Earlier this year, cats became the preferred pet in North American households for the first time in History. Most office and bookstore pets are cats too. For every dog that gets a scratch behind the ear, three cats will get the same. For years, feline progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to cats? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.
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| "I'm game if you are" the little goomba seemed to say. |
In his final book,
The Tennis Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Monsieur Grumbles describes the changing pet dynamics of Ouaf, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The hunting dogs once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Ouaf. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive hunting game once had, the dogs felt obligated to hunt it. Meanwhile, modern cats shunned farm life, lured away by mice and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional "flinging of the tennis balls", but the dogs who awaited them had lost their prestige. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Grumbles describes in his book: at the tennis ball, the dogs, self-conscious about their diminished status, sit stiffly, their paws by their sides, as the cats twirl away at balls of thread.
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| Parallel distraction - a problem common enough in today's digital society. Is it over here? Is it over there? The question - pertinent! Does this painting represent the disintegration of the self back into the animistic conception of multiple spirits? Does it foreshadow the rhizomatic de-structuring of our species into parallax courses of cybernetic technology and computerization? Or a cat? Probably a cat. |
Dogs dominate just two of the 15 pet categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: purse-pet and training reality tv-show pet. Cats have everything else—cute pet, YouTube pet, internet meme, pet in novels. Many of the new categories “replace the things that cats used to do on the streets for free.” None is especially high-paying in snacks. But the steady accumulation of these pet-jobs adds up to an economy that, for working pets, has become more amenable to cats than to dogs.
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Muslim Integration.
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Near the top of the pets pyramid, of course, the upward march of cats stalls. Prominent cat celebrities, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities, and most of us can tick off their names just from occasionally reading the business pages: Maru, icanhascheeseburger, OMGcat etc. Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have cats, and the number has never risen much above that.
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| "I know all there is to know of conflict and killing. I know how to swing my paws to left and right, and how to use my teeth sturdily in a fight. I know how to dash among the charging chariots drawn by the swiftest mares, and I know how to tread the measure of angry Ares in close encounter. Yet I’d not strike secretly at a goose like you, but openly, and hope to hit you." |
Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of cats in crude pet stereotypes: cats as less empathetic, as worse consensus-seekers and better thinkers; cats as bringing a questionable moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the ’90s, this field of cat-ist theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between caninity and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of dogs, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional pet map: dogs on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and cats on the side of the cool and levelheaded.
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| Misse/Luttine! Masculine/Feminine! Black/ White! L'Allegro / Il Pensoro! Woof / Ouaf! |
IF YOU REALLY want to see where the world is headed, of course, looking at the current pet workforce can get you only so far. demographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by cat owners. The Country Hunting Hound, meanwhile, master of wild beast and wild country, seems too far-fetched and preposterous even for celebrity gossip. His modern equivalents are the stunted dogs in Paris Hilton's purse.
American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega dog, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, intellectually challenged loser can show up as a perpetual goofball, or a happy couch potato. He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a DOG. The American Hounddog novelist has lost his mojo and entirely given up on hunting as a way for his characters to assert canine dominance. The current play style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than the chase, the cuddle preferable to the kill.
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| "This is the eternal goofiness of things" a wise poet once said. Even in the midst of our highest attentiveness, our hunting posture is, I'm afraid, hilarious. Not that you aren't doing a good job, my doughty hound Pascal. You are completely on the right track. The creature is right there. But to us, I'm afraid, your bug-eyed concern and sausage tail, your splayed posture and patchy demeanour are only too silly. |
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