Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [10]
Luckily we’re dealing only with primates here, since nothing else has fingers, and if we have to move over and make room in the intellectual community we won’t have to make very much room.
It may really be that primates are smarter than other animals because they’re the most like us; certainly we like to think so, having had to swallow the theory of a common ancestor. And certainly they are like us. Meeting, through smudged glass, the eyes of a gorilla in the zoo, we feel the quivering shock of recognition that runs through every fiber: an animal not ours but us. The endless fascination of a cat’s eyes lies in the difference. A cat is not us. The cat is inside there, and its mind is working, but how?
We’ve never even considered inventing a practical speech for animals with neither hands nor voice boxes, and if we did, how would we teach it to a cat, or answer, since we lack a cat’s movable equipment as much as it lacks ours? Our deficiency in the matter clinches the cat’s inferior mentality.
Speechlessness doesn’t stop the cat from telling lies. Derek Tangye’s cat Monty lied. In Somewhere a Cat Is Waiting, he tells us that he and his wife were packing to go on a trip when Monty came to them with a painful limp, hobbling on three legs, unable to touch paw to floor. They called the vet, the vet came and examined the cat and said there was nothing at all wrong with him, and Monty stalked huffily away on all four feet.
A horse, no intellectual giant, who has gone lame and been let off work because of it, may fake going lame again, but this is only cause and effect at its simplest. Suitcases are only cause and effect: all cats know that their appearance means the people are going away, and some cats sulk, or hide, or hunker down inside the suitcase to make it impossible to pack. But apparently Monty, to whom it had never happened, supposed, like Boston Blackie supposing a reformed life, that if he were ill the people would cancel their trip. And apparently he also knew when his bluff had been called. And certainly he told a deliberate lie.
The naturalist W. H. Hudson said, “Cats are mentally near to us; their brains function even as ours do.” Somewhere in there beyond the language barrier.
Lately it has occurred to our researchers that, if we can’t teach cats a real language, at least we can write down their own unschooled and primitive utterances and assign them meanings. On a recent Public Broadcast special I admired a massive computer console digesting a program that analyzed the sounds of cats; each sound was recorded and broken down and assigned a meaning, and when the project is complete we will have a written language for the cat. It’s simple enough, according to this research, since the cat has only fifteen different sounds to be combined into twenty-five different vocalizations. “Meow” is actually two words, “me,” a greeting, and “ow,” meaning “keep your distance,” used more with people than with other cats.
Unfortunately, in a recent book, How to Talk to Your Animals, Jean Craighead George says that “meow” with the accent on the “ow” means “follow me,” while the same word drawn out and unaccented is a whine of protest.
And of course in order to carry out this translation we’ll have to search out cats that say “meow” at all, though I did meet one once. It was unnerving, like having a rooster walk up and say “cock-a-doodle-doo.” And having compiled a glossary of terms for cats that use the sounds that English-speakers think of as cat sounds, we can turn our attention to other countries, since the Chinese think their cats say “ming” and what we hear as “purr” the French hear as “ron-ron.” In the end the cats will be no better than the humans, separated from cats in other lands by separate languages.
My own unscientific