My one-year-old cat went missing eights weeks ago. On a windy and stormy night, he walked off and never came back. I am especially worried for him, as this is the second time he has lost his home—when I rescued him a year ago, he was crying in a hedge at just six weeks old. I have taken the usual steps that people suggest: I announced his disappearance on the community Facebook pages and contacted various lost pet organisations. People have been kind—there’s an understanding in the village of the depth of love that can exist between a person and her pet. However, the advice that stayed with me the most came from the farmer.
A mile down the road, at the bottom of the hill from where I live, is a farm. Around 20 feral cats live among the bales of hay in its barns. The farmer’s wife feeds them twice a day and boasts they’ve never had a problem with rats. It’s highly likely my missing cat, Socrates, would have started life there.
Last week, the farmer stopped his car as he passed me on the road. He wound down his window and asked if Socrates had been found. I told him that he hadn’t, and that it had broken my heart. The farmer replied with something I thought was rather curious. He said: “Don’t break your heart, not over a cat.”
I have been pondering the words of this farmer ever since. It’s obvious what he was saying: not everything deserves to be taken to heart. This made me ask the question: what is worth breaking our hearts over?
It is easy to acknowledge the things that our hearts should not stop beating for—an abusive partner, for example. But who decides what we should give our hearts to? And why are cats not worthy?
When I was growing up my father said, “Don’t love anything so much that you won’t know what to do when it’s gone.” At the time, this seemed sensible advice. But after many years of living, I understand love better.
Whatever the subject of our love, pets or people, we inevitably become vulnerable to them; they can die, run away or not love us back. To love is to make oneself vulnerable. There’s no way of getting away from it. We cannot bulletproof our hearts. Perhaps we can choose never to love, but to do so would mean to never really live. The heart is always at risk.
“Don’t break your heart, not for a cat,” would mean not to love Socrates, as whatever we choose to give our hearts to has the potential to break it.
The 19th-century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, known to be a misanthrope, adored poodles and reportedly owned a succession of them throughout his life. He named them, Atma, the Sanskrit term for the self.
Schopenhauer was a solitary figure without much human contact but, because of his poodles, he lived a content life, in what otherwise might have been a lonely one. I am sure Schopenhauer would disagree with the farmer—he risked his heart a number of times with many poodles. Known to be an early proponent of animal rights, he famously said no man that was cruel to animals could be called a good man.
Like Schopenhauer, I’m an animal lover. In recent years, this has been amplified. On Christmas Eve in 2014, my mother died. When I moved to the countryside, away from London, the city from where I am from, I started a new tradition. Every Christmas Eve, I take a solo country walk. I noticed something; seeing cows, sheep and the highland cattle that live at the top of the hill—on a festive but difficult day—gave me an inexplicable joy. There was a purity about them, a wholesomeness in contrast to the over-exuberance and hype of the Christmas cheer that can exist within the city. It reignited my belief that animals can heal.
We cannot control who captures our heart. Schopenhauer’s father committed suicide when Schopenhauer was a teenager, and his mother was cold. The choices we make about love are often a reflection of what we have been through in our own lives.
Rural life has taught me that animals can be seen as cogs in the wheels of farm life. The feral cats are vermin control; Zip, the sheepdog, herds sheep. And perhaps the farmer doesn’t love them the same way I loved Socrates. But even where there is not love, there is always respect and appreciation for animals in farming life.
