The Lord of Cats

I don't know why I used that title. I seemed funnier than "When Lesser Mammals Pay Homage to Their Genetic Superiors", I guess.

But neither title has much to do with what I'm writing about, mainly because I'm sure cat's do this entirely for self-serving purposes. Nevertheless, I love it when cats follow you around. It makes it seem at least like they genuinely crave your company. Plus it's just cute. Mine and Kate's are like 15 year old mute toddlers that pad around after you, following innocently from room to room, content just to be near you. Paying them attention is a bonus, of course, and DB particularly will sometimes force himself on you. But from a place of sort of quaint desperation which isn't the least bit annoying.

Dogs I'm sure behave the same way, probably to an even greater degree. But I'm not a dog person, so I can't really speak to it. I know my sister and John's dog Lucy likes the lap, but she may just be imitating the two cats in the house. But okay. Let's be inclusive and expand out to say how great it is when any animal follows you around the house. Especially fish. That's particularly endearing, and astounding.

Anthropomorphism is Sixteen Letters of Positive

It's human nature to anthropomorphize. We do it with almost everything we come into contact with, often times without an awareness of the act. I'm sure it's an offshoot of our social natures. Seeing ourselves in others helps us relate to them. But anthropomorphism isn't just a social construct, or, at its worst the ultimate act of vanity. I think anthropomorphism is the root of empathy and compassion, and it's nature's ultimate evolutionary behavioral accomplishment.

It goes like this. We care for ourselves. We look after ourselves. Our survival instinct makes sure we protect ourselves from harm. We don't vary too much from every other species on the planet in this, especially our mammalian cousins. But what sets us apart is our ability, almost our compulsion to project onto other's our own traits, fears, desires and behaviors. Even, and especially non-human creatures and inanimate objects. And, as we protect ourselves from harm, we tend to protect those we consider similar to us. Kin and friends alike. If you are one of us you are part of the protected fold. Anthropomorphistic behaviors allow humans to extend their circle of protection beyond themselves and their close kin groups. They grant us the ability to feel empathy in general, and specifically toward creatures and objects completely unlike ourselves. We can even extend the empathy to concepts like justice and freedom. We see ourselves everywhere, and everywhere we see ourselves we have the innate desire to protect.

This gets short-circuited often, no doubt. But at its root, apart from other external factors, anthroporphism is the foundation of human ethics. Treat others as you would be treated. Look at ancient animistic religions. Their adherents saw spirits and gods in everything. In plants and animals. In the cycles of the seasons. In the sun, stars and moon. Why? Because they saw themselves in everything, and therefore everything became sacred to them as they were sacred to themselves. Everything around them was an extension of their culture, their circle of community. And they protected it as best they could.

Next time you find yourself imbuing something external to you with human attributes try and catch your motivation. Are you trying to understand it better? Are you trying to forge a connection? Attempting to get inside its mind (or imagine it has one)? Generally speaking I think you'll find that whatever your motivation is, it's a positive one. It's all about extending your sphere of connectivity within the world. Making positive attachments to meaningful things.

Anthropomorphism isn't a human failing, and it most certainly isn't a human vanity. It's the doorway to inclusiveness, kindness and acceptance of everything around you.

Unlikely Pair

It's remarkable when you witness an unlikely friendship between two different animal species. I just saw this video of an orangutan and a dog that I had to share with everyone. It brings tears to my eyes to view such a bond between the two of them. It shows that even animals who rarely share habitats with other species can even feel a strong connection with another kind of animal. The bond was immediate, like they were meant to meet one day. It's just uncanny and absolutely amazing. That's all I can say, now view the beautiful relationship for yourself.

Using Your Pets for Your Own Amusement

Owning pets has its rewards. They are instant family members, loyal to the end. They love you unconditionally, largely because their brains aren't hefty enough to process the concept of "conditions." Nor can they distinguish a laser pointer point from an actual, capture-able thing, and that's the sort of thing I'm writing about today.

Pets are great diversions. It's a riot watching little feline junkies pine for a fix of catnip, and then roll around in ecstasy with little regard for the fact that their fur is getting coated in their drug of choice. My cats (Banjo especially, back when he was around) are also absolutely transfixed by plastic bags. They perch themselves halfway into the bag, licking its inner surface incessantly. I can't imagine it's the flavor they're after. It must be the crinkly sound and the feel of the plastic on their tongues. Or maybe it's a natural offshoot of licking lead paint earlier in life. I'm not sure, but it's bizarre and hilarious.

Banjo also used to flip out for laser pointers. He'd run himself ragged; in circles, up walls, up and down from furniture trying to catch and kill that little red dot. It didn't matter that he'd never even managed to touch it before, let alone capture it. He wasn't about to let seeming invulnerability stop him from hunting his prey. And he reacted that way at fourteen years old. I only wish I'd had laser pointers when he was younger. I think his head would have literally exploded.

Fetch is a favorite game with our canine friends, a game that would never work with another human. It would be like dropping your pencil repeatedly and expecting your friend to pick it up for you every time and enjoy the privilege. But dogs freaking love it. Any opportunity to run anywhere is a good one. And that's why using your pets for your own amusement is so great. Not only are you enjoying yourself, but they are, too. When your dog rolls over, plays dead, or shakes hands, he's getting the satisfaction of a job well done. With Banjo and his laser pointer, the hunt is more important than the capture. So, unless you like to painfully torture small mammals for your own amusement, generally it's a two-way street of fun.


The fun doesn't really start until about halfway through the video.

What Are We Missing?

I'm not sure that this topic, in itself, qualifies as a positive (though it's not a negative either) but I've always thought the conclusion was pretty interesting, so I see it as positive in that sense.

When we train any one of our senses on the outside world, we assume we're experiencing our surroundings as they are. We see in color. The world is in color. We see in three dimensions. The world matches that observation. We smell something only if it's giving off a scent. The world is simply sitting there, apart from us, waiting to be sensed. It is as we sense it to be.

Other creatures, if they shared our capacity for consciousness, would feel the same way, but their perception of the world can be quite different. Simple eyes on simple creatures can only sense light and dark, or movement. Other animals don't have the capacity to see color. Further, animals lacking stereoscopic vision can't truly experience the world in three dimensions. There are large swathes of possible experience that these creatures will never know, will never know that they don't know, and wouldn't understand even if they did. Their perceived world, as it exists for them, seems whole and complete. But arguably it isn't.

So what are we missing? Some things we know. Certain animals can see in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. We can't. Many animal species, such as homing pigeons, can sense the earth's magnetic field, almost like an internal compass. It's almost a sixth sense, and it's one that we don't share. Echolocation, used by bats and dolphins, and the ability to sense electric fields are other examples of senses we don't have access to.

Many other species possess versions of our standard five senses that far outperform their human counterparts. Certain sharks can detect prey scent diluted in water one part per 10 billion. And while a normal human auditory frequency range is 20 Hz. to 20,000 Hz., certain pigeons can hear sounds at frequencies as low as 0.1 Hz., while certain moth species can hear frequencies up to 240,000 Hz.

Buzzards can spot small rodents from an altitude of 15,000 feet. Dogs can be trained to smell cancerous tissues. Cockroaches can detect movement as small as 2,000 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. That one is staggering! And this list goes on.

The point is, there is a lot of available information out there that we already know we're missing. How much more is there we're completely unaware of? Probably not a lot, I'll grant you. We're intellectually aware of many other varieties of sensible radiation and other phenomena that no animal species can detect. Emissions that only our technology allows us to percieve. So, in that sense, we've eclipsed every other species on the planet. Our technology extends our senses beyond the capabilities of even the most prodigious critter.

But for my money, using mechanized contraptions to sense the world around us is a poor substitute for direct experience. Using a compass to sense magnetic north works great, but imagine what it would feel like to just know where north lay. To feel it innately inside you. Infrared cameras convert heat information into the visible spectrum. We then see it as blotches of yellow and red on a computer monitor. But what does it actually look like to a creature that can sense it directly?

Here's what I think all of this teaches us. While it's true that the world is just sitting out there, emitting particles, waiting to be sensed, it doesn't actually look or smell or sound or taste like anything. All of that happens on the back end of experience, in our brains, and is a complete fabrication. What happens is our tongue touches NaCl, sodium chloride, better known as table salt. We taste something salty. That "taste" doesn't exist as a necessary component of NaCl. It could taste, because of differing chemical reactions in differing brains, very different for other creatures. There's no way of knowing for sure whether my experience of salt is even the same as another human being's. Further, an animal that can perceive salt's weak electric field may experience it in a way that we can't even imagine.

So I guess the answer to my original question, what are we missing, is "nothing". And everything. But since we have no real sense of what experience could be outside of our own heads, we're not really missing it.