Winifred Carriere:
Quotable on Cats

When it came to cats, Winifred Carriere was quite quotable. Just Google her name and you’ll find scores of websites recalling her observations. Probably her most repeated pronouncement is: “Cats always know whether people like or dislike them. They do not always care enough to do anything about it.”

Carriere loved cats, enough to write a book, Cats, 24 Hours A Day, published in 1967 and again in 1975. “There is no doubt that Winifred Carriere is ‘possessed’ by her cats,” said Kirkus Reviews,  “and for 20 years she has been happily ‘without a catless moment.’”

However, her interests extended beyond the feline to the floral.

Winifred Osborn Carriere was born in Ridgefield on April 20, 1912,  the daughter of Richard C. Osborn and Beulah Sanford. Her father, who worked for the family-owned lumber yard that is now Ridgefield Supply, died when she was seven  Her mother went off to Manhattan to become a nurse, married one of her Columbia University professors named Harry Clinton France,  and eventually became a leading authority on child care. She wrote articles for more than 100 magazines, was editorial director of American Baby magazine, appeared often on TV, and wrote two books, How to Have a Happy Child (1952) and How to Have a Happy, Healthy Baby (1964).

 Young Winifred stayed in Ridgefield with her great-aunts, Annie Tallman Osborn and Carolyn Winifred Osborn, at the Osborn homestead at Main and Prospect Streets.

 She graduated from Syracuse University, where she met and married Albert Carriere, an aspiring playwright and actor. They had a daughter and were later divorced.

After the divorce she moved to New York City, and began a career in editing. She worked

at Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill and the Institute of Radio Engineers before turning to magazines. For many years she published and edited Professional Florist Magazine, a trade magazine. 

Her interest in flowers led her to join with Vernon Johnson in 1964 in writing An Easy Guide to Artificial Light Gardening for Pleasure and Profit. A New York Times reviewer with a sense of the pun said the book “provides illuminating answers to questions about equipment, construction and care of light-gardens.” 

She retired to a house on Wooster Street in the 1960s and 1970s,  working for a while as office manager for Buck Argenio’s Buck Realty. She died in an assisted care home in Sharon in 2002 at the age of 90.

While flowers were her profession for many years, it is cats that keep Win Carriere’s name alive today. Other of her observations that are often quoted include:

• If a cat did not put a firm paw down now and then, how could his human remain possessed?
• I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better than he is — more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not.
• The cat is the mirror of his human’s mind. The dog mirrors his human’s physical appearance.

The nose knows

The next time your cat rubs its head against your leg, it may be more communication than affection. Kitty is probably marking you with its scent.

Cats rub against people and places to deposit saliva and secretions from three glands on the head. These deposits send a message to other cats: You are part of their territory. It may be like posting a “no trespassing” sign.

In the wild, creatures from lowly mice to lumbering bears and fleet-footed deer mark the trees and ground with semiochemicals. “Semio” is from Greek, meaning a “sign,” and mammalian signs are read with considerable interest. They often define territories, but their particular mixture of 50 or more compounds may even identify an individual animal, as a name or Social Security number identifies us.

In the case of deer, the meaning of scents can be quite complex, advertising a buck’s status in the herd, triggering the reproductive cycle in females and perhaps even stemming the sexual drive in bucks of lower status.

Most mammals have much better olfaction than humans – dogs and their wild kin have up to a million times more scent receptors than we do.

So remember when you take Fido for a walk: Those leaves and twigs he spends so much time sniffing could be his version of reading the local newspaper.

Killer cats

Few scenes are as peaceful and domestic as the family cat, curled up and purring in your lap, on a cool spring evening. But for uncountable millions of creatures, house cats are not so warm and fuzzy, and feline fangs are the last thing they see before they die.

Conservation officials say that of the 90 million pet cats in the U.S., only 35% are kept indoors. The rest are let loose to hunt, killing “hundreds of millions of birds, and more than a billion small mammals, such as rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks each year,” says the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

Habitat destruction is the leading cause of declining bird populations, but right up in second place are cats, both domestic and feral.

The killer is becoming the killed, however, as house cats are now prey themselves. Increasing numbers of coyotes and now fishers – a large carnivorous marten that has been reintroduced into our woods – are catching and eating many house cats.

The answer to both deadly problems is simple: Keep kitty indoors.