Everything is Unnatural These Days
Despite the attempts by Elon Musk to turn the platform into a Nazi haven, I am still a real Twitter sicko (his mama named him Twitter, Imma call him Twitter), and often enjoy the ridiculous debates that arise there. “The Discourse,” so to speak. Earlier this year, I caused a bit of discourse myself when I tweeted that pets are enslaved. The backlash was enormous: I have never been called an idiot so frequently in a 48-hour period. Yet I was undeterred — the state of pets has had me pondering for a while. How should a person be in relation to their pet? Is a pet a child, or is it more of a sibling? What responsibilities do we have towards them? When fellow Lux editor Natalie Adler told me her friend Rebecca van Laer was writing a book, Cat, about her relationship with her cats, I knew I had to talk to her about why we’re culturally reluctant to consider the constraints that pets live under and whether she’s enslaving her pets. —Cheryl Rivera
CHERYL RIVERA I don’t know how much Natalie [Adler] told you about my thoughts — you know, about pets as slaves. I don’t mean it’s not fun and enjoyable to have a pet. Yet, I am disturbed by the sort of power we hold over our pets. I’m not quite sure that’s inherent to the relationship between cats and dogs, and humans. But I do think the way we’re living makes it true. Something interesting I learned from your book was that the prevailing way people like to talk about their relationship to their pets is parental. That’s not the relationship you have to your cats. When I say pets are slaves, part of it is that I think animals are actually people. But what kind of people are they to you?
REBECCA VAN LAER I agree with that and I agree that the way that we live with it can be a little disturbing. Discipline is something that I’m just really uncomfortable with, which is part of why I’ve ultimately decided I wouldn’t be a parent. Part of the whole thing with dogs is that they constantly have to be subjected to discipline in order to exist in human spaces. With cats, it’s kind of not an option. They’re not responsive to it.
Our current two cats — one of them I’m always saying is the the most important person in the household. He’s kind of this paragon of perfection, and we’re trying to do everything to make his life as luxurious and wonderful as possible. The other one, he wants to go into the basement. I don’t want him in the basement. But he often goes in the basement. I mostly just think of them as weird little guys who can only communicate what they want through yowling and that I try my best to take care of. But you’re sometimes rubbing against the fact that you can’t give them what they want or the fact that you just don’t know what they want or that it’s not available within the confines of the life they live.
CR You talk about the consciousness and language that cats have to try to communicate with us. I think that’s probably more widely true of many animals than people like to think, but I’m wondering what you think. Are cats a special case?
RVL In so far as communication, I don’t think so. I think that anthropomorphizing can be helpful because a lot of animals have pretty complex language structures, and they might know on some level that that doesn’t translate to us. But it doesn’t mean they’re not trying to communicate. We also have chickens and the chickens can really make their desires known through sounds and actions.
CR You’re also communicating with the chickens?
RVL I talk to the chickens, just like I talk to the cats. So many people talk about their pets like, “oh look at this orange cat with one single brain cell.” Or like, “oh, my dog is just a little idiot.” They have their own intelligence — that applies not just to cats and dogs, but also to chickens. It’s something people always tell me: chickens are really dumb. But they’re actually quite resourceful and if you spend any time with them, you start to see it.
I think it’s a real defense mechanism against how we treat animals, to deny their consciousness or complexity. Trees aren’t even animals and they’re pretty fucking smart. So maybe we could extend that to all animal life around us. Be open to observation and not think that everything that an animal does is random or driven merely by the instinct to eat food and survive, but by other things. All mammals play and dream. Once you realize that maybe you even feel bad about eating them, which is one reason people don’t like to think about it.
CR Do you ever engage in doggo culture? Is there a cat term that’s like doggo? Maybe it’s not comparable.
RVL I don’t think I do. I think of my pets as infinitely complex creatures. People love to share cat memes with me. Now that my book is coming out, most of them are cat respectful. But once in a while something about their idiocy comes through. I think it helps a lot of people to believe that their pets are pure and uncomplicated when they’re not. It’s a sort of fantasy life we live through them.
CR There’s a way in which animals were treated like perfectly content beings who are in alignment with their environment and static in their personhood. Like: “I love animals because they’re so much better and purer than humans.” I don’t know, I think sometimes animals can be evil. I’ve seen an animal be a dickhead! I’ve seen a cat form an evil thought.
RVL Oh, yeah. My partner, Steven, whose book comes out the day before mine, makes a point that we have a tendency to idealize nature. I feel like we’re often thinking through similar things, but in very different forms. He calls his work anti-pastoral. The idea of nature as this pure, nurturing, “other” space that we’re outside of. He thinks some of the problems of contemporary environmentalism come from the insistence on that separation and our unwillingness to acknowledge that there’s really no such thing as being “in harmony with nature”. It’s a constant struggle in nature. Everything is shaping itself up against everything else, and when we make it perfect and outside ourselves, maybe it actually limits our ability to protect the ecosystems. Because we’re not acknowledging their complexity.
CR Your relationship with your cats has clearly pushed your thinking on the larger topic of the environment. What made you want to write this book?
RVL I didn’t really know when I first pitched it — which was, at this point, an unimaginably long time ago — that it would all deal with my own choice of whether or not to have kids. And I also don’t think I knew that it would just have such an environmental component.
CR My other favorite provocative statement is that kids are slaves. I usually don’t say that one.
RVL I think I just got to a point where I realized that the fantasy of maternity or parenthood really was that you’re living with a disenfranchised person for a long time and that they may end up hating you at the end of it. It’s an incredibly ambivalent relationship for both parties. Like, best case scenario, you just mildly annoy them. None of that is at all appealing to me.
It’s a really overpowering cultural fantasy of permanence and unconditional love. And of legacy and futurity. That’s in contrast to cats. You outlive them. It’s a cycle of ongoing loss.
CR One of my nightmares when I fostered some cats for a few months was that their mother [ed note: her words!] was never going to come back to get them. These are young cats. 20 years they might live, and they might hate me. Could they hate me for 20 years? They did come around to liking me in the four or five months I had them, but there was a moment where I was really, like, oh my god.
RVL Funny, because I feel like unconditional love is not a thing.
CR Yes, we know you’re not guaranteed that from a child, but people really want that. But it is something that we think pets do unconditionally.
RVL You can only be sure of giving it. As far as the receiving goes… I’ve had my cat Gus for 13 years and he vastly prefers my partner to me. He often just steps on me on his way across to my partner, and if he pauses, I’m like “wow.” He just does not love me as much, and he’s made that abundantly clear. And I’ve had other cats that haven’t really liked anyone, so that’s a possibility too.
CR What were you hoping for when you wrote the book?
RVL I think I just wanted to write something really beautiful as an ode to my cat and as I wrote it, it changed a little bit. I’m hoping that other readers wrestle with the unacknowledged side of the life of pets broadly and specifically. There are many of them, more than we know what to do with, all over the world. To get anywhere with that, we need to start thinking; to not only read cozy cat books and think they’re perfect little angels.
CR As you said, there’s a psychological reason we can’t really confront the fullness of cats. And that’s because the confrontation of that fullness really precludes thinking through solutions for the massive numbers of cats we have and the completely incompatible ways we have of living in dignity with them. Not only cats, but other animals as well. Pet slavery — I think that tweet came from when I was like, I have to get these cats I’m fostering neutered. And that’s really fucking weird. Like, obviously, I’m doing it, but isn’t it weird that I have to constrain the reproductive capacity of this animal because of the ways that we have created this whole relationship?
RVL A lot of pet owners don’t want to even do that because it’s unnatural. But like, you know? Everything is unnatural. Everything is unnatural these days.
CR That’s the title of this newsletter interview. Everything is unnatural these days. So instead of us pretending there’s some sort of utopic version that we can return to the naturalness of the world, I think people gotta accept we made these pets. We have these cats. We’re in a relationship with them. And it can’t just be memes of our cutesy bootsy babies.
Rebecca van Laer is the author of a memoir, Cat, and a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark. Her work appears in Joyland, The New England Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and lives in the Hudson Valley.
Cheryl Rivera is an editor at Lux, and a co-founder of the movement center Another World and abolitionist group Crown Heights CARE Collective. She won’t shut up about pet slavery.