Living with dogs, chosen by cats - 'A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me' and 'The Character of Cats: The Origins, Intelligence, Behavior, and Stratagems of Felis silvestris catus' - Book Review

Animals, Fall, 2002 by Sy Montgomery

A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me. By Jon Katz. 200 pages. Villard. $21.95 hardcover.

Jon Katz is the kind of guy whom you might find (as a local cop did at 6:30 one morning) lying on a sewer grate in the street in the pouring rain, flailing down the stinking hole with a pooper-scooper.

To Katz, this seemed a perfectly fine place to be at the moment: after all, his beloved yellow Labrador retriever, Stanley, had dropped his favorite hall down there months ago, and happily, with the spring storm, the toy had just resurfaced. What else was a dog lover to do?

It's easy to love Stanley and Julius, Katz's two beautiful, loving, dignified, Zen-calm yellow Labs. But what about a wild, stubborn, frantic dog whose very breed is often described as high-strung, unstable, obsessive, and neurotic?

Such a dog is Devon, a two-year-old Border collie whom Katz describes as "equal parts manic and panic" but nevertheless adopts over the objections of his wife and the initial astonishment of his two Labs.

Devon chases buses, leaps atop moving minivans, and races in front of large vehicles in a misguided attempt to herd them. Abused as a pup, Devon is emotionally scarred yet diabolically smart. He figures out how to open the refrigerator. He gets out of the fenced backyard, then connives to hide the evidence. (Katz snuck back into the house to see how: Devon raced to each slat of the fence, found a loose one, pushed it to the side, and squeezed through. The dog then turned around and pushed the slat back into position.) This Border collie even manages to nose his way into Katz's lunch bag, unwrap the sandwich, and remove and eat the ham, leaving the cheese and bread untouched.

So naturally, Katz adopts another one.

This is the story of how Katz's middle-aged, suburban routine is transformed by the lives and deaths of canine companions. At turns funny, sad, and revelatory, this book is worthy of the extraordinary dogs that inspired it. Katz's narrative is written with conversational flair, and his observations are often wise and always honest. It's as much fun as a rawhide chew flip. You'll love it.

The Character of Cats: The Origins, Intelligence, Behavior, and Stratagems of Felis silvestris catus. By Stephen Budiansky. 227 pages. Viking. $24.95 hardcover.

"There are no search-and-rescue cats, guard cats, Seeing Eye cats, bomb-detecting cats, drug-sniffing cats, escaped-convict-tracking cats, sheep cats, sled cats ..." begins Stephen Budiansky's The Character of Cats. And this is a matter of considerable relief for Budiansky, who writes about animals from the standpoint of genetics, brain chemistry, evolution, and social behavior.

His previous book, The Truth about Dogs, garnered critical praise but also angered dog lovers, incensed to find their best friends' loyalty and love reduced to adaptive strategies and genetically programmed mechanisms. For cats, though, this approach works just fine because, as he writes, "no one has any illusions about cats. Cats are cats, and any real cat owner knows it."

Although cats are the least tamed of common domestic animals, more of them live in American households than any other pet. And therein lies just one of the mysteries that this fascinating and levelheaded book delves into.

Cats are not, Budiansky argues, truly domesticated. Almost every other tame creature--from the dog to the horse--came to our homes under very specific circumstances, unlike the cat. And while the progenitors of other pets and livestock changed in response to the company of humans, cats are still essentially wild.

Cats are endowed with the brainpower to follow and anticipate the motion of fast-moving prey. Yet "trying to actively train a cat sometimes carries with it a bit of the feeling of trying to reason with a hysterical person." There is good reason for this, and that is the heart of the book: Budiansky explores what makes a cat a cat and why their sometimes frustrating behaviors are also key to their success--both as predators and as pets.

"A cat who was totally a creature of human desires and ambitions would cease to be a cat," the author concludes. "The beauty and fascination we find in cats are much the same as what we feel for the wildest things in nature."

Sy Montgomery is a contributing editor for Animals.