Nikita (Niki; also called Mačulja/Čačulja), the female cat who lives in our family for twelve years, is seriously ill, in a hard-fought battle against the odds, on drugs and infusion. What do you do when you are about to say that last goodbye to a good and beloved being? You may try to rationalize your affection and emotions, which burdens you even more.

We live with cats in greater intimacy than with any other animal, except dogs... For those of us who love them, the reword is great, for with no other animal is it easier and more enchanting to cross the species barrier, an almost universal desire throughout human history, than with cats.

We definitely feel love for cats, and by extension, this probably tells us something about their capacity to love us back... I concede that we may not have the right word for what the cat is feeling. We have only human words, and these are restricted. For most of human history, after all, they have been used only for humans, not for other animals. Our vocabulary is still poor, but it is growing, and there may come a time when we find words that approximate more closely to what the cat feels...We acknowledge love only in forms immediately comprehensible to us. Cats have purring, and a look of love in the eye, and the rubbing against us and the entwining of their bodies around our legs, and even the meow of love, a sound we recognize at once. Why not expand our definition of love? Might there not be forms of love, from cats to us, that we do not recognize because they are not familiar?

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson: The nine emotional lives of cats, Ballantine Books, New York, 2002.