Igor, the sweetest doofus in the entire world, wrapping himself around my head while purring up a storm.
It’s so strange having a kitten who feels, emotionally and practically, like raising a son. I never expected to have parental feelings over a cat, especially since my last cat (of roughly 17 years together) was the one who had parental feelings over me. But Igor has treated me like a mama cat from day one(1), and I treat him like some cross between a kitten son and a human son.
Like, I’m not one of those people who treats cats like lifelong babies, which is an attitude that really freaks me out. Or someone who treats cats like humans in general. But I’m also not one of those people who assumes that specific traits must only exist in humans and that anything less than seeing animals as dumb robots driven only by “instinct” and humans as driven by “intelligence”, and that animals don’t have deep and complex feelings, or assorted other abilities that they very definitely have (or can have), etc.
But it’s very hard not to relate to him as human-like in some ways. In particular his intellect. I don’t mean he’s smarter than other cats -- he’s very smart, but that’s not what I mean. I mean the shape of his intelligence is primate-like in a way I almost never see in cats. He puts ideas together in a way I’ve seen in humans, apes, monkeys, and some kinds of birds, but not usually cats. Everyone responds to him as if he’s human -- I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t at some point start earnestly and elaborately explaining something to him only to catch themselves and realize they’re trying to use complex sets of words to talk to a kitten(2). And some people on just meeting him have told me that they instinctively want to pay him the kind of attention that they personally rarely pay to cats and usually pay to humans, whenever he’s in the room. One person (whose religion believes in reincarnation) told me he was probably human (and possibly a scientist) in at least one of his past lives.
But his wisdom on the other hand is pure cat. When he shows wisdom, he shows what I call kitten-wisdom, and it’s a form normally found in cats, that I can’t describe or explain very well. It’s very endearing especially given that he’s such an enormous doofus in some ways. And yet you’ll see this pure earnest kitten-wisdom shining out of him at the most unlikely of moments. Which is one thing that makes him resemble Arhu.
I love my little weirdo. (And I can say that, I’m a big weirdo. In fact one especially weird thing about him is that he would completely fit into the level and even the type of weirdness and eccentricity shown by actual blood relatives. And yes he’s plenty weird for a cat, too.) And a cattish human and a humanish cat do surprisingly well together.
(1) Cats are very gender-divided and not as a rule very paternal. (They don’t usually kill their own kittens, though. If they do kill kittens, they generally try to kill kittens that are not their own, to give their own kittens a better chance.) Kittens are raised by their mothers, and sometimes also by an assortment of female friends and relatiives of their mothers as well. (Sharing kittens, among many other benefits, keeps the toms confused about whose kittens are whose, and less likely to kill them.) There are tomcats who get involved with the childcare but even when that happens the bulk of the care is done by the mother (and other queens). So generally if a kitten is relating to you like you’re their primary child-raiser, they’re relating to you like a mother, not a father, regardless of your gender. (Or like an aunt or mom’s best female friend and the like, but still basically a maternal figure.)
(2) He clearly knows some words, and I’ve made an effort to teach him as many as he’ll absorb. I don’t think he understands long strings of sentences but I figure he might understand the tone and other things conveyed nonverbally, while catching a few words here and there. But you never know. Especially with Igor, who is a very strange cat. If prairie dogs can have complex vocabularies, I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that he could understand more words than I give him credit for, but my guess is he has a large vocabulary for a cat but a small vocabulary by far for a human. But given he gets a lot out of being talked to -- regardless of which element of conversation and attention he’s responding to -- I don’t at all mind the fact that people are constantly talking in depth to him about stuff he’s doing or curious about.