Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [8]
Roger Brown, in Words and Things, says, “Most people are determined to hold the line against animals. Grant them the ability to make linguistic reference and they will be putting in a claim for minds and souls. The whole phyletic scale will come trouping into Heaven demanding immortality for every tadpole and hippopotamus. Better be firm now and make it clear that man alone can use language and make reference. There is a qualitative difference of mentality separating us from animals.”
The italics are mine. Betsy couldn’t use our spoken words, lacking the vocal setup, but she used what physical equipment she did have. And if she wasn’t “referring” to the litter pan—if I were a scientist it would be worth my diploma to suppose she was—then we have to assume that this cat of almost irritatingly hygienic habit once in her life suffered from an aberrant impulse, a kind of psychobiologic twitch, that made her risk a beating by jumping into the sink and committing an unheard-of indecency right under my hands. When screamed at she coincidentally ran toward the litter pan; the fact that it needed cleaning is inadmissible evidence, since I couldn’t retest her to prove that she wouldn’t run toward a pan that didn’t need cleaning; science is hard work.
Always ascribe intelligent behavior to coincidence, however bizarre. Anecdote is not evidence, and no valid results can be taken from a test set up by the animal itself and not by us; only human testing is conclusive.
In the animal laboratory of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, Audrey M. Shuey worked with eighty-two kittens for nearly a year and a half, during which time they grew into eighty-two deeply confused cats.
She constructed a cage within a cage. The inner cage had the food in it, and a door; the outer cage had three electrical pressure plates in the floor, programmable by the operator to open the door to the food when properly stepped on.
In the beginning the door opened whenever any one plate was stepped on, then if any two plates, then any three. Each kitten was given five minutes to pass the test, and to Shuey’s apparent surprise they didn’t all buckle down to work immediately, but frittered away the precious minutes “sitting or washing, playing with tail, pawing at shadow, jumping, rolling over, rubbing against the walls.” Sometimes they simply curled up and went to sleep, indicating a lack of ambition repulsive to the human mind.
It took them anywhere from nine to 136 sessions to learn to step on one plate to get dinner. To step on two plates took from one to seventy tries, and to step on all three from one to 121. The kittens that came out best were “facing the inner door as they touched the plate accidentally and probably saw the door slide back.” Shuey doesn’t seem surprised by this, but it bears thinking about.
A cat knows nothing of electrical impulses that open doors from a distance, any more than Betsy, when she was shot by a neighbor a year after the sink incident, could have understood murder from thirty feet away. The fact that the kittens made the connection “step here and that door opens over there,” though it was irrelevant to Shuey’s question, seems rather clever. If I rub my ear and a fire truck passes by outside, I don’t assume I’ve produced the fire truck by rubbing, but only because I’ve been told of the habits of fire trucks. Some of the kittens made an assumption and happened to be right.
They could have been wrong. A French writer reports on a cat and her kittens who always ate lunch with the family, on the table. One day, just as the platter of pork chops was set on the table, there was a loud explosion in the gas pipes, frightening everyone. No damage was done, and the people resumed their lunch, but the cats stayed in hiding. Some weeks later, with peace long re-established, pork chops were