Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [6]
Top criterion for true humanoid achievement is the use of tools. We feel that using tools is pretty fancy stuff, possible only for smart people like us, and it never enters our minds that it might be smarter still if we were so sufficient in ourselves that we didn’t need to use separate tools—if we were our own tools. In 1950 a four-month-old kitten climbed the Matterhorn with a group of mountaineers. It was the only member of the party without climbing and safety equipment. Is it, in the eye of eternity, really nobler to have invented the crampon than not to have needed the thing in the first place?
Besides tools, we admire as intelligence the concept of work. Being so ill-equipped for the world, we have to do a good deal of work just to survive, and since we do it, it must be a sign of intelligence, this submersion of natural inclination in order to accomplish a task. In animals, this usually boils down to working for us, at jobs we want done. Dogs understand work, and often seem to take the same self-important pleasure in it that we do, enjoying it as much for its own sake as for the praise attached. The bird dog brings us the bird, never thinking to eat it himself, and takes pride in the job well done. The elephant, considered an animal genius, seems to understand working for us and even to enjoy it, its little eyes twinkling merrily as it helps us destroy the forests that shelter its fellows. It even helps us trap wild elephants, herding them into stockades and then disciplining and instructing them in their future duties to man. Most people find this charming as well as intellectual.
The cat, a lesser being, does not work for us. It catches mice, but not for us, not as a job, though it may bring us one as a gift, freely offered and not because we asked. Task and obligation are not catly concepts. In the building of Grand Coulee Dam a cat was useful, taking a string tied to its tail along a winding drainpipe so that the engineers could pull a cable through it; what cat could resist exploring a winding drainpipe? No one supposes it wanted to be useful, or took any interest in dams; our separate interests, just for a moment, happened to cross.
They don’t often. I have read, though I’m not sure I believe it, that in Vietnam the United States Army undertook to make cats on leashes lead foot soldiers through the night jungles, using their magical eyes to help us win our war. The project had to be abandoned because the cats kept playing with the pack straps of the soldiers in front, stopping to strop their claws on the soldiers’ boots, and knocking off work altogether when it rained. It’s rare that the cat’s concept of fun coincides with the human concept of work; when the human tries to do paperwork, all the cat sees is a person wasting on a sheet of paper valuable attention that might better be spent on cats; when the human digs a row of holes in which to plant daffodils, the cat follows along using the holes for feline purposes and then filling them neatly in again.
We never ask—it would be sentimental to ask—what the purpose of intelligence is to its user, how successful the cat is to itself as a cat. We ask how successful it would be as a human. We ask it to prove that it could build a better mousetrap, perhaps forgetting that it doesn’t need to; it is a better mousetrap. It never seems to occur to us that a cat, if it were human, might not want to learn to program a computer but instead to compose songs or dance with the Bolshoi or translate its dreams into numbers that win the lottery. We’re disappointed in it when it doesn’t bother to solve our puzzles,