on interspecies friendships

My family and I adopted a dog a few months ago.

Her name is Kitty. She’s a one year old heeler mix. We were introduced by a friend of friend of a friend essentially because we live in a household of people who know American Sign Language. Kitty is deaf, like her namesake, the stuntwoman Kitty O’Neil (also known as The Fastest Woman in the World).

The topic of interspecies friendship is heavy on my mind because I’m working on a class about the fixed star Sirius with my bestie Chloe (of Recent Bedroom).

We’ll presenting our research and experiences focusing especially on magical approaches to the star. A large part of our conversations has focused around our relationships with our pets and the avenues these relationships present for magic. More on that later but I just thought I should let y’all know :)

We’d lived with our bluegray cat, Small Joseph (known as Lil Joe to his friends) for about 5 years when we decided we were ready to adopt a dog. The funny thing is that before we adopted Joseph we actually intended to foster a dog but it seemed that the spirits had other plans for us. We’ve been through a lot with Joseph these recent years and came to learn that although he doesn’t really like other cats, he actually does quite well with dogs. We weren’t terribly worried about the prospect of bringing home a dog for his sake but finding a dog that gets along with cats isn’t the easiest.

A friend recently told me that the best way to adopt an animal is to identify an animal-shaped opening in your life and then let the universe fill it for you.

As an adult, I’ve only had the two pets: Joseph and now Kitty. I grew up in a menagerie between having divorced parents living separately and their various partners and roommates. Over the years I grew up with a total of 13 dogs, 4 parrots, 3 snakes and 2 cats in one configuration or another. Growing up with so many animals (and the problems that ensue from that number) made me a bit shy to adopt a pet of my own.

For a long time, I worked in bars and coffee shops in a very, very dog-friendly city famous for its patio culture. Unfortunately for me, I often found myself having to enforce boundaries with dog-owners who would bring their poorly behaved and under-socialized dogs to our patios and let them wreak havoc until forced to pay attention. The dog bites (of me, my coworkers, and other patrons) and other endless dog problems ruined the whole affair for me.

But I always held such a deep love for the animals I grew up with—even though they caused plenty of problems too. I thought that maybe I was just someone who hated dogs.

Maybe I was a cat person?

I found cats easier to get along with. When living with roommates who had cats, I often found myself in the animal problem-solving position. After years living with the hoard of difficult pets, I found the cats so easy to understand and communicate with (even the punk house tuxedo cat whose original name had been forgotten and was known only as Satan). A partner once told me that the thing that attracted her to me was the way I communicated with her cat.

I’m so grateful for everything Joseph has taught me about myself and how to love someone who depends on you. No matter how insurmountable my life feels, I have to find a way to make sure he’s cared for and finding that capacity in my heart has radically changed me as a person.

Sometimes I struggle with how to define our relationship.

It feels odd to call me his owner but that is the legal designation of our relationship.

I also really chafe at the term “pet parent” because I feel it does both these animals and human children a disservice to compare their relationships to each other. A child is wholly dependent on their parents but will eventually grow into a full adult of their own. After exiting the puppy or kitten stage, a pet will grow into an adult domesticated animal who will still depend on its caretakers.

Do they wholly depend on us, though? Or is it possible for us to develop a reciprocal relationship?

It doesn’t feel right to me to anthropomorphize and infantilize our pets. They are their own entire creature with their own holistic experience of the world that has intrinsic value without being compared to children (and children are not a special kind of foreign creature—that’s a discussion for another day).

I don’t live in circumstances that require the services of a cat or herding dog, yet they still provide their services. I’ve mentioned the way that caring for Joseph has changed my heart, but he contributes in other ways, too. Joseph has shown himself to be an ally to me in my occult work, for example.

He seems to have a sensitivity to altered states of consciousness. It started the first time I meditated after he came into our lives—when I opened my eyes after the session I found him on the chair next to me, cooly watching over my body. When I do any kind of meditation, magic, or spiritual cultivation, he finds his way to me. There’s hardly any point in attempting to stop him by closing a door, he’ll just disrupt the session until I let him come in (at which point he settles into a supervisory position from a safe vantage point).

Kitty is a new addition to our household (as I’m writing this, today marks the fourth lunar return of her joining our family) and so we’re still getting to know each other. It’s rare to meet a dog who has been thoroughly vetted to be safe around cats we feel especially lucky to have been connected with her. She has clearly lived with many cats as part of her background.

As she integrates into our household, I’ve found Joseph stepping up in many interesting ways to support the addition of a new friend in the family. Kitty has some trauma and anxieties, as any shelter dog does, and we’re doing our best to help her develop a perspective on our home as a place of safety and stability.

*Small Joseph and Kitty hanging out below the Venus altar*

An example: Kitty is afraid of new people.

After a few weeks at home with us, she learned that everyone in our family will be kind to her, but she still isn’t sure about other humans. I don’t think that fellow members of my species have always been kind to her. Something I want to promise her is that we wont let people who will hurt her or violate her boundaries into our home, but it’s a process.

I noticed a few weeks ago that when we bring new people over, Joseph stays close to her. She has access to a secluded area that we instruct the guests not to bother and Joseph often places himself in a place where he can guard her area. Joseph has several favorite friends of ours. He often makes a big show of how comfortable he is with these friends in front of Kitty in a way that seems to suggest (to my human eyes) an invitation to her to join the friendships he’s built with our loved ones. And slowly (but faster than we’ve been advised to expect) she is starting to warm up to some of those people. We’ve added 1 person to her roster of safe people and she’s well on her way with 2 others already!

We try to provide as much space as possible for Joseph (and now Kitty too) to express themselves as the animals that they are. We try to indulge their instincts in the rhythms of our household and create as many opportunities as possible for them to engage their agency by making choices. The goal, as I see it, is to meet them where they’re at (while also expecting them to meet us where we’re at too). This is something I’m always trying to do my with my friends—we each have our needs and we build our relationship in the place where we are each able to comfortably accommodate each others needs.

I still don’t really know what my preferred label as an animal caretaker is but I think friendship is the frame I’d like to use to develop my relationships between myself and the animals we live with. And it seems to mirror the relationship that the are developing with each other, too.

As I deepen my friendships with these two, I’m realizing that part of connecting with animals involves inhabiting your own animal soul. Through the terrestrial, bodily soul, I am able to understand them and their needs more easily. That kind of radical embodiment, perhaps that’s part of what they offer me in my relationships with each of them.

I like the parts of myself they bring out of me.

I thought this was going to be an essay about the ways that my friendships with Joseph and Kitty have been relevant to my magical projects and other forms of spiritual work but instead it became this: a reflection on interspecies relationships.

I have much more to say on this topic, but today I think this will suffice.

relating with the animal soul