Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

The more I tend to love an animal, the more I project my neuroses and anxiety onto them.

I think this is true of animal love in general. The people who love animals the most tend to eventually believe that animals are just like them, think like them, and know them inside and out..

The e-flap over Zip being cold and coming inside is an excellent example of how I sometimes – even though I know better – assume that animals feel the way I do about things and feel the way I feel.

Scores of cat lovers wrote to Maria and me to argue that Zip must be cold and should be permitted to come into the house.

They sincerely believed he must be suffering the way people suffer. Maria didn’t buy it, but I became increasingly worried about him.

He’s a small cat and a young one, and since I could barely go outside in this subzero weather, I thought he MUST suffer and I argued for a heated cat house in the big barn. Maria agreed, mostly because she saw I was worried.

I was worried because I put aside my own experience and knowledge of animals and succumbed to my anxiety, for which I have been treated all of my life. This is because I love Zip and want to ensure he is well cared for.

But it was clear to me yesterday and today that Maria was right and so are my original ideas about animals.

Since we turned on the heat in the barn, Zip has spent very little time in there, racing around the farm, looking to hunt, hunting, hoping for a scratch or a cuddle.

This morning, it was just below zero, and I was freezing. Zip was on the back porch sunning himself. He was comfortable, playful, and quite relaxed.

When he came to the door to look for me, as he always does in the morning it was not clear he was looking for me or Maria to feed him. Once he is fed, he goes off about his own business. If the cold bothers him at all, he doesn’t know it.

When it is coldest, Zip lies in the sun, not sitting by the door. He is fat and happy and healthy. I misread him out of love.

I guess – I don’t know – that he might have spent some time in the heated cat house.

Why not? He was hanging around hoping for food, not entry to the house to be warm. animals do get hungry in the cold.

I’m sure he enjoyed the heated cat house, but there’s no evidence that he needed it. The people who wrote to me and Maria about our cruelty and callousness for keeping Zip outside were, I believe, mostly just wrong.  Second guessing other people is one of Social Media’s great sports.

They were doing what I have argued about for years and mostly avoided – anthropomorphizing animals and projecting our feelings and concerns onto them.

I can’t speak for anybody else’s cat – I am sure some cats need a heated house to sleep in. But Zip is not one of them.

As is often the case, the problem is the human animal lover, who constantly struggles against the false idea that animals are just like children to us and that we need to treat them in the same way. That would be me this round.

There’s no harm on its own in getting a heated cat house for stray and outdoor cats or barn cats. The only harm it can do is to continue the epidemic of emotionalizing that has swept the pet and animal world. Like Boomer children, animals are not allowed to have their own problems, we have to fix all of them .

It isn’t good for them, even if it feels good to us. Overeating is one of the leading causes of death for dogs.

The people who love them often worry that they have enough to eat and shower them with unhealthy treats and medications.

I know better than to listen to all of the amateur vets out there, but as often happens, the thing I needed to consider was me, not him.

I love this cat quite a bit, which triggers the human need to put our needs and fears aside onto our dogs, cats, and even donkeys. Something chemical turns on inside our brains and tells us our worries are theirs. I’ve had barn cats for years, and I never thought of getting a heated cat house for them until they were ancient and fading. It was like our hospice for cats.

I suppose this is one of the reasons hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats are now on Prozac, something they didn’t need for thousands of years.

Bud is just fine outdoors.