr. Moreau talked about his obsession with “the plasticity of living forms.” Pointing to Tiki Wild, Oberzire said, “We’ve gone through four miscarriages on this cat. The first was just blood. The second, two dead kittens were inside her. We took her to the emergency room, they charged me three thousand dollars for giving her two shots of oxytocin, and they told me she needed a C-section.” When he balked at the price, the vet suggested putting her down. “Well, that’s my favorite little girl! I said, ‘I’ll come and pick her up. Don’t worry about it: I have more drugs than you guys, I have more equipment than you guys have, and obviously more knowledge than you guys have.’ So I brought her home and I flushed her. I used a Massengill—your douche.” I was confused. “Human,” he explained. “I put a full tube of lube inside of her, and I let her sit for a day so she could get some more energy, because she was just about dead. The next day, I gave her about four times the amount of oxytocin.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 30
