A random Friday morning post while waiting on the roasting vegetables, getting ready laundry, cleaning the floors, desk work.
A person I once knew recently began what appears a successful university course on animal and human interaction. Now, yes, there’s a lot that has been explored there, a very interesting topic. How many books, not just academic, have been written. It seems way too obvious that more will come.
In midst of my cooking and cleaning and life organizing, NPR played recordings from a seventies-so documentary about whales’ cries, and the man who made that film, interviewed on NPR, used the term “whale speak”. In itself a pretty delightful set of words…”whale speak”.
But, what was coolest. My Crazy Cat Oliver heard those streaming whale voices and paid the most tail-flicking, ears-upright, what’s-that-laptop saying, attention to the whales. No doubt whatever that he was fiercely listening. I, the human, just watched the inter-species-by-Internet interaction. Inter-species-by-Internet. Gosh.
Cat Oliver also becomes so utterly content in his tree pod when the laptop streams Mozart, Stravinsky, and yeah, OK, George Harrison, Bob Marley, while I am cooking and cleaning. So the cat likes depth music, thump thump, and those sensitive human guys.
Peaceful-streaming-happy-Internet cat, his human doing last of summer harvest, laundry, floors, and the gunky stuff plus desk work while cat watches, listens, snoozes in his inter-species OK-ness.
Cat Oliver very, very aroused by black squirrels outside the window. Inter-species but not by Internet. My late dog Gunther, same thing, chasing like nobody else’s speed, rabbits in the yard. Inter-species but not by Internet, just racing paws tearing up the ground..
(Oh aside. Probably Google, reading what I put up in this space, gave me search results of “animal interference” (not my term and not what I ever looked for, oh well Google) into major league baseball games. Squirrels, cats, hawks, seagulls, making the players and the fans just giggle, clap hands, and so enjoy the interspecies interaction.)
(Oh aside. Trevor Noah on rescue rats. Rescue rats, cute, yes cute, with little tiny rat-packs, trained to find human disaster survivors.)
(Oh aside. When I was much younger, yup, I had that girls’ love of horses. Maybe my Mother will get a smile if she knows that I remember she promised that if I would “agree” to move to our family’s new (and goodness, wonderful home), I would get one. I didn’t, but when my Father went for business trips he pretty much always brought back for me a horse book. My Mother bought for me horse books from the elementary school book club and for birthday and Christmas gifts, and they are not in storage but rather on my book case still right now.)
(Oh aside. Many decades ago my Father hunted sometimes. After, Dad was skinning a deer in the basement and I watched and heard my Brother, very young then, ask “what about his mother”. Our Dad quit hunting for good. And to this day I still cannot stand the film Bambi.)
Did use the kitchen sprayer on a spider today. Me, fan of May Berenbaum, entomologist at University of Illinois School of Integrative Biology, the best bug professor, felt a little interspecies-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-do-this. Cat Oliver much interested in spider until down the drain it went. And I’ll sleep without creepy crawly wake-ups. But didn’t want to do, for sure.
Then, cricket sounds outside open window late night in late October.
Dayna Finet 