🐟 Joy to the World, All the Boys and Girls 🐠

The Lizard Got Here First

Both climbed through our windows looking for crumbs. One got a velvet cushion. The other got a broom!

Here is something worth thinking about on a warm afternoon when you have nowhere particular to be: Cats and lizards are, in the broad sweep of natural history, doing basically the same job. They are both heat-seekers. They are both hunters of small things. They both figured out, somewhere along the evolutionary timeline, that human dwellings were warm, generously stocked with insects and rodents, and only intermittently guarded. They both climbed in through the window. And yet one of them is currently sleeping on a cashmere throw in an air-conditioned apartment with its own Instagram account, and the other one is a problem you call a guy about.

It does make you wonder what the meeting was like. At some point in ancient history — Egypt, probably, since Egypt gets credit for most of the things that happened before anyone was writing things down — a cat walked into a grain storehouse, looked around, and someone in charge decided this was fine. More than fine, actually. Auspicious.  The lizard, meanwhile, has spent the intervening millennia doing the exact same things — eating bugs, staying warm, minding its own quiet business on a sunny wall — and somehow never got the call.

The cat got promoted from intruder to deity in what had to be one of the fastest HR decisions in recorded time.

There is no real injustice here. Nobody is suffering. The lizard is not lying awake at night feeling overlooked. But it is a funny thing about human perception, the way we decide, more or less arbitrarily, which animals are charming and which ones are not. The cat has fur, and we are mammals, and fur reads as familiar. The lizard has scales, and scales read as ancient and slightly alien, even though lizards predate cats on this planet by a comfortable margin. The lizard was here first. It does not seem to have helped.

What the cat had, which the lizard apparently lacked, was a gift for the slow approach. Cats did not demand anything. They just appeared, kept appearing, made themselves useful, and waited. They understood, on some wordless level, that the trick was not to need anything too obviously. The lizard never learned this. It skitters. It appears suddenly on the wall near the light switch and does not seem to care whether you are comfortable with this. Cats, from the very beginning, have been in the business of making you feel like the arrangement was your idea.

So here we are. One animal has a multi-billion-dollar global industry of food, toys, furniture, medical care, and memorial services built around it. The other one gets a mention in a home pest-control blog between the section on silverfish and the section on water bugs. Both of them are just out here trying to stay warm. Only one of them knew how to make that your problem in the most appealing possible way. You have to respect the strategy, even a little.