animals

Lindsayland wouldn't be a true California experience without aspects of a bizarre religious cult. On this account we will not disappoint. Here we worship cats. Well, why not? It makes more sense than other religions.

This is Houdini, born in October '21, one of the Lindsayland kats, currently the only animals residing here.

There were horses here, maybe seventy years ago. Large animals have difficulty in this harsh environment.

A kennel was built here in 1962 and the owner raised AKC-registered German Shepherds. The last female lived out her days quietly. It was the scent of her that kept coyotes away. After she passed in 2010, they picked off the fifty India blue peafowl that had been here for many years. The last two females I took down to Arcadia and released in the luxury neighborhood where they're protected by ordinance.

They were a lot of fun. I'd collect discarded food in Kramer Junction and bring it to them. They especially loved french fries. I learned a profound lesson from them about the power of fairness. They assembled in front of me, expectantly. I tossed them fries one-by-one. At first they'd pile on and fight over each. Soon, however, surprisingly quickly, they saw that I was targeting them individually and that each of them would get a fair share if they stood still. When the fries were all gone, the juveniles squatted in the sand, showing their submission and trust. The mature peahens and then the beta peacocks followed likewise. Finally, the alpha male squatted and I sat cross-legged in the sand with them. After a few minutes, as if he was thinking: enough of this, I'm still the boss here, he rose as did the others, in the reverse of the order in which they'd sat down.

He had another funny behavior. He'd face his reflection, in the chrome bumper of my '72 Olds Toronado, and peck at it as if it were another peacock. I'd sit on the ground next to him, nose to beak, to show him that I had a reflection too, trying to make him understand that it wasn't real. I believe that if he could have told me, he'd say that he realized it wasn't another peacock behind his reflection, but that he was having fun. Striking his beak against the bumper gave him a satisfying sensation while sliding harmlessly to the side. Actual competition between peacocks didn't include pecking but only the facing of each other and leaping, flapping their wings.

Currently, cats are what we're raising here. Strays have always wandered here. Some stay for a while. One had two litters, then left when she was pregnant with a third in February 2022. I believe she didn't want me to force her to nurse another litter, as I had to do for her second.

I think the peacocks were more intelligent than the cats, who, having been fed regularly all their lives still pile on each other over every morsel.

In the original TV show of Mission: Impossible, episode: "The Seal" (1967), the Impossible Missions Force employs in their caper "a highly trained cat", named Rusty, who crawls through a small opening in a vault to pick up and bring out with him an art object of political significance. "According [to] IMDB there were as many as twelve different cats used during the filming, each one with a different talent." (CinemaCats.com/Mission-Impossible-The-Seal/). Like most of the concepts featured in this franchise, the idea of a trained cat is charmingly preposterous. They can't be trained because they lack the prefrontal cortex that dogs and humans have.

Nevertheless, cats serve humans in our self-education on how to live. As creatures of languor, repose, and simple instincts, they teach us the futility of living according to complex precepts instilled in us by culture.

In popular culture, the most significant representation of an emotional support animal is Blofeld's cat, a white Persian, repeatedly employed in the long-running James Bond 007 franchise. Bond's nemesis Blofeld is a character of intelligence and taste who is afraid of people and can only dominate them by his cruelty, frequently hiding his face from his underlings and victims. Another cat appears, filling the same sort of emotional role, in The Godfather when Don Corleone asks to be treated with respect by a supplicant who seeks his services.