The Mythology of the Cat: Part Two

I’ve previously had a go at trying to figure out how a wild animal with minimal contact with humans might view their world, especially when humans are a part of it even if the animal doesn’t know it. I concluded that no matter what, the animal; in my previous essay the case of a possum, while having a worldview would never get the particulars correct. But what about a domestic animal who interacts with us day-in-and-day-out? What’s their worldview and is it any better than that of a wild animal?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

I’ve never gotten the impression that a cat ponders anything at anytime but practical matters that have a direct bearing on it in the here and right now. An obvious example is that any cat always finds itself on the wrong side of a door, and you are expected to correct that state of affairs as often as is necessary – which is very often indeed. No wonder people install cat flaps! Anyway, things like philosophy and religion and the arts and mathematics and anything abstract not only isn’t considered and immediately dismissed, the cat probably can’t even conceive of such things in order for them to be dismissed as of no relevance to the cat’s worldview. There’s no creativity in their little grey cells whatever. I very much doubt whether any cat has pondered whether or not it has free will. My cats don’t respond to cat art, like the pictures of cats on calendars. Music sooths the savage beast but with one minor exception all my cats have been oblivious to whatever type of music CD I’m playing, be it classical or jazz, country & western or film scores; vocal or instrumental. That one exception is that I once had a cat that would react to whistling within a song that emanated from the speakers. Still, cats probably therefore never have to endure that annoying experience of having an irritating song play endlessly, over and over and over again inside their head! 

If the cats were of a human frame of mind, they might conceive of something like: In the beginning the great cat deity, lets name it Bastet (also spelled Bast, Baast, Ubasti and Baset) after the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, created not only the domestic feline, but all that’s part and parcel of their world. In the beginning Bastet created the ever pristine litter box; the ever full food and water bowls, and lots of birds and mice for felines to chase, catch and snack on. That’s of course according to the mythology of the cat, if the cat had a human’s imagination.  Well actually, not. No cat has imagined any self-contained mythology about the origin and evolution of cats.  If cats have a worldview mythology outside of the concepts of self and now, then it probably centres on what strange companions humans are. And I’m 99% sure that while such human activities might be fascinating, they are equally incomprehensible.

Translated, whatever mythology our domestic feline companions come up with that explains to their satisfaction their worldview, it will bear little resemblance to actual human activities on behalf of the animal, like the concept of money to pay for the goods and services it receives. The cats have no conception of livestock (slaughtered as pet food), of biological evolution (that provided the birds and mice and the abilities of the cat to chase, catch and snack on them), of the infrastructure that gets them their fresh water (and other goodies) that ends up as the end product in their water bowls, etc.

So while I have no idea what worldview mythology my cats have (and they probably aren’t the exact same – each cat’s worldview will be in part unique) it’s wrong.

However, we can speculate; take scenarios that are part and parcel of their world, natural or otherwise, and try to figure out how they see and interpret things through their eyes.

So what goes through a cat’s mind when it’s not immediately concerned with me; now – when it’s not in immediate need of catering to various biological requirements and functions? The cat is just sitting, wide awake, alert, observing, but what is it thinking? Does it have to be deep in thought at all? Probably not I suspect. In fact, it’s more likely as not they are observing just for the sake of observing – always on the lookout for something to chase and eat (that’s probably just hardwired into their brain), or for something that might chase and eat them.

I mean my cats are interested in birds; I’m interested in birds too – but for totally different reasons. On the other hand, my cats are interested in a clean litter box, but what goes through their minds when every time they go to the litter box it’s pristine, even though it wasn’t in that condition a little while back for obvious reasons? Do they associate that ‘it wasn’t then but now it is pristine’ phenomenon with a cat deity or with me or neither?  Cat food appears on demand in bowls they eat out of, yet they have no comprehension of the chain of events between manufacture, distribution, the need for money to purchase, transport, open and pour into those bowls that food. So how do they account for the food that somehow magically appears before them? Do they have a food bowl mythology? Or, perhaps it is a phenomena that just is, and they think no more about it than a fish ponders the nature of the water it swims in. For some reason I find it very hard to picture my cats deep in thought wondering about all those whys and wherefores associated with the food they consume.

Well we have some idea what a cat’s worldview mythology is (me; now), and isn’t (nothing that’s abstract) but you, the owner, aren’t an abstraction. How do you fit in to your animal’s mythology?

Cats must have a field day with respect to inventing a mythology that accounts for the strange habits of those creatures they share their environment with – humans. For example, my cats see me getting dressed every morning – I’m putting on the fur. Since cats don’t need to dress, this behaviour must be really weird to them. Ditto making the bed or washing the dishes. The cats must be totally freaked out by my habit of deliberately getting wet via a daily shower or bath. What activity could repulse a cat more than that? Yuck! How do cats explain the dwelling they reside in along with all the stuff it contains? I know where it all comes from, but how do they account for it all? Do they even bother to try to account for it? Part of that all is my personal computer (PC). They see me typing away on this PC but I’m sure they have no comprehension of what this PC device is or why I’m pecking away on it instead of paying attention to them. When I go out of the house, shopping say or off to the club for a few cold beers, do they wonder where and why? Do they worry that I might not come back, because if I don’t they will find themselves in a pretty pickle. Or, is the fact I’m away of no interest and no consequence and causes no speculation? Since they don’t seem agitated when I leave, I suspect they have no comprehension of the possibility that I might not return, being hit by the proverbial bus instead.

So, do my cats develop a point of view, a worldview mythology to account for birds (a natural part of their environment), litter boxes (not so natural), and PC’s (totally unnatural)?  I suspect they don’t. These things just are and don’t require any mythological interpretation to otherwise explain them.

Cats like to lie and stretch out in and soak up the warmth of the Sun. How do they account for sunshine and this warmth since presumably they know nothing of stellar astrophysics, nuclear fusion, photons, etc.? Might it be, if it be at all, that our cats conclude that in the beginning that great cat deity Bastet created the Sun to give pleasure and warmth to them, but, Bastet hides the Sun at regular intervals (at night) so as not to totally spoil us cats? Probably not I suspect. The warmth of the Sun probably just is (like the water is to the fish) – in fact they might not even make the connection between the Sun, sunshine, and the warmth that gives them. 

Conclusions & Summary: So what is a domestic cat’s worldview mythology? Well, if the cat could speak, it might say something like this: “It’s all about me; it’s all about now; everything else just is and if it doesn’t affect me now, it’s not relevant.” The more I think about it, the more I draw a parallel between a cat being an eternal toddler (me; now; everything else just is, albeit interesting and worthy of exploring), but at least without the temper tantrums!

The Mythology of the Cat: Part One

I’ve previously had a go at trying to figure out how a wild animal with minimal contact with humans might view their world, especially when humans are a part of it even if the animal doesn’t know it. I concluded that no matter what, the animal; in my previous essay the case of a possum, while having a worldview would never get the particulars correct. But what about a domestic animal who interacts with us day-in-and-day-out? What’s their worldview and is it any better than that of a wild animal?

Most of the lesser complex animals, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and reptiles probably have a worldview along the lines of ‘it just is’ and accept whatever comes along – go with the flow. But once you consider the relatively higher and more complex animals, like birds and mammals, then brain complexity becomes such that to a greater or lesser degree, intelligence and the ability to think and figure things out has to be taken into consideration.

For those of you who have companion animals, or even those of you who have just watched animals at a distance, you may have wondered how those animals view and perhaps even think about life, the universe and everything. That is, each animal must have some sort of personal worldview; a perspective or point of view probably forever beyond our understanding – usually but not always.

I’m picking on cats in this particular case because I’ve owned cats nearly all my life. This essay could just as easily have been dogs or horses or some other domesticated mammal.

So what are cats? Can we identify with them? Can they identify with us? Well, domesticated cats are playful; curious; adaptable; selfish; they dream; they like variety though they can also be creatures of habit; they can ‘think’ things through and make decisions; they have a vocal language and a body language; they display emotions; they have memory and therefore somewhat a sense of history; they have the same sensory apparatus as we have; they have their own likes and dislikes whether it be food; a place to sleep, where they want or don’t want to be scratched or rubbed or petted; and, in short each cat has their own very unique personality. Cats are certainly very self-centred, perhaps a bit more so than typical adult humans, but certainly akin to human infants and toddlers whose worldview is very self-centred with a near 24/7 gimmie, gimmie, gimmie; I want, I want, I want. Cats, at least those intersecting with humans have a gimmie/I want aspect to them, and like infants/toddlers the ‘pester’ factor can often reach extremes. In short, cats really seem to be mini albeit furry versions of humans, especially infants/toddlers. But, how close might that version really be?   

For starters, and perhaps like all animals, the cat probably has a worldview something akin to it being the centre of things – the be-all-and-end-all – and that the entire environment the cat finds itself in is there to provide for all the cat’s requirements. From the domestic cat’s point of view, the world owes it a living! How else could the cat view things? One’s self perceptions tend to revolve around ‘I am the centre of the universe’ because you are most intimately bound up in your worldview with yourself and not as intimately with anything else. Therefore, anything else, in a self-centred worldview must be subservient. Of course the cat often finds out the hard way that parts of that external reality have differing opinions. That never seems to shift the cat’s worldview however that it is ‘top dog’* and deserves all the best that comes its way – which might not be all the ‘best’ that nature could provide but the cat doesn’t know that.  

Cats certainly have no comprehension, perhaps like toddlers, of being in the way, underfoot, in danger of being trodden on or sat upon, while helping themselves to whatever piece of household geography suits their fancy. One could conclude from their selfish (from our point of view) behaviour, their worldview must be one of ‘supreme being’ and ‘rank has its privileges’, and such a worldview will persist at least until such time as their tail gets stepped on or they get tossed out of the easy chair! They still probably see themselves as supreme beings – it’s their worldview of you that’s now somewhat changed. 

The average head of the household and cat owner is probably somewhat of the opinion or has the rationale that ‘I pay the bills, therefore I call the shots and what I say goes’! Cats can probably understand ‘head of the household’ in that in cat society, as in all animal societies, all cats are not equal – there is a hierarchy and one cat alone will be ‘top dog’ as it were. But there’s nothing in a cat’s worldview that corresponds to money or bills or economics or finance. Everything is a free lunch, be it sunshine or the electric/gas/wood heater you, the owner, pay for. Even if the cat goes outside and catches and eats a mouse, it’s still as free a lunch as far as the cat is concerned as the food you put in its food bowl. So that bit about ‘I’m the boss because I pay the bills’ has no meaning or significance to the cat since the concept of ‘bills’ is foreign.

Cats have no mythology about shopping. The post Xmas sales and weekly specials at the supermarket are alien concepts. So is that nearly supreme abstraction to humans – time. Birthdays are a non-event with no realization when they occur and with no relevance in any event. Ditto all those other special points in time like holidays we humans are obsessed with. Cats don’t make a habit of staying up late on New Years Eve. It’s of no consequence. Weekends are no different than weekdays.

Equally the cat has apparently no worldview of tomorrow or of the future (though it has a memory of the past). It doesn’t save for a rainy day. I’ve never observed a cat hide away a few of its dry cat food pellets for a future emergency or a midnight snack. A cat is very ‘now’ oriented. A cat probably has no concept of death, far less an afterlife. I’ve always tended to have two cats at a time on the theoretical grounds they have companionship when I’m not around. As such, one cat will finally get to go to that great ‘litter box in the sky’ and as such the surviving cat (for a while at least) will be without its companion feline ‘friend’. I’ve never noticed however any real change in the behaviour of the surviving cat. The demise and removal of the other animal has apparently all the relevance of my tossing an empty can into the recycling bin. Now if I tossed out the cat’s favourite easy chair that would probably cause more of a reaction!

It’s difficult to teach a cat anything that isn’t already hardwired into its little grey cells. I mean you don’t tend to have guard cats, seeing-eye cats, or cats that sit up, stop on command at the corner, beg, and play fetch, etc. when their human owners say so. The cat’s worldview is quite foreign to such concepts, though there’s little difference between a cat’s IQ and a dog’s IQ. Maybe that’s why the saying ‘dogs have masters; cats have slaves’!

So those are several significant differences between the worldview mythologies of the cat relative to humans (or even dogs, who, are well known to ‘grieve’ upon the death of a fellow companion dog or of their owner. If I died, my cat’s loyalty would shift quick-smart to the next human who fed it). 

I noted above that cats dream and why not. I judge this because often when they are sound asleep I frequently notice their paws and mouths twitching as if in response to something going on inside their head. I assume it’s not some abstraction that occupies this assumed dream state. It’s probably related to visions of chasing and eating fat mice and plump flightless birds! There’s no way of telling for sure, but that’s what I suspect. If they dream, they dream practical cat-related things.

To be continued…

*The standing observation or joke is that a dog thinks to itself that ‘my human feeds me and plays with me and looks after me, therefore he must be a god’. The cat thinks to itself that ‘my human feeds me and plays with me and looks after me, therefore I must be a god!’ There’s an awful lot of relevance in that observation IMHO.

The Mythology of the Possum

For those of you who have companion animals, or even those of you who have just watched animals at a distance, you may have wondered how those animals view and perhaps even think about life, the universe and everything. That is, each animal, if they have any intelligence at all, must have some sort of personal worldview mythology; a perspective or point of view (POV) probably, even usually, but not always forever beyond our understanding since we can try to walk a mile in their paws by using our intelligence as a guide.

Most of the lesser complex animals, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and reptiles probably have a worldview along the lines of ‘it just is’ and accept whatever comes along – go with the flow. But once you consider the relatively higher and more complex animals, like birds and mammals, then brain complexity becomes such that to a greater or lesser degree, intelligence and the ability to think and figure things out has to be taken into consideration.

Humans maybe top of the pops when it comes to smarts and figuring things out, but that doesn’t mean that every non-human life form has the IQ of a microbe. I strongly suspect that birds and mammals develop a personal worldview mythology that explains to their satisfaction all that they see and experience daily.

Further, for all such animals that develop a direct or indirect relationship with humans they must additionally evolve a personal mythology that’s understandable within their larger worldview that puts us in their Big Picture. That mythology, their POV is going to be grossly incorrect of course, but they don’t know that. They, in all honesty can not comprehend the sum total of those experiences they share directly with human activity and so to some degree or other they develop a mythological worldview that somehow explains what humans do within their own context. However, sometimes humans feature only indirectly and so their POV doesn’t actually involve humans in any shape, manner or form.

So the purpose of this little essay is to illustrate those animals (i.e. – birds and mammals) that interact directly or indirectly with humans (in a good, indifferent, bad or god-awful way) have a somewhat human-centred mythology even if they aren’t aware of it. Taking one specific animal as an example, consider the following tale of the possum.

I have a possum that visits my back courtyard overnight. I know that because I often see its poo; actually I once saw it silhouetted against the backdrop of a lighted window of a house opposite mine. Presumably the possum hasn’t spotted me; it being a creature of the night and I being a creature of the day. Now presumably the possum hunts around at night, foraging for food. It’s been an usually long and bitterly cold Australian winter here in the nation’s capital, Canberra, so, in empathy for a fellow life-form who has a far tougher life than I, I took to leaving out for it in the early evening an apple. In the morning following, it was gone – the apple that is. Now I, as an intelligent human, know all the facts of the matter. I buy an apple; I leave out the apple; the possum finds the apple and eats it. However, I can’t help but wonder, from the perspective of the possum, what does it make of this nightly gift of an apple, an apple that appears where there is no apple tree for miles around?  

Some assumptions are in order. I assume the possum has some intelligence, an IQ, an ability to think and wonder and ponder. When something out of the ordinary occurs, it makes an impression. Translated, the sun comes up and the sun sets – nothing out of the ordinary. I doubt if the possum much ponders this fact of life. The tree it lives in exists day in and day out – nothing much to think about there. It’s warm in the summer; cold in the winter; some days it rains; most days it doesn’t rain. But that daily apple hasn’t been part and parcel of its worldview mythology – until now.

So, something new, beneficial but unexpected comes into play. Does the possum put it down to good luck, good fortune, clean living, being in the right place at the right time, or does it think deeper than that?

Now an apple appears for the first time on the ground it forages over – unusual but strange things happen. An apple appears on that same spot of ground every evening – the same spot without benefit of an apple tree. That’s not in keeping with the ordinary expectations and experiences of our possum. Because this is not something natural and ordinary within the possum’s worldview, then this has to be something extraordinary; this is something magical; this is something paranormal; this is something supernatural. Perhaps there is a supernatural Possum Deity that looks after possums in times of need, like in the wintertime when food in general and apples in particular are few and far between.

And so our possum perhaps develops this idea of something bigger than the natural world it’s used to. The possum perhaps develops a possum mythology of a Possum Deity that looks after all possums, like itself. It has to be ‘all possums’ since I’ll assume our possum has no comprehension of good possums vs. bad possums with only the former getting rewarded with an unaccounted for apple (possum manna from heaven).

But perhaps it’s seen me from the seclusion of its tree put down the apple, in which case maybe I’m the Great Possum Deity. If it sees other humans are they deities too, even if not possum deities?

Since this regularly occurring apple appears in roughly the same geographical spot night after night, might our hungry possum attribute something extraordinary to this patch of (my) backyard, (its) courtyard turf? Might that patch of ground in fact, in our possum’s worldview mythology, become our possum’s Sacred Site?  

Now the possum’s perspective won’t be one based around language and it won’t be able to communicate its worldview mythology to other possums. Rather its perceptions will be based on its five senses, most prominently vision in all likelihood. It could imagine, visualise in its mind, some super-sized (Santa Claus type deity) possum delivering apples without having words for ‘apple’ or ‘possum’ or ‘deity’ or ‘gift giver’ or even ‘human’. It wouldn’t have words for ground or ‘Sacred Site’, rather a mental image that this patch of ground is extra-special. Such an image, as opposed to the words we would use, wouldn’t be out of the question. I’m sure our possum could visualize another possum (even without knowing the word ‘possum’) even if there was no other actual possum in visual range or otherwise present in the vicinity.

Okay, you know and I know there’s no Possum Deity, nothing mysterious or supernatural is going on, there is no Sacred Site. I know what’s going on – some farmer, hundreds of miles away sells their crop of apples to some company who hires a distributor who trucks them to Canberra and they end up in that company’s local supermarkets. You know that, and I know that, but we can’t expect the possum to know that. If this possum communicates with fellow possums (not that it can), it is not going to relate a story of a compassionate human buying an apple a day and leaving it out to be devoured by possums, far less have knowledge of that far away farmer, company, distributor, truck, supermarket, and all the infrastructure that implies, etc.

It would be fascinating to converse with that possum and find out exactly what its current worldview mythology is, even though that’s beyond our means. But, I’d bet that whatever it is, it’s wrong! Still, let’s walk a mile in its paws and try to view things like it would. That much we can do. I’ve tried to do so, but the odds are I’m wrong oo. There’s no real meeting of the minds here. Even if I came face-to-face with the possum, I couldn’t converse with it; I couldn’t convince it that its POV was wrong.

However, just like each possum has their own unique worldview mythology, so too does each and every human have a unique perspective on life, the universe and everything. The difference is that in most cases we can communicate that perspective to others of our species.

The point now is if our companion mammals have a flawed POV of their worldview mythology, one that we know is wrong, but they don’t, one that may or may not incorporate humans; do we humans have in turn a flawed POV when it comes to our worldview mythologies? The parallels between mammals (like our possum) and humans and those collective worldview mythologies we all have might suggest that we too have some flawed perceptions about life, the universe and everything that need further and continued exploration and elaboration. In that broader context, perhaps we can also have empathy with possums inasmuch as we too might have flawed worldview mythologies in the eyes of entities superior to us.