Notes: Going to the Cats
EVERY DECADE OR so the United States of America crosses some portentous new threshold that symbolizes the nation’s evolution from one kind of society into another. It crossed one after the Second World War, when for the first time in history American men bought more belts than they did suspenders. It crossed another in the mid-1950s, when the number of tractors on American farms for the first time exceeded the number of horses. Now, in the 1980s, the country faces a new demographic reality: the number of cats in American households is rapidly overtaking, if it has not already overtaken, the number of dogs. According to the Pet Food Institute, a Washington-based trade association, there were about 18 million more dogs than cats in the United States as recently as a decade ago, but today there are 56 million cats and only 52 million dogs. Actually, because millions of unregistered dogs and cats—the illegal aliens of the animal kingdom—go uncounted, it may be that dogs still maintain a slight edge. But sales of dog food are holding steady, whereas sales of cat food have been increasing in recent years at an annual rate of five to eight percent. The trend is clear.
This is not the place to dredge up all the old arguments on the relative merits of cats and dogs, friend of the mouse though I am. But it does seem to me that the displacement of Canis familiaris by Felis catus might tell us something larger about the condition of the republic, much as from a single drop of rain (to cite Sherlock Holmes’s famous example) one might infer the existence of oceans. Consider an America congenial to the dog: it was a place of nuclear or extended families, of someone always home, of children (or per) looked after during the day by a parent (or owner), of open spaces and family farms, of sticks and leftovers, of expansiveness and looking outward and being outside; it was the America of Willa Cather and Lassie and Leon Leonwood Bean. Consider an America conducive to the cat: it is a place of working men and women with not much time, of crowded cities, of apartment buildings with restrictive clauses, of day-care and take-out food, of self-absorption and modest horizons; it is the America of Tama Janowitz and Blade Runner and The Sharper Image catalogue.
These generalizations may, I suppose, be extreme, but they are prompted in part by the new, 1987 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which I recently received in the mail. This may be the best book the government publishes, and I wish I could earmark my taxes every year to pay the salary of its editor. According to the Abstract, here is some of what has happened to the country from the time when dogs were an overwhelming majority of household pets (I’ve chosen the early to middle 1970s) to the present day: the amount of land claimed by cities Increased by 191,795 square miles, or 49 percent; the number of people living in cities increased by 35 million; the number of households consisting of only one person doubled, to 21 million, and as a proportion of all households increased by 41 percent; the number of families headed by only one parent more than doubled, to 7 million, and as a proportion of all families increased by 100 percent; the proportion of childless couples with both partners in the labor force increased by 9.5 percent; the proportion of working couples with children under three increased by 56 percent; the proportion of new houses having no more than two bedrooms doubled, and the average size of new housing units shrank by nineteen square feet; the number of people living in a typical rental unit declined by 13 percent, to 2.0, and the number living in the average occupantowned unit declined by 16 percent, to 2.5; the number of miles Americans traveled (including going to work) increased by 631 billion; the amount of money spent on fast food increased by 153 percent; membership in the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts declined by 25 percent. The Abstract carries a lot of other suggestive data. It provides a recipe, so to speak, for cats.
I do not propose that we attempt to redress the balance. To be sure, I can imagine certain developments, such as a dramatic worsening of the many social and physical ills with which dogs so nobly help us cope, that might foster a resurgence of the canine population, but this prospect is not, on the whole, very inviting. By the same token, I can imagine expedient ways of reducing the feline population to rough parity with the canine one, although perhaps not without harm to the country’s liberal democratic traditions. In the end, I think, there is no turning back the clock. As one who has shaken hands with Rin Tin Tin, I mourn the loss of what was good about dog America. But I accept the inevitability of cat America, and all that this implies about life-styles and public policy. I will be surprised indeed if, after the electorate has spoken in 1988, the next First Pet enters the White House on anything other than little cat feet.
—Cullen Murphy
