Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [7]
One thing we used to know for certain about the lesser forms of life: they can’t talk. Speech, human speech, we ardently believe, is the one utter necessity for abstract thought and the crowning glory that distinguishes the human mind from all other “minds.” Lacking speech, an animal cannot entertain concepts. It’s impossible, for instance, that both the Siamese Morgan and the new little black cat, being young and inexperienced, tried to play with the letter O. Both of them, on separate occasions, saw it, one of the big decorative capitals used to break up a page of print, and tried to roll it off the page. They ignored the F, the L, the T, as being too angular, but they pawed for quite a while at the rollable O before they realized they’d been duped and gave up. Without the word round, they cannot entertain the thought “round,” and this can’t be allowed to have happened.
Without speech nothing can exist but the here and now, the concrete, the immediate sensory impression. Speech is thought. Without it, an animal’s world is reduced to heat and cold, hunger and thirst, sex and reproduction: the rest is silence.
Consider Betsy, a most unremarkable cat. My daughter brought her home, a wretched scrap of alley flotsam with patches of white and patches of gray stripes, and she ate, washed up, and stayed. A nice enough cat and immaculate in her personal habits, but not the kind that impresses itself on a cat household; I more or less ignored her.
One evening I was scraping carrots into the sink and Betsy jumped up onto the counter. This was surprising; unlike all my other cats she never jumped onto counters or the dinner table, having apparently made herself a set of rules for household behavior that never occurred to anyone else, least of all me. She stepped delicately into the sink, gazed greenly up at me to be sure she had my attention, and squatted and urinated.
“Betsy!” Betsy the prissy, Betsy of the perfect manners—in the sink? I raised my hand to smack her and she sprang onto the floor and raced toward the laundry room. I chased her. Glancing over her shoulder to see that I was still on her trail, she led me to the cat pan and stopped in front of it and looked up at me. She lifted a curled paw in disgust. It was a mess. I had been busy. I had neglected to change the litter.
I apologized, I cleaned the pan, I went back to the carrots. But I was shaken.
Consider the necessary train of thought, or “thoughts”:
1. The woman changes the litter pan.
2. It needs changing badly, so she must have forgotten.
3. If I remind her, she’ll change it.
4. How can I remind her? Just pacing back and forth meowing, or scratching the furniture, or nipping her ankle, will direct her attention to me but not to the litter pan.
5. How can I say, specifically, “litter pan” to her in a way she understands?
6. With a symbolic gesture. I will get her attention, and then demonstrate the problem to her.
7. Then she’ll change it.
I don’t know whether my chasing her was part of the plan, so she could lead me to the laundry room, or a spontaneous addition when she saw she had overestimated my intelligence and further explanation was necessary.
Those who have spent time in a country where they didn’t speak the language know the difficulty of conveying a problem not in the same room, an invisible problem, even with hands to gesture with. Your car has broken down, but how to explain a car when there is no car in sight? Even given pencil and paper and hands to draw with, how to explain that the car won’t run? It takes very little genuine intelligence to say “My car broke down” to someone who understands the words; inventing a symbolic demonstration is high-order effort.
When a cat wants a door opened, it pantomimes opening the door, reaches for the doorknob or hooks a paw under the edge and glares around at the people. But the door is there, and means door, directly, as refrigerator means food, while urinating