1. Juno was sick when I adopted her. While she was recovering, she seemed much more docile and easygoing than she actually was. I’d grown up with affectionate cats, but it became clear that Juno didn’t like when I was affectionate with her. She was always trying to bite me. About a year and a half after I got her, my roommate confessed to me that they’d given up trying to tell her no about it.

Alright, I thought, Let’s try it, Juno. 

Some cats bite in the same way that they hiss, but Juno doesn’t. Juno’s love language is bite. She bites in the sweetest way, like it’s her favorite way to know you. It took me so long to understand. This was the first thing Juno taught me about herself.

2. I live in a house with three black cats: Juno, Ripley, and Toast. I love introducing cats to each other, because it's a moment when it’s even clearer than usual that your cat considers you to be their specific human.

3. It’s fun living with three cats because you really understand that they’re all their own creatures. Ripley likes to bat pens and startles when you touch her. When she gets upset she commits specific and targeted acts of revenge. Toast likes being held and will meow in a single, one-note scream when he wants something. I don’t think he understands the concept of ‘being yelled at.’ Juno chases light and will steal a fried egg if you leave it on the table. In the morning, she’ll come into my room and check on me every five minutes or so to see if I’m awake yet. They all move differently. There are six of us (three humans, three cats) and we all have different relationships to each other, degrees of familiarity and closeness.

4. It’s possible that our cats could bond as closely to each other as they do to us, but I don’t think they have. In our house, each cat/human pair has a room that’s theirs. This feels like the natural order of things. Once, my roommate babysat Juno for a few months and Juno stayed both in their room and in my old room, even though I wasn’t there. When we moved to a new house and I returned, Juno started sleeping only in my room again. What about this arrangement did she understand?

5. I asked my roommate once “do you think that Juno is my best friend and Toast is your best friend, or are they best friends?” They thought it over and I thought it over and then I said “actually, I don’t think it’s like that at all.”

6. Black cats appear most often in pop culture as familiars in media about witches. Historically, familiars are demons that have taken on animal form, occupying a role somewhere between a witch’s companion and servant. 

7. In Kiki’s Delivery Service, Jiji, the talking black cat, is Kiki’s friend. Kiki speaks with Jiji when she’s young, but loses the ability to communicate with Jiji as she grows older.

When the movie was dubbed for English-speaking audiences, it was altered to imply that at the end, they regain their ability to communicate. This alteration complicates the original intent, in which Kiki’s inability to talk to Jiji is symbolic of Kiki growing up and learning to be her own person without Jiji’s advice and close companionship.

I understand the impulse to defang that loss of intimacy, the tragedy of having something small and dear move away from you into the unknown. It’s complicated to accept that something beloved can’t be spoken to or understood, that it might remain a mystery. This is what’s always complicated about loving other animals.

8. It feels easy to have a sneering, dismissive attitude towards anthropomorphization, probably due to its ubiquity in children’s cartoons. Debates about its supposed benefits or harm feel reductive — positing that it’s either good, in that it fosters empathy towards animals, or bad, in that it somehow dangerously or foolishly misrepresents biological realities.

There’s something joyless in that simplification of what it does when we ascribe human traits to animals.

9. Animals may not love, grieve or communicate in the way that we do. With the righteous zeal of those who believe themselves above common magic, people who criticize the desire to anthropomorphize seem to miss the point: why ascribe human traits and feelings to animals if not to imagine, in our way, what it might be like to be close to them?

10. I can usually tell what Juno is thinking. I can tell when she wants to get down or when she’s out of sorts. I can read her body language, maybe, but it feels like a sense, like how you would know instinctively when someone is making one of your friends uncomfortable, without them having to say anything.

My familiarity with Juno is inexplicable to me. It wasn’t something I set out to learn. I don’t know how I learned it nor do I understand its mechanisms, but it’s real.

11. I can always tell when someone doesn’t know cats. They pet them wrong. It’s a delicacy in the turn of the hand maybe, a subterranean language of movement.

12. Koko, the gorilla who learned sign language, owned a gray tabby who she named All Ball.

13. By the time Koko died in 2018, she had learned more than 1,000 signs and the ability to understand 2,000 words of spoken English. Because of research done with Koko, we know that gorillas have language skills similar to those of small children.

14. While holding All Ball, Koko would sign ‘soft. good. cat.’ Koko would hold, pet, and play chase games with her. When All Ball was tired of being held, she would bite or wriggle loose and Koko would sign ‘obnoxious cat.’ Koko must have loved her, All Ball must have loved her in return. In 1985, All Ball was run over by a car. When researchers told her, Koko at first pretended not to hear and then began to grieve.

15. Gorillas experience emotions in much the same way we do. Instinctively, I don’t think that Juno has quite the emotional landscape. And yet, how complicated am I, really? I’m hungry, I want to be loved, I want to be close, I want to be left alone. All my complex desires aren’t much more than this. I know Juno feels emotions. Does Juno know that I do?

16. On a functional level, it doesn’t seem like Juno knows how I feel. I suppose I’m the higher-level organism. It seems unlikely that Juno feels empathy. She’s not a very good comfort cat. I think it scares her when I cry and she doesn’t like to be held under any circumstances. There is something there, though.

17. When I was little, my mom had a very bad and bitey cat named Arthur that children were not allowed to touch. There’s a story about this cat: when my mom was in the beginnings of labor, Arthur stayed up all night with her like he had some kind of understanding of what she needed.

18. Juno doesn’t do anything because she thinks she’s supposed to. She comes and sleeps on my bed for simpler reasons than that - because I’m hers and she is mine. There’s no ulterior motive, no duplicity. I’ve heard that cats sleep next to humans because either they think that the human will protect them or they think that they need to protect the human. Juno used to sleep between me and the door, now I sleep between her and it.

19. My most common recurring dream involves any number of black cats. In these dreams, I have to find Juno among dozens of other identical cats, each turning their soft and unfamiliar faces towards me.

In these dreams, sometimes I can find Juno and sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I won’t be sure. It may be more clear to describe these dreams as nightmares.

20. Dream interpretation suggests that dreaming of black cats can symbolize good luck, bad luck, a fear of trusting your own intuition, that you’re a good person, that you have inner conflict, that one of your friends wishes you ill, or that you will have to face your enemies. This is an incomplete list.

21. I have these dreams most when my life is most tumultuous. Searching for Juno in my dreams is how I interact with a lack of control or security I’m feeling during my waking hours. Sometimes, I suspect I worry about Juno in ways I can’t properly worry about myself.

22.  I don’t mean to turn Juno into a symbol, only to say that I am the only other animal whose care I am entirely responsible for.

23. In an article about Koko and All Ball, it says that All Ball interacted with Koko like she would with a human. It doesn’t seem clear to me whether All Ball understood the difference between a human and a gorilla. I can’t figure out what this fact is supposed to communicate to me. According to some behavioral scientists, cats view us not as humans but as larger cats, because they don’t adapt their behavior in order to interact with us. How can this be true, when Juno sometimes does the things I like, just for my attention?

24. Sure, I understand the difference between a cat and a human. Sure, I interact with the people I love differently than I interact with the cats. But where is that distinction meaningful? Where is it arbitrary?

25. Both electronic and biological animals proliferate in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Whether these animals are real or clever fakes is a flickering schrödingers cat at the center of the narrative. The novel portrays the act of caring for an animal as a moral imperative. Animals function as symbols of prosperity and morality, their interiority subsumed to what they mean to the humans who own them.

26. There’s a moment, near the end, where Rick Deckard spends his entire paycheck on a black goat. He’s full of reasons for why it’s a good or bad decision, situating it within this cultural mythology of animal ownership.

It’s not until he gets the goat onto his roof that he understands her as more than what she represents. In a brief moment of unexpected connection, the goat “[regards] him with a wide-eyed perspicacity, but [makes] no sound.” To his wife, he says “let’s just sit and look at her and maybe feed the goat something [...] We can call her Euphemia.”

27. Against the backdrop of dystopia, it’s easier to see how our narratives about what animals mean allow us to remain separate from the reality of them. Deckard spends paragraphs trying to unravel what the goat means until the moment she looks at him.

28. In the titular line of a short story by Sofia Samatar, the narrator hugs her sister and thinks “I realized that people, with their warm weight, their softness, and their smell, are the closest thing we have to animals now.”

29. When Juno and Toast play, they attack each other. Juno and I don’t do this. She does follow me down the hallway and bat at my feet, though, which is pretty much the same thing. My girlfriend slow-blinks at me like our cats do. When I’m sad, I chase Juno down the hallway and try to make her hug me—which she hates and does not understand in the way I do. I’ve heard that cats meow at humans more than they meow at other cats because they’ve realized it’s our preferred method of communication.

30. You don’t speak to Juno like you would speak to me, my roommate says. Of course I do, I say, she just doesn’t reply. Well, I correct, sometimes she does, in her own way. I’m almost certain that Juno knows what her name is. I don’t think Juno knows what my name is. It’s entirely possible that Juno has some kind of name for me that I will never understand and wouldn’t know to respond to. My roommate is calling Juno’s name: she’s not looking, but her ear twitches every time.

31. I had a cat as a child who would come whenever I whistled. I never trained her to do this. I just whistled a lot and she loved to be near me, and the sound I made reminded her of this every time she heard it.

32. My roommate sometimes asks me if I think Toast loves them. Then, if I think he knows that he is loved. For a long time, I wondered this about Juno too. I had ideas about what cats did, how they acted, what their love would look like, or mean. Once, like many houseguests before them, someone went to pick up Juno and was rewarded with pitiful wailing.

“No one is allowed to pick up Juno,” my roommate explained. “Not even Francis.”

33. When Juno hears me call for her, she does an undignified little scamper from wherever she is to come see me. She did this once, and my roommate, who had been watching, said “that’s the way she always runs over to you.” 

“That’s just how she runs,” I said, and they shook their head. 

“Not always,” they said. “Just to you.”

34. I’m very moved by the communication I have with Juno. Sometimes all I have to do is be in the kitchen and pitch my voice a certain way for Juno to know she should come. Once every few months, Juno wanders the halls at night wailing, even though she knows where I am and doesn’t appear to need anything I can give her. I don’t know what she’s feeling when she does this. It’s the most distraught she ever sounds.

35. We have a house with multiple rooms and Juno very quietly makes it her job to be nearly always in the same room as I am. Juno loves to be around. Juno does not want to be on my lap and it’s likely that she doesn’t want to be touched but she would like to be within 10 feet of me, generally. Is this not love as I know it?

36. I’m very moved by the fact that Juno comes to see me when I get home from work, even though she doesn’t understand work or coming home. I’m very moved by sleeping next to a creature every night who I will never speak with. I am moved by the unspoken trust. There’s a question that goes ‘if you could speak to your pet, what would you say?’ I hear so much that Juno says to me. I don’t need words from her.