Não será o gato o melhor amigo do homem?

Julia Segatto

Brasília, 23 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - Quem disse que o cachorro é o melhor amigo do homem deve rever essa afirmação. Com a redução do tamanho das residências e o ritmo acelerado de vida, os gatos, geralmente mais independentes e higiênicos do que os cães, passaram a ser os melhores companheiros do homem moderno. De acordo com estudo sobre a convivência entre humanos e animais domésticos realizado pelo professor e pesquisador Carlos C. Alberts, da Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), o comportamento do gato com seu dono se assemelha às relações humanas contemporâneas, em que o comprometimento com o outro é menos valorizado.

A flexibilidade comportamental do gato também o tornou o melhor amigo do homem. Ele altera suas características comportamentais de acordo com as condições em que vive. "Se o animal vive em um ambiente com baixa densidade
populacional de gatos, ele tenderá a ser um animal solitário, esquivo e até agressivo. Se vive em um local com alta densidade de gatos, tenderá a ser sociável, dócil. Se, por outro lado, vive com o homem, adapta-se facilmente ao esquema de vida deste, tornando-se sociável, ou não, dependendo dos estímulos que recebe em momentos específicos de sua vida", ilustra o
professor.

Gracioso em seus movimentos e notado por sua inteligência, o gato é, hoje,
um dos animais de estimação mais queridos do mundo. Em alguns países, é mais
admirado do que o cachorro. Estima-se que nos Estados Unidos e na Europa se
criem mais gatos do que cães, em uma proporção de cerca de 30 gatos para cada
ser humano, incluindo os ferais - gatos de áreas rurais e urbanas sem donos
fixos.

Mas não é apenas a sociedade urbana atual que se identifica e se rende aos
encantos dos carnívoros mais numerosos do mundo. Esses felinos se tornaram
objeto de apreciação e conquistaram o afeto de célebres poetas e escritores,
como Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain e Victor Hugo, e de
civilizações antigas, como a egípcia, fenícia e romana, em razão da sua
habilidade de caçar ratos. No século XI, por exemplo, esses felinos foram a
arma mais eficaz contra os roedores transmissores da peste bubônica.

Aparentemente, a domesticação dos felinos ainda está em curso, mas segundo
Alberts, pode-se dizer que o processo começou há cerca de seis mil anos, no
Egito Antigo, onde os gatos eram adorados como divindades. A deusa Bast, por
exemplo, que representava o Sol e significava fertilidade, era retratada com
a cabeça de um gato. "Quando os gatos morriam, eram mumificados e seus donos
raspavam as sobrancelhas em sinal de luto", explica Alberts. Estátuas,
desenhos e pinturas em tumbas revelam que os gatos da raça Abissínio - com
pelo curto, corpo esguio e pernas longas - são os mais semelhantes aos
daquela época.

Muitos pesquisadores consideram o gato domesticado egípcio o ancestral da
maioria das raças conhecidas atualmente. Segundo o pesquisador da Unesp,
embora fosse proibida a saída dos gatos do Egito, os fenícios e os romanos
levaram o felino domesticado para a Europa. Depois de dominar o Egito e
adotar o culto à deusa Bast, a civilização romana passou a considerar o gato
símbolo de liberdade, transformando-o em mascote dos exércitos que invadiram
países como a Inglaterra. "Os gatos ingleses são, portanto, descendentes dos
egípcios e de gatos selvagens locais que foram domesticados, o que é regra
em diversos países", acentua Alberts. Há, no entanto, exceções como o
Brasil, onde os gatos domésticos descendem somente daqueles trazidos pelos
colonizadores europeus, o que significa que o gato brasileiro tem como
ancestral o egípcio.

Na Idade Média, os gatos deixaram de ser admirados e passaram a sofrer
perseguição da Igreja Católica. "Para acabar com a resistência dos celtas ao
catolicismo, a Igreja pregou que os sacerdotes druidas eram bruxos. Como
viviam isolados, mas rodeados de gatos, estes foram associados ao demônio e
à má sorte", conta o professor. Os gatos, principalmente os pretos, eram
perseguidos, capturados e jogados à fogueira, o que ocorreu também entre os
povos germânicos, adoradores da deusa Freya, considerada uma divindade pagã.
O culto a Freya foi considerado heresia e associado à adoração de maus
espíritos. "Imagens da deusa foram destruídas, mulheres que tinham gatos
eram queimadas e os animais, enforcados."

Essa perseguição alimentou uma série de superstições que perduram até hoje,
como a crença de que cruzar com gato preto dá azar (azar, não, má sorte!). A
organização não-governamental dos EUA de proteção a animais The Humane
Society of the United States veiculou em seu site uma série de medidas
preventivas a serem tomadas por criadores de animais domésticos, no dia 31
de outubro, data na qual os norte-americanos tradicionalmente comemoram o
Dia das Bruxas. Aos donos de gatos pretos, a recomendação era: "Não deixe
seu gato solto durante as comemorações do Halloween, em especial gatos
pretos, que podem ser vítimas de brincadeiras nocivas."

Ken Kesey Pulls His Last Prank...

by John Perry Barlow


Saturday evening, I received this message from Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia:

[Kesey is] gone from the planet as you probably know by now - about 3:35 this morning, while everyone was napping, he tiptoed off away from a hopeless body, out into the radiance. While I'm feeling lonely, and wondering how to cope, the truth is, there are a lot of his trainees out there to take over his work. Those training camps got pretty large sometimes. sadly, softly, love, MG

Well. Right.

So Ken Kesey has shed his mortal husk. Damn! What a fine old wreck that was. Major meat.

So passes the last Titan of my young, bohemian admirings. How they all took flight, bang, bang, bang: Neal Cassady, Tim Leary, Jerry Garcia, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Terence McKenna, John Lilly, and now, magnificent, manly, irascible Kesey. I am blessed to have known all of them well enough to get past any distant awe to the better awe that beamed through full knowledge of their humanizing weaknesses.

I guess it's up to us now.

Of course, this would happen eventually. It's in the natural order of things here on the manifested plane. As I get older myself, it will become a commonplace. (My lamented mother used to say that she read the obituaries to keep up on news from her friends...)

And of course, we should not lament. As Mark Twain said: "Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."

Still, knowing that the loss is ours, not Ken's, doesn't make me miss him less.

I will miss as well that which has fallen victim to the "collateral damages" - to employ a current military euphemism - of his ascent. Also, dematerialized is the marvelous creature that lived in the space between Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs. During the four decades I've known them, they husbanded the best friendship I've ever soaked warmth from. Through the weirdest psychic weather imaginable, they kept that angel dancing, nanosecond to nanosecond.

With an economy that expands into unspoken encyclopedias of love, Babbs posted this on their web site (http://www.intrepidtrips.com/):

A great good friend and great husband and father and grand dad, he will be sorely missed but if there is one thing he would want us to do it would be to carry on his life's work. Namely to treat others with kindness and if anyone does you dirt forgive that person right away. This goes beyond the art, the writing, the performances, even the bus. Right down to the bone.

Just so. And never mind the fact that Kesey could also hold a grudge like the Celtic chieftain he resembled. Like all intrepid tripsters, Los Dos Kens knew that all such paradoxes were truths that hadn't had half of themselves amputated by some fool trying to resolve what he took to be mere contradiction.

Also seriously re-configured is the robust being that was his marriage to Faye Kesey, a true Christian, who remained as calm as Kesey was tempestuous during the 40 some years following their fresh-out-of-high-school elopement.

Wendell Berry once told me with admiration that of the astonishing cadre of writers that came to Stanford on Stegner Fellowships in 1962 - a group that consisted of Kesey, Berry, Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ed McLanahan, and Tom McGuane - only Kesey and himself had remained married to the same woman. (McLanahan described the 1962 Stegner Fellows as "the nicest group of bad people I ever had the good fortune to fall in with.")

Kesey used his time in Palo Alto to excellent purpose. First, he whacked out the canonical hip novel of his time, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," an accomplishment that occupied a only few weeks of 1962. Then he set about to turn on America to LSD, having been been rewired himself in 1959 while volunteering for psychedelic service in an experimental program at the Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital.

Even while plotting the overthrow of the Existing Paradigm, he found time in 1964 to write what I consider to be the best shot taken at The Great American novel since "Moby Dick," "Sometimes A Great Notion." Like its author, it was big, broad-shouldered, masculine, and sweet-hearted. It does for the Northwest what Faulkner did for the South. If you haven't read it, the best thing you could do in the service of Ken's memory - in addition to following Babbs' good advice above - would be to read it.

But scarcely had he finished it when he took his Merry Pranksters, a fine platoon of loons - out on the most culturally influential road trip since Kerouac's. (The events of the next two years are chronicled in Tom Wolf's jabbering account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.") Along the way, they commandeered venues and invited anyone who felt like it to come and drink their fill from bathtubs full of LSD-laced Kool-Aid. In the process, they were hugely responsible for turning the 60's into the 60's.

They also spawned a band that was called The Warlocks when Kesey decided to ask them to become the Muzak for this madness but who, after a few Acid Tests, became better known as The Grateful Dead.

I was shocked when I heard about these goings on. At the time, I was member of Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD, hanging out with Leary and Alpert at their compound in Millbrook, NY. There we took our acid very seriously. The thought of passing out massive quantities to total strangers seemed to us like, well, drug abuse. (As that point, I still didn't know that my best friend from prep school, Bob Weir, had become a central conspirator in this plot as the rhythm guitar player for the Grateful Dead.)

In any case, I allowed my ideological disapproval to cause me to miss that part of the fun, but it turned out there was plenty more to had in Kesey's presence, even after the Acid Tests were over, the Pranksters somewhat dispersed, and their driver, the avatar Neal Cassady was dead.

But you probably know all this. What you probably don't know was that Ken Kesey was an exceptionally good man. And I do mean good. And I do mean man. (He was, in college, the unlimited weight-class Northwestern wrestling champion and was built like a Humvee.}

I think one of the reasons people found him so disturbing was that he contained in plenty all the American virtues and looked the granite-jawed part besides. Ken was loyal, trustworthy, brave, kind. and irreverent. Babbs, who would know, was right. He was indeed,"a great good friend and great husband and father and grand dad."

He also suffered the worst thing that can happen to a father, and particularly one as devoted as he was. In 1984, the University of Oregon wrestling team was wiped out when their bus skidded off into a slick road and tumbled down a deep ravine. Among them was his golden son Jed.

Ken never got over it. But as I learned, only a little less painfully, there is a human soul and it persists with such timelessness as to render the bodies it wraps around itself irrelevant to all but the currently embodied.

One night, during the summer of summer of 1987, I found myself on the road with The Grateful Dead in the service of a screenplay I was writing for them at the time. Ken, his Prankster buddy Mike Hagen, and a beautiful veterinarian Hagen was chasing at the time, had turned up in San Francisco in an entirely unroadworthy '72 Cadillac they'd picked up at a used car lot in Eureka when their previous (and similar) edition rolled right over her front end.

They were headed to LA where the band's next gig was to be played in Anaheim Stadium. Since I wasn't drinking at the time and had run up many hours at the wheel of hard-used Cadillacs, they decided I would make a good designated driver. Furthermore, they wanted to stick to the back roads, which I would have found to my own preference had the steering box not had a (crazy) mind of its own.

At some point in the middle of that long and perilous night, Ken and I started talking about the possibility of life after life. He believed in it. Since I was still a Scientific Fundamentalist at the time, I found it astonishing that someone so erudite could believe such primitive thing.

Finally, he trumped me. "I have to believe that," he said quietly, on the heels of a noisy debate. "It's the only way I'll ever see Jed again."

Well, a lot of things happened after that, including the death of Cynthia Horner, which had the same effect on me. It comes in handy at moments like this, because it it would also be hard to think I'll never see Ken Kesey again. It's only a matter of time. And time is always brief, whether nanoseconds or millennia.

I can't be in Pleasant Hill, Oregon when they bury him next to Jed tomorrow. I want to be there, but I have a speech to give at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, where there will be a number of Senators and Congressman who might be able to stop the media conglomerates from their blitzkrieg aimed at colonizing the Global Mind. So I'll be fighting for the freedoms that Ken held so dear.

Instead, I took Mountain Girl up on her offer to read something I wrote over Ken's vacated remains, I sent her this:

Eulogy for Ken

Kesey. You are still a trip. And I will always be on it.

What a man you were. And do I mean man. What a bull, all beef and energy and power, and sometimes, wild craziness. The meat is now discarded. The power and the energy - and certainly the wild craziness - still snort through our consciousness, which you did so much to expand.

I don't grieve for you. You knew long before I did that there are meadows for the soul. Jed led you to them. Now you're there with him and your grief is over. I'm sorry for us, but because I know how little truck you had with self-pity, I'm trying not to be too sorry for us.

Still. I will miss your magnificent bullshit. I will miss the little Prankster smile at the corners of your mouth. I will miss your mythic stories and the life you led that was so rich in their production. I will miss the lean clarity of your words. No one of your generation wrote better than you.

I will miss your nearly concealed sweetness of heart, the softness that stirred beneath the muscle, the disappearing bunny of your soul. I will even miss your faults, the weaknesses that almost rendered you human scale.

You were the last Titan of my Bohemian life. The latest crop of us seem soft on the outside and hard within. There are no more Cassadys or Kerouacs. There is no more Kesey.

I wish I could be there to watch them plant you out in your garden. But I am in the Belly of the Beast today, Washington, DC, putting in a lonely word for freedom. You never gave an inch in its service, and I will live for it as you would have me do.

Maybe one day I'll be able to identify all the qualities that grew into me from you. I know that you became part of me, just as Neal lived on in you. But right now, you are too generally distributed in my psyche to sort out into anything but gratitude.

So. Thank you, Ken. Thank you for everything. Thank you for myself.

Love,

Barlow

Abort, retry, ignore?

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer,
I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.

Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed mother! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before.
Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more,
From "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"


With fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

I tried to catch the chips off guard, and pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in mighty desperation, trying random combinations,
Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw a dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go.
What demonic nether world us wrought where lost data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes?
But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
You will be one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"