Budapest shop cat. © 2017 Jen Burke Anderson
The more I see of this president, the more intelligent I’m starting to think animals are.
This is not, by association, to insult animals in any way. Nor to romanticize them. The animal kingdom is as cruel as it is beautiful. It’s just that there is something to be said for a silent intelligence that can never be fully apprehended.
As this administration drags on, minute by minute, hour by hour, my ascendant urge is to sit down and talk with a housecat for a couple of hours.
There is a reason that malicious neighborhood idiots the world over poison cats. They correctly intuit that cats, on some plane of existence, are their intellectual superiors. Such people gleefully and repeatedly point out the fact of the cat’s peanut-sized brain, which of course misses the point entirely. Any animal’s intelligence lives in its entire body, in its movement, attuned response, and self-inhabitation. Cats are nature’s insult to stupidity. Therefore idiots must destroy them.
Hunting as a moral issue makes a fascinating debate, but setting that aside, there’s something singularly revolting about the image of soon-to-be presidential sons posing with their big-cat kill on safari hunt in Africa in 2012. The image appeared on the site Hunting Legends, was leaked to social media, and has been making the rounds ever since.
The creature draped over Eric Trump’s arm, even in death, is noble and magnificent. He and his brother, in contrast, wear expressions that are brightly self-satisfied, yet babyish and uncomprehending.
Animal-rights advocates are often dismissed as precious, overheated eccentrics. Yet images like this, along with our own encounters with the animals in our lives, can make even the stoic among us wonder who on this earth is truly dominant.
© 2017 Jen Burke Anderson