This week I am reading Stephen W. Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time. On
the first page it asks, "What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to
an end?" My immediate response was, "Only in our minds."
Then my mind began playing tricks on me. I began wondering
if other animals experience a sense of time passing. I decided that some do,
but probably not in the same way as humans do. Dogs and cats, for instance,
seem to experience it in a limited way, or perhaps that's just MY limited
perception. Perhaps they experience it in an expanded way compared to ours.
(Offhand, I would say that: [1] Pets never use an alarm clock to interfere with
natural sleep cycles. [2] Nor do pets overcommit; only humans, with our
complicated minds, are foolish enough to do that!)
So while pets don't use human-style markers to denote the
passage of time (days, months, years), they probably have marker systems of
their own, perhaps based on concrete rather than abstract phenomena. (I'm
thinking of cats that seem to know roughly when their owners will return home
from work, or, even more concretely, those that spray certain locations to mark
their territory.)
How about seasons, though? Or growth cycles? Some
interval-markers are beneath the level of conscious behavior, as anyone who has
ever witnessed an animal shedding its winter coat or outgrown skin can attest.
In any case, I wonder how the cat concept of time differs substantially from
the dog's, or the Westernized human's. My cat Judy, whom I lived with for over
15 years, would become increasingly fraught the longer her "human"
was away on travels, though after a certain point (based on anecdotal evidence
from cat-sitters), her sense of anxiety or grief flattened out somewhat, and
she seemed to adjust to the presence of the sitter in her environment.
Of course, I don't really know how my cat perceived time,
and I'm probably just projecting my human experience onto her feline one. Yet I
know that most pets, like most people, eventually adapt to the absence of
certain humans and the presence of new ones. Cats in particular seem more put
off by the presence of new cats than the absence of humans because the former
is tied to their territorialism. They will far more readily claim a new human
than cede territory to another cat. And they can certainly make their feeding
time known to any available human by encroaching upon said human's aural,
visual, and physical turf!
Have you noticed how I can't seem to talk for long about
time without invoking space?
I don't "do" regret, yet if there is one incident
in my life for which I harbor any regret, it is for the circumstances surrounding my cat Judy's death. I could not keep her because she never adapted
successfully to being housed with my partner's cat when we all moved in
together in 2001. After a year of constant catfights and bodily function
messes, I finally gave up. I had her checked out, then gave her antibiotics
orally for two weeks 
(which was about as much fun as we used to have together
with flea-baths). Once she had a clean bill of health, she continued to spray,
so I gave her to a catless friend who wanted companionship. Since there was no
longer another cat's scent to "spray over," Judy no longer sprayed,
but the friend gave her back two weeks later nonetheless, after Judy bit her
one night when my friend rolled over in her sleep. ("There's only room in the
apartment for one alpha female," she told me, although she was gracious
enough to keep Judy while I searched for another replacement home for her.)
After an unsuccessful attempt to find her a second home, I finally took Judy to
the animal shelter, where they classified her as "unrehomeable."
(That's cat-psychologist jargon for "hella mean old bitch who bit the
cat-shrink when she tried to remove Judy from the cage.")
I'd asked the shelter to call me if they couldn't place her.
I took her in on a Friday evening, and by Tuesday, I was so bugged by my
decision and the ensuing silence that I placed a call to inquire about her. It
turned out that they'd killed her about 90 minutes before I called.
I learned a few years later that I could have taken her to a
vet and paid a fee to hold her in my arms while the vet administered a lethal
injection, instead of leaving her to suffer for days in pet-prison where the
last person to touch her was someone she was quite understandably hostile
toward.
I don't want to sentimentalize my cat too much — she was a
cranky old female who was set in her ways and could not adapt gracefully to
sharing a small apartment with another cat. Also, she probably had arthritis
pain in her lower spine and was fairly ready to be done with her life. My mind
knows that regret is pointless — the world moves on, and you can't undo the
past. Still, to quote Pascal, the heart has reasons that reason cannot know.
So, if I could turn back time, I would script that
ending to be a happier one. I was playing God with my cat's life, yet
"God" was working with incomplete information. So reading this
introductory page in Hawking's book caused me to reflect on how I had some
degree of control over her death, although to Judy, who had no capacity to
contemplate her own mortality, much less the nature of time, maybe it was all
one day.
What is tougher to bear is the thought that maybe the day
ended for her when God walked away, and her sense of time stretched into a
bleak and pointless night as her life compressed down to one tiny space, namely a
cage at the pound.
But that really is my projection, and a rather absurdly existential one at that.
In any case, having derived that much introspection from
Hawking's two opening paragraphs, I am excited to be reading this book, which
will doubtless continue to raise many more questions in my mind than it
answers.
