A Game of Chicken

The first Cat Dispatch from a Dog Man.
​By Zach Hively

In times of crisis, we learn who we really are—and what really matters most. I, for instance, appear to value my snacks above even the rule of law and my own domestic bliss put together.
There’s a lot of context to unpack here. Let me simplify it:

• On one hand, I have an evolutionarily honed instinctive drive to protect my food from the grubby paws of predatory competitors. 
• On the other hand, I may have adopted three cats.
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I never set out to be known as a cat person. Neither did Dr. Seuss, Taylor Swift, or Odie the dog, but here we all are, lumped together in a Zach Hively piece about unsuspecting cat people.

And in the coming times—when we are all going to need uplifting stories about very different factions coming together for a greater good—you’ll be seeing a great many dispatches about how I, a dog man, am desperate for these cats to tolerate my existence.

Loving the cats is easy.

They are a package deal with a very lovely human who I am interested in having continued relations with. They look so soft when they steal her lap before I get to it, and they have—to my knowledge, and I think I’d know—not yet once puked in my shoes.*

*Which is a thing they, these specific cats, have done to other people before me.

The hard part, you’d think, would be not loving them. 

The hard part, in reality, is predicting them, because I don’t speak Cat.

English is my first language. Dog is my second. German third. My Cat is about as good as my Spanish: I barely even try to conjugate the verbs, but I can let myself think I understand some of the loan words, cognates, and food vocabulary.

​In active conversation, though, I slip easily into speaking Dog, where—at least in my dialect—food far back on the counter is safe, and anything falling off the counter is fair game for that brief moment between landing on the floor and either a) I cover it with my foot, or b) I remember just how little of an impediment swallowing is when speaking Dog.

At my co-human’s house, we really don’t worry much about food.

By “we” I mean, of course, “us humans.” One of the three cats in particular—let’s call her “Soks” because that is one of her many names—worries constantly that we have forgotten, are forgetting, and will continue to forget about the sacred offering of wet food.

I’m not used to this. I have two dogs who, put together, outweigh me, at least when I myself am not worshipping wet food. They do not insist on being fed. I have, on at least one occasion, forgotten to feed them entirely, and I received no formal grievances. The exception here is bread; I cannot eat a carbohydrate without suffering an onset of Toast Face.

Yet I also know what happens when, say, a hamburger or an entire rabbit is left unattended. It can disappear fully in the time it takes to get the mustard from the fridge. 

Many a cat, however—whose natural meals will scamper into a hole in the wall if given the chance—will turn up its nose at gourmet tuna purée because you served it on the wrong day of the week. 

I’ve seen it myself. Soks’ sister, Bug, once quit eating wet food because, and I quote, “So what if I ate that every day for the last eighteen months? It’s gross now.” And their brother, Beep, will not touch a mouse because texture.

​This pickiness works well for me, because I am not the one responsible for feeding the cats. Also, the cats will leave my human food unscarfed, unlike certain other furry canine creatures I could mention but won’t. I have never committed a felony, but if I did, it would be over someone interfering with my munchables.

Which brings us to a time of crisis.

I was already hungry. We co-humans had about forty-five minutes to get out the door for an evening of being around people, an evening with no hope of dinner until we came home in the double digit o’clocks.

I was washing up and heard a song from the kitchen, distinct from the cat-centric wet-food songs that will rouse Soks from a near-death stupor:

Chickie chickie chickie
Chickie for my Zach
Chickie chickie chickie
My Zach Zach needs a snack

My co-human, knowing I needed food for my own wellbeing but mostly for hers, had pulled some pre-cooked chickie from the fridge. I put it in a bowl. I decided not to microwave it, for the sake of time and also because warm chicken would make me want warm sides, and there was no time for that now.

The bowl was on the counter. This should not need to be described, but it is important for the sake of the one single, simple rule in this house, which translates from Cat as: TWELVE PAWS ON THE FLOOR.

I, being a literalist at times, need you to know that the rule is not actually twelve paws on the floor. It is zero paws on the counter. This is a sanitary rule, and also a safety one. The counter, to a cat, looks identical to the stovetop, which is sometimes hot, and vets are expensive.

I have sometimes been enlisted as the muscle to enforce this law. Because I want the cats to love me, I always whisper to them that it’s not my fault, but we’ll both be in trouble if we don’t comply.

At that, the cats usually give me a look that is not in a dog’s vocabulary.

But I put the remaining chickie in the fridge, which I think showed admirable restraint and forward-thinkingness to when we might—as happens—be hungry again later.

I said something sweet to my co-human that consumed my attention for not very many seconds, really.

And when I turned around.

There was Soks.

On the counter.

Eating my chickie.

I had to act fast.

And remember, Dog is my second language. There is no time for diplomacy with a dog. Not with chickie involved.

So I did what any good dog person would do: I put my foot over the chickie.

No, not really. Because—and this is generally foreign to a big-dog man—I’ve never had to cover food on the counter with my foot.

But I did snatch that bowl of chickie away from Soks faster than you could say pspsps.

It didn’t matter that it would take her a metric week to get through that whole bowl. It didn’t matter that the letter of the law states that the appropriate action in that moment is to sweep the purrrpetrator onto the floor. My instincts kicked in, and I reclaimed what was mine, rules be damned.

I did make amends.

Ahsoka was not flummoxed. She knows her place is secure.

Neither was my co-human. In fact, she laughed, and she laughed. She laughed at me, a grown-ass adult human man, defending my snackie snack from a fourteen-pound indoor cat.

And I? I gave Soks some little cat-bite-sized pieces of my chicken, which lured her onto my chair—a drastic improvement over her long-running stance that I don’t exist in any meaningful sense one way or another.

​It may not yet be love that she’s showing me. But remember, I speak fluent Dog. I know how to bribe for affection.