Road Apples
March 1, 2010


Flush, Felix! Use your salad fork, Spot!

By Tim Sanders

I received a huge response to last week’s column about the stupidity of cats. Oh, okay, so maybe that huge response only consisted of one email, but it was a very big email, full of several moderately large words, which became even larger–almost huge–when I increased their font size. It was from a young fellow named Troy Cummings, and went as follows:


Mr. Sanders,

I read your column about cats, and my mom and I disagree with you. We have a cat named Butch who mom has trained to do his business on the commode. We just leave the bathroom door open and he goes in and uses it whenever he needs to. She is training him to flush, but he hasn’t learned that yet. My dad doesn’t like Butch using the commode, because he’s afraid he’ll catch some cat disorder from Butch. Here is a photo of Butch sitting on the toilet. Mom says if you think dogs are so darned smart, she’d like to see you train a dog to do that.

Troy Cummings


Sure enough, Troy had attached a digital photo of a black and white cat perched on the side of a commode, with its hindquarters positioned above the target area. In that photo, Butch was humped up as though he was about to pass a massive, 3,000-page healthcare bill, and his ears were laid back in a way that convinced me he resented the whole ugly process being publicized. I’m not sure just exactly how Troy’s mom managed to train that cat, but from his expression in that photo, I’d think it would take an exceptionally brave woman to try to strategically position Butch, or any other tomcat, on the rim of that commode while he was trying to make a deposit.
I respectfully disagree with Troy’s implication that cats are smarter than dogs because they can be taught to use the commode. It has nothing to do with intelligence or training, only with the feline instinct to annoy. For some inexplicable reason, cats do not mind obeying a woman if the resulting behavior annoys a man. Cats can sense when something they’ve done aggravates a man, and if invading a man’s inner sanctum and soiling his porcelain altar works, then they will repeat the procedure. I would argue that Butch undoubtedly mastered that skill for no other reason than to aggravate Troy’s father. I can also guarantee that if Troy’s dad had attempted to teach that furniture scratching, furball hacking tapeworm-infested cat to use that commode, he’d have been swathed in bandages within an hour. By which I mean Troy’s dad. At worst, Butch would only have gotten wet.

Which is not to say that I think dogs are exactly intellectual creatures–they aren’t. We did have a very bright dog named Milo a few years ago. Once, while we were out of the house, she managed to subscribe to a magazine she thought would be interesting. Oh sure, you might say that there’s not a cat on the planet smart enough to subscribe to anything, and you’d be right. But Milo was no genius, either. When the first issue of that magazine arrived she was quite disappointed to learn that her “Opera” magazine was in fact the “Oprah” magazine. She loved opera, but hated Oprah. Sadly, her spelling left a lot to be desired.
To illustrate the need for people to humanize their pets a bit further, there was a very informative article in the February 17, 2010 edition of the St. Petersburg Times. The article, by Times Food Critic Laura Reiley, tells the story of several Dunedin, Florida families who’ve been attending the Tampa Bay area’s first “cooking for your dog” class at Dunedin’s La Maison Gourmet cooking school. Hey, dogs appreciate gourmet food, too, right? The recipe for “Moderate Veggie Cookies for Dogs,” for example, includes whole wheat flour, dried basil, cilantro, dried oregano, chopped carrots, cut green beans, tomato paste, canola oil, and mashed garlic. Yes, it requires a lot more time and effort and expense than simply busting open a bag of Milk Bones, but any dog with the sense God gave a Pekinese and the slightest knowledge of good nutrition knows just how tasteless a diet lacking in basil, cilantro, and oregano can be. You think a dog can’t discriminate between gourmet treats and Piggly Wiggly brand dog biscuits?

Well, some might argue that the notion of such refined taste buds being attached to a canine is silly. Any dog–any normal, non-commode-using dog who regularly goes looking for dead moles in the backyard to consume, who routinely uses his own tongue to clean his personal exhaust pipe area, and who quivers with joy when he finds a nice meal he’d recently disgorged out by the oak tree–that dog would probably not know a gourmet whole wheat, cilantro and oregano “moderate veggie” cookie from a rancid, week-old furball. And if he did, he’d undoubtedly prefer the furball.

We have a cat and a dog. We immunize them but we don’t anthropomorphize them. None of that “my pet is almost human” stuff for us. Our cat doesn’t get to use our commode, and our dachshund gets only dog biscuits and kibble. And as long as neither of them ever reads Troy Cummings’ email or hears about that silly St. Petersburg Times article, that’s how it’s going to stay.