When I come home from work, Chloe is in the window, waving frantically and meowing. I enter the house and she jumps into my arms, burrowing her head into the crook of my neck. Annie saunters into the room and rubs against my ankles, purring loudly. Chloe, the little drama queen, is as emotional as a furry Edith Piaf. “Mon Dieu! Annie is un diable! She roars at me! She bares her claws! Sacré bleu! I am desolée!”
Annie looks up at us, a deceptively sweet smile plays on her little kitty lips. “Just wait, ma chère,” she seems to say to Chloe. “Just you wait. Your protector is here now, but she’ll go back outside sooner or later. She’ll leave you alone, unguarded, sans protection. And then you’ll be mine, all mine to torment.”
Annie trips blithely upstairs. Chloe jumps from my arms. She flops onto her back and I rub her belly. I start upstairs, Chloe at my heels. She runs happily ahead of me, then stops cold on the landing. Annie crouches in the upstairs hall, barring Chloe’s passage. I don’t know how tiny Annie has the power to intimidate Chloe, who is twice her size, with a glance, but she does. Poor Chloe slinks back downstairs.
“Why do you threaten poor Chloe?” I ask Annie who is now sitting beside me on the bed while I change out of my work clothes. “What is your problem with aggression?”
“A gression?” Annie looks at me arrogantly. “I have several gressions, many, many gressions. They’re my fondest possessions. I will never give them up. And I keep them with my other treasures under your bed.”
Maybe the power differential is explained by the fact that Chloe has been declawed while Annie still has her talons. She uses them against Chloe to great effect, swiping her savagely at every opportunity. Sometimes I’ll come home to find Chloe hiding behind the sofa, huge clumps of her hair on the carpet.
I go back downstairs to cook dinner. Chloe looks at me imploring, twining around my legs and considering her prospects. “May I have a pearl handled derringer for Christmas, please? Just a feminine, dainty, single-shot model. It would even the playing field.”
“No, Chloe! We try to be peaceful creatures in this house. Even if we don’t succeed," I say, looking at Annie who is peering around the kitchen door, growling softly. "For heaven’s sake, I’m a Quaker! A derringer could be fatal.”
“I wouldn’t kill her; I’d just wing her.” She looks at me hopefully.
My friend Ed suggested that I offer to buy Chloe a Taser gun. “So she could stun Annie,” he suggested helpfully. “It’s not lethal, but it’s effective.”
Still, I hope for a weapon-free solution. When Annie unleashes her gressions savagely, I stand between her and Chloe, hoping the situation will defuse. Fat chance!
Cats are the queens of displaced aggression. They see a threat outside the window and react by attacking a catnip toy indoors. I protect Chloe from her foe by warning Annie sternly, “No gressions!” while standing between the two. After Annie leaves the room, Chloe thanks me with an angry hiss and a swat of her declawed paws before raising her tail like a battle flag and prancing to her window perch where she sits looking outside and ignoring me pointedly, a portrait in disdain.
"This is a marvelous world, full of beauty and splendor; it is also an unrelenting and savage world, and we are not the only living things prone to dominate if given the chance. . . We have no reason to be either arrogant or complacent: one look at the stars or through a microscope is sufficient to quell such notions. But we have to accept our positon in the world with as much responsibility and fortitude as we can muster, and try to grow up to our measure of love in this tangle of prospects and torments.”
Quaker Faith and Practice, Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers in Britain). Warwick, England, 1995, 25:08.
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