9:34am Tuesday 31st August 2010
By Helen Mead
“THAT cat is like a dog.” My neighbour tells me this every time he sees me walking along the street with our ginger tom a few paces behind.
I’ve come across a few people out walking with cats, who, like dogs, will follow you on a stroll. The difference – and this is why they don’t make the best walking companions – is that they start to get twitchy once outside their familiar territory. They ‘wowl’ and sit down every few seconds, usually in the middle of the road.
Of course, there are exceptions. Our first cat, a raggy black and white male, had a huge territory and would have done the Pennine Way with you providing he got fed en route.
Walking together is, in my opinion, where the similarity between cats and dogs ends.
I’m 100 per cent a cat person and, for a variety of reasons, I would choose one in preference to a dog any day – but I can’t pretend that my cat loves me.
He knows the sound of my car and will come to the end of the drive to meet me, he will follow me around the house during the day and always comes to sit on my knee. But he is not loyal and devoted like a dog to his master.
While on holiday, two of my kindly neighbours took over the feeding for a few days each. My cat quickly latched on to the fact that he was getting food from neighbour number one, and would regularly appear in her kitchen.
Once neighbour number two started, he began to wait on her doorstep and under her car. But he still carried on visiting neighbour number one, trying his luck for an extra feed. “He’s not daft,” she told me.
It hurts me to say it, but cats are brimming over not with love, but cupboard love. They go where the food is and are loyal only to their stomachs.
Disturbingly, I recently discovered my cat seems to know where the food is in every cat-owning home in the street. At the weekend he raced past one of my neighbours as she stood in her doorway chatting to me, and made a beeline for her cats’ food bowls.
It was very embarrassing. And as if that’s not bad enough, another of my neighbours recounted how she was having a shower when she had a Bates Motel moment and heard noises as if someone was in the bathroom. She cautiously peeped around the curtain to see my cat prowling around. A clear-cut case of a peeping Tom.
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