On Traveleling Zoos 5: Serval Cats and Quitting

About a month into my employment, I had the big ‘To Do’- I was going out on a show with the actual boss. And, as the actual boss was going, we were taking the performing animals, ones she had trained, that only she handled. We were going to a community center in some generic northern suburb.

Her vehicle, the official one, was a converted ambulance. It was painted lavender and stenciled on the side, not all that delicately, were the words ‘Samantha’s Amazing Animals’. For every other show I had done, we had taken a brokedown* white van, but here I was, with the boss in the company vehicle, one that had undoubtedly seen the last dying breaths of many good citizens. I did not feel good about this.

Here’s the thing about training animals; you can’t train them. You can only encourage them to do things that they normally do anyway. You can get the horse to ‘count’, but he can’t perform arithmetic. You can get the cat to walk like a fashion model down a runway, but she’s doing it for the treat, not the prestige. Yes, a piano-playing duck sounds pretty cool, but it’s not so impressive when you find out it’s just picking up duck food that you threw on the keyboard with its beak, striking notes in a haphazard manner. There is no composition. Still, we all like to anthropomorphize animals-especially city people-as it makes them seem a little less alien to us, a little more toward our realm of consiousness and a little further away from their animal natures, which seem quite brutal to us. Take the raccoons, for instance.

They played basketball. That is to say, they would take the little orange Nerf© balls that Samantha gave them and drop them through little toy hoops. These same creatures, in the pen in her backyard, would snarl and hiss every time you went by. We were all under strict instructions to never go near them, and never give them opportunity to get close enough to the cage for them to take a bite out of us. Still, they looked cute on stage, and didn’t give any indication of their true natures while performing.

Not so with the Serval cat.

I should give you an idea of what a Serval is before I get into the actual performance. It is the smallest of the ‘Big Cats’, a loose category used to describe predatory felines large enough to take down substantial prey, something bigger than rodents or birds. According to wikipedia-a dubious source, to be sure- it can weigh up to 40 pounds. This doesn’t sound that huge at first; a profoundly obese housecat can get up to 20, so in these terms, it’s just two Garfields. The Serval, however, is built along different lines. It has extraordinarily long, thin legs and, according to www.serval-cats.com, is often confused with Cheetahs.

Cheetahs.

These things are tall and lean. Yes, it does hunt rodents, hares, etc., but it also hunts antelopes. Small ones, to be sure, but antelopes nonetheless. Antelopes are among the worlds fastest terrestrial mammals, and this thing can take one down. After one show, Cyndi, the only other one allowed to handle it, was dragging it upstairs on a leash, and the Serval was being, to put it mildly, reluctant, and was voicing its displeasure. Servals don’t meow. They growl, in that National-Geographic sound-bit sort of way, the one that makes nature documentaries interesting from the once-removed perspective of television. Live action is different. To be succinct, they induce bowel twisting primal terror when the thing is within striking range without a moat and a fence between you and it. At one point on the way up the stairs, when Cyndi was bringing it back up to its home after a show, it was writhing and leaping around in such a way that I swear all four of its paws (and I hate to use the word paws, as it conjures up images of cute kitty-ness) were off the ground, and I swear that Cyndi used this opportunity to yank the leash in such a way that it was yanked in flight up the last remaining section of the stairwell. My respect for her was growing immeasurably, as well as a little fear. If she could kick a Serval’s ass, she could certainly kick mine. I sensed a glass ceiling in the company, but that’s not important now. Back to the show.

For the performance, Samantha had set up two collapsible tables, the kind found in elementary school cafeterias, about six feet apart, and had set up a ring for the cat to jump through. Pellet food and doggie treats are fine enough for ducks and raccoons, but the Serval was having none of that. This was a cat, after all. Human vegetarians like to get their digs in on the meat eating portion of the population by calling us ‘carnivores’, but it isn’t true, really- we are designed by nature to extract protein from a number of different sources, and only a small percentage of that should be meat, much less than is incorporated in the typical American diet. ‘Should’ is a strong term as well- countless people have shown that we can get by fine without it.

Cats, however, are a different story. They are real carnivores. Anybody who has a cat will back me up- how many times has your cat turned her nose up at the dried Purina cat chow in her bowl? How much does she love you when you give her that gross slab of gelatinous processed meat out of the can?**

The point is, cats are real carnivores. They eat meat exclusively, and it being so high in protein and saturated fats, it affords them most of the day to sleep it off. They are all cute when they are purring and snoozing in the sun, but when duty calls, they are mean little predatory machines. The Serval cat was technically a pet, but Purina cat chow was not going to do it for him. Samantha solved this by using chunks of raw steak to entice him to jump from table to table, and through the hoop. When she brought the meat out of the carton during the show, the Serval’s response was immediate, raw and Pavlov. It instantly started drooling uncontrollably, great swathes of saliva dripping off its chin like regurgitated chocolate milk. I didn’t think it was possible for an animal to bug out its eyes like a bullfrog and narrow its eyelids to hunter’s focus at the same time, but it did. It was alarming to see this, and to see how clearly it was beyond this animal’s power to control or moderate its response. I think Samantha had to wipe up the drool puddles with a rag during the show. I’m sure, actually. I clearly remember her handing me the drool rag and making me do it.

Memory is a fickle thing. Reason tells me Samantha would never light a hoop on fire and have the cat jump through it, given that it had a coat of very flammable fur, but I think because I was involved in all the theatre productions in high school and therefore a ‘drama’ geek, I prefer to remember it that way. I’m fairly certain it didn’t happen, but it seems more in line to think about it as such. What I am sure of is that at some point I either had to move a stationary hoop or hold one in one place. Regardless, I was up close and personal, ‘on stage’ as it were. The cat was drooling everywhere now, in wild anticipation for raw meat. but was, for whatever reason- be it singing its fur or retaining it’s dignity- reluctant to jump through the hoop. All I know was that the thing looked at me, mad with craving for flesh, but unwilling to perform for it.

Supposedly, only Dr. Doolittle can talk to the animals, but I watched the gears turn in this animals head, and I clearly understood what it was thinking when it came to the realization that there was a ready source of soft, dark meat that it wouldn’t have to sacrifice its pride for. No hoops, no prepared little chunks of cold-cow cuts, this hunk of walking gourmet was closer, warmer, and, given the look I probably had on my face, easy pickins’. Plus, everyone likes Indian food.

I’m sure gave every indication that I was lock-dead easy prey, but pre-programming and Samantha’s constant cajoling won over. It jumped through the hoop, Samantha gave it its treat, and I excused myself to go throw up in the bathroom.

This same cat finally sealed the decision to quit. We, as employees, had to go up to the ‘office’, Samantha’s third floor apartment, to sign out for our paycheck. I guess I’d done a couple of shows, and they were getting used to seeing me around, because Cyndi told me to just go up by my lonesome and sign myself out. The creaky wooden chair, the one I’d imagined Dee sitting in when I’d made my initial call, was behind an old wooden desk, the hub of business transactions for SAA. The baby squirrel was skittering around the place, the snakes were slithering in the computer room, and the Serval was staring at me from the kitchen, entirely off the leash.

‘Oh’, I thought to myself, ‘There’s the funky little squirrel doing his thing, here’s the paperwork I need, the snakes are milling around the computer room, and there’s the Serval cat, stalking me. Everything seems in order. I think. Should I be worried about something? I feel like I’m missing something.’

There is something to be said for denial. Had I freaked out entirely, the Serval would’ve knocked my ass senseless like a big stuffed catnip toy. The image of the cat registered in my mind as I reluctantly pressed the rewind on my brain, but I did have the sense to turn my head around slowly. Yes, I had done shows with the thing, yes, I was aware that Samantha let it run free in the apartment, but I trusted these people enough to figure that, I don’t know, it would be in a special room or asleep or something. I was alone, it didn’t recognize my smell*** , and the thing loved raw meat. I was on his turf.

Underwear isn’t all that expensive, but I wasn’t getting paid enough to write it off as a business expense, given the rate I was soiling them in this job, and when the thing let slip a throaty, guttural growl and hunkered down into pouncing position, claws extruded and dug into kitchen tile for purchase in its final killing leap, I decided it might be prudent to try other employment, should I live through this one.

When I got home that evening, a letter awaited. I had applied to a fast-track teaching certification program some weeks before, and I found I had been accepted, training starting next month, we hope to hear from you soon, etc. I made the decision right then and there to try my luck with human animals, a safer bet. At least I spoke some of their language, if not entirely fluently. Yes, parents can sue, yes, the salary is sorta dismal, but being alive to bitch about it seemed worth it. Time to become a schoolteacher.
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*And I mean ‘brokedown’ as in “brokedown drag-queen”- it had that effect, and I couldn’t tell you why.

**The reasons for this are biological. Intestine length has much to do with diet. Cows and other ruminants have complex digestive systems. Four metabolic chambers, a sequential chemical sequence that requires back-and-forth regurgitation with precise timing, a symbiotic relationship with specific strains of bacteria, and, most significantly, an intensely long and coiled alimentary track- all of this is needed to digest something as simple as grass. A carnivore has a different layout- look at a lion sometime. Within the ribcage and torso, it is thicker, as it contains HUGE lungs (it has to exert a lot of effort to catch its prey, and oxygen is needed in spades to do this) as well as its normal set of organs, liver, heart, spleen, etc. What it doesn’t have is a big huge belly- cats are slim around what for lack of a better term we can call a waist. We, as fancy monkeys, are somewhere in between. We don’t carry enormous fat reserves of fuel, unless we happen to be American, and we don’t have the same type of complicated alimentary track as ruminants, as we don’t need to digest grass all the time. We do get beer bellies, however, and in part that is because we need to have a lengthy enough tract to digest whatever comes our way, but short enough to be able to catch, acquire, etc, whatever is available, including beer. We are, in short, omnivores. Sorry for all that, but I am a biology teacher, after all.

***Or perhaps it did. Chicken Tikka Masala, I imagine.