Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [5]
A cat will stand for a long time at an opened door and consider the immediate sensory arguments for and against going out: wind in the ears, rain, cold, snow on the ground, dogs, planes, sunshine, squirrels, and the condition of the litter box inside. The weights of these matters nudge the cat in one direction or the other, or, more often, in both directions until a human foot pushes him firmly out onto the steps. If the decision is negative, an experienced cat will go back to bed, sometimes for the whole month of February, while a young cat may ask to have the door reopened twenty times in the course of a single rainy day, to see if things have changed, but the decision process is the same. It’s a decision we can allow a cat to make, simple and physical and based on observable factors: it is raining and in the past when I went out in the rain I got my feet wet; I don’t like rain so I will stay in. This is no more complicated than deciding whether or not to scratch an ear—and I’ve seen cats undecided about that, too. If we’re going to admit independent volition in animals, and Descartes begrudged them even that, insisting that all animal behavior was as automated as digestion, then we have to allow them to act on past experience and what they can see and hear at the moment.
But a cat does not make New Year’s resolutions. A cat does not sit in the bushes one day and decide, without pressure of any kind, to stop being a vicious renegade with a price (we were going to give Terry a beer) on his head and turn himself into the mildest of house cats. Precious few humans are capable of this decision; our habitual criminals tend to stay criminal, and even our own simple resolutions, such as spending more time with the children, tend to fade by Groundhog Day. But leaving aside the effort of will involved in changing one’s whole personality and behavior instantly and permanently, the intellectual leap is beyond him.
We know perfectly well that a cat doesn’t have the kind of brain that could conceive of itself as a different creature from the one it is now, and take steps to become that creature. We are, surely, the only animal self-conscious enough to inspect our behavior and wonder if life would be more satisfying if we changed it: a cat can’t imagine life as a different sort of cat any more than it can imagine life as a rhinoceros.
Even a very young human child can say to itself, “Maybe if I were a better boy my mother would be nicer to me and this would make me happier.” No animal can say this. A dog can learn that if he sits when he’s told to sit he’ll get a pat on the head, but he can’t suppose it before it’s ever happened; dogs may want to please, but they aren’t supposed to suppose.
Blackie cannot have thought things over and decided to become Basil.
What, then, did he think—or should I say “think"? What did happen? As swiftly as a werewolf changing back into human form with the blood of his midnight rampages still wet on his claws, he became a different cat, a cat of peace and sofa cushions, and in time even the other cats forgot his outlaw days and allowed him to curl among them in a patchwork heap, and no outsider, looking them over, could have guessed for which of these a man was coming with a gun.
2
Smart Like Us
When humans address the question of nonhuman intelligence, what we ask is, “How close is this creature’s mind to ours?” Naturally it can come only so close and no closer, but our mind is the standard of perfection against which all imperfect, lesser minds must be measured. Then we make up tests to see just how far inferior cats are to humans at solving human puzzles; when the cats pose us feline puzzles we are not obliged to solve them, nor to call it failure if we fail to. Our tests measure the kind of persistence and cleverness valuable to humans in a modern, human world, because if not of use to us, then of what use at all?
We do not test for adaptability, or consider it a form of intelligence, because we’re in charge here: humans don’t need adaptability because