Glancing out the side window, I see a beautiful dog (a golden retriever, I think) rolling and burrowing luxuriantly and playfully on a slope of thick green lawn next door. His master pauses for a few moments to indulge this exuberance, then pulls firmly on a red cloth leash in order to resume the walk. The dog seems to want to stay and go at the same time, and playfully bites and worries the leash.
It strikes me that the line of the leash is a physical and, as it were, geometric, expression (transmitter) of the will of the master.
I try to imagine a love for myself in this mode: an adult slave-child who is allowed a certain degree of latitude: enough to be his doggy self and for me at the same time; who revels simultaneously in freedom and slavery. (I'll give him a very long leash, or better yet let him range freely, but I'll expect him to come when I call.)
"Dog people" are as curious and alien to me as dogs are to a cat. Although I enjoy the beauty and playfulness of certain dogs, there is almost no cat, no matter how ugly, to which I am not instantly drawn. Watching their movements and expressions gives me a mesmerized delight, and it's hard to resist stroking them and playing with them. (I can submit the anecdotal evidence that cat worship may be genetic: I, my brother, and my mother are all cat people.)
Walking home from a bar in the wee hours, I'll catch sight of one slinking in some bushes, and I'll make a certain secret sound with my tongue and teeth which always arrests their attention as reliably as the chirp of a bird. Then I'll prostrate myself on the sidewalk (cat people know that this technique makes one's relative size less threatening) and make a worm of my finger or a scurrying animal of my hand - another tactic that attracts them involuntarily. (Of course they know it's a hand, but it still piques their desire to investigate more closely.)
Nearly always successful, I make of the little stranger an affectionate and flirtatious friend. (They are as capable of furtive seduction and desirous of pleasurable attentions as I am.) I get up and continue home without looking back, feeling the chagrin of a relationship that should begin and end so quickly, and wishing I carried with me a reward of some food for the exchange (solitary as I am, this may be one of the few chances I have to exchange pure physical affection with another creature).
Here's my biased take on dog people vs. cat people: the pleasure of the dog owner comes from a love that demands recognition as ultimate lord, master, parent (or that demands at least the dynamic between benevolent master and rebellious slave); whereas, with cats, it may appear as such on the surface, but if you know cats you know that any fawning behavior is performed with the ironic and manipulative intent of a courtier; that to the cat we are at best equals; and that any true love demonstrated to us is a love of equals.
This is not to say that cats are superior to dogs: I would sooner say that both are superior to us. This is simply by way of directing my stinger at the insufferable complacency of "dog people."
But of course the stinger stings both ways: one could just as easily propose that the pleasure of the cat person is still a master-slave dynamic, only with roles reversed.
And if you find offensive the thought that your cat may not truly love you in the same way you love it, consider this: if you were by some Disneyesque miracle suddenly shrunk to, say, an inch tall, do really think your cat would have any qualms about sporting cruelly with you before making a meal of you?
She'll know instinctively that, at that size, you'll never again be able to open a can.
[The title of this piece alludes to a disturbingly infantile and yet amusing site called I Can Has Cheezburger?]
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