Whose Property?

Shankar Vedantam in the Post wrote about property yesterday and Tyler Cowen and Ross Hanson links to it. Research seems to show that those people who decorate their cars with bumper stickers, regardless of the sentiment, are more aggressive drivers than those milquetoasts like me who have an unadorned car (almost put a Gore sticker on in 2000, but didn't) and who just fume inside when someone cuts me off or tailgates or whatever.

The researchers' explanation is people have difference senses of "property"--our sense of possession of our bedroom is "private", whereas walking down a city street is "public". So the theory is people who decorate their cars consider them to be private, or privatish, and take more offense when their property is impinged on. (Reminds me of a cartoon I saw yesterday, although I can't get the punch line right: it was someone in a sort of vehicle, explaining to the bystander it wasn't their new SUV, it was their new house.)

I was struck by the sense of property idea. One thing I've noticed, living in a townhouse cluster where one's yard extends about 3-6 feet from the house and the rest is common, my sense of property doesn't match my neighbors, or rather, it took a good while for me to adjust. In the country our farm was a bit isolated, so anyone appearing on one's land was sort of automatically an intruder, suspicious, perhaps a hunter, perhaps a city person, definitely someone whose business you'd want to know. (Didn't want hunters mistaking cows for deer or city folks scaring the cows and cutting their milk production.) This might fit with the imperialistic image of farmers, who don't want anything except the land next to theirs. And, of course, reinforced by the need for fences. Anyhow, it's a different sense of property than I see in Reston. There's no property markers evident.

I thought of that yesterday, but got interrupted from posting it. Then this morning I got reminded of how we are just animals, after all. Petting our older cat, whose mother was feral and who still retains a bit of edge, everything was fine until she decided to jump into her cardboard box and bulge over its sides and I continued to pet her. Wrong! For her, when she's in a box or a paper bag, that's her property and she defends it, even when the hand approaching the box or bag harbors only good intentions.

Bottom line: Cats own property too.