Fight! Fight!

Phoebe tried to break up a cat fight this morning. Being a young dog, she has less experience with cats than the other dogs and she thought, with the eternal optimism of youth, that she could do it. Now, it wasn’t a real fight, not yet, just that vocal preliminary to what might or might not turn into a full fledged cat fight. It was Ole Yeller, a battle scarred veteran, and the upstart Chubby, who probably outweighs his counterpart but doesn’t measure up in experience. When I came in the house, Phoebe was still trying to break up the quarrel and the combatants were hurling insults in a language I probably didn’t want to translate. My advice to her was to leave them to it if she didn’t want to end up the object of the fight herself.
We had a small dog fight in the house the other night. I was the inadvertent cause of it because I stepped on Tess’s tail. A collie tail takes up a lot of floor space. She yelped and I moved my foot and that would have been the end of it had Phoebe not walked by at that exact moment. To Tess, who doesn’t always have a good grasp of cause and effect, it was obvious that whatever happened with her tail must have been Phoebe’s fault and that she must learn not to do whatever it was she did again. Phoebe, of course, had no idea why she was being punished. It wasn’t the first time an innocent bystander bore the brunt of a situation between others and it won’t be the last.
I remember one day at my mom’s house, when one of my puppies was with me in her kitchen and one of her indoor cats apparantly took offense at something she said. She jumped on poor Maggie, who wasted no time fleeing the scene and finding refuge under the bed. But that didn’t end things because the other house cat who was somewhere in another room heard the beginning of the fight and flew into the kitchen where she jumped into the now non-existent fight and proceeded to beat the stuffing out of the cat who must have wondered how she ended up as the victim. Cats are like that. They don’t care who started the fight or why. A fight is a fight and takes on a life of its own. When I was growing up, I witnessed this phenomenon many times. Two cats in the backyard would come to blows over some perceived insult and cats would come from all over the farm to rumble. Never mind that only the original pair knew how it started and what it was about. Nothing can move as fast as a cat who hears a fight starting, and it didn’t matter where they were or what they were doing – it was mandatory that they participate. It was just amazing how fast the yard could fill up with angry cats.
I always wondered what they all thought when the fight was over and I wondered how they decided the winner. There never seemed to be hard feelings; everyone just walked away to lick their ruffled fur and take a nap. Too bad human fights don’t end as easily.