Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [9]
Understanding cause and effect isn’t really the high-level thinking we’ve made of it, and doesn’t depend on knowing exactly how the effect is caused; if I answer a ringing telephone, I expect a voice at the other end, though I couldn’t explain how it gets there. When Blueberry and I lived in a third-floor walk-up, the snarl of a buzzer meant that someone was coming to visit: I pressed the button that released the catch on the downstairs door, and after a suitable interval company came in, gasping from the climb. I didn’t tell the cat that a fellow tenant had lost her key, and I had promised to let her in when she rang. She did, and I did, and thought no more about it. Blueberry sat by the door and waited. Nobody came. She paced. She glowered at me. She hooked her paw under the door and rattled it angrily. Buzzer means company; where the hell is company?
Cats have less trouble than we like to think with this much thinking.
Meanwhile, back at Columbia, Shuey pressed on. In the next phase of the exam, the cats had to step on all three plates and then go back and step on one of the first two a second time. Then on all three once and the first two twice, then on all three twice but without repeating the immediately previous plate. Shuey then added a fourth plate, so that getting the food required the proper stepping-on of plates twelve times. Then she arranged to have the door open only if the plates were stepped on in a preprogrammed order.
The natural way for a cat to get its dinner is to lie in wait, to stalk, and to pounce; putting up with this electronic dance seems uncommonly good-natured of them if not necessarily intelligent.
Four of the cats did brilliantly and one poor dodo took 271 tries to get through the first basic series. (Perhaps the food in the inner cage was something he hated. One of my cats hates kidneys, another won’t touch liver.) The study, when Shuey finally ran out of plates and quit, proved conclusively that some cats are more intelligent than others. Or hungrier. Or less interested in alternative activities like chasing their tails.
Since she noted that eighty percent of the cats stepped on the plates with their front paws first, it also proved that more cats walk forward than backward.
It’s interesting to consider that Shuey’s intelligence, or even sanity, was not under question at any time, nor was she asked, as a control, to pass a test of the cats’ devising. Crossing the room without stepping on the floor, for instance.
In recent years studies of animal intelligence have shifted from the ability to manipulate traps to the ability to use language. Not to communicate, which is primitive, but to use real language. Our language. Words. Cats are off the hook, primates are on, and gorillas and chimpanzees are crowding our solitary superiority by talking to us in the human sign language. Where now is our “qualitative difference of mentality separating us from the animals"? Not only do they learn to make the signs, which really would seem a simple enough intellectual feat, and the hand sign “hunger” not too far above a cat scratching at the refrigerator door, but they also learn to put the words together into groups that, when we use them ourselves, we call “thoughts.” They ask for comforting hugs when things go wrong, and asking for them in a language we’ve invented seems very much classier indeed than, for instance, a cat asking for a comforting lap in the language natural to a cat.
These primates say insulting things about each other. And they tell lies.
Lucy, the famous signing chimp, was asked by her trainer if she was responsible for that pile of feces (for all their brilliance, they’re as hard to housebreak as a human) in the middle of the floor. She said no. She said the trainer had done it himself.
A lie is a sophisticated concept. First to learn the words,