So, my girlfriend’s cat lives with me. She’s a complete hag (the cat). Growls and hisses at me when I walk into a room, leaps out from under the bed at my feet when I get up to pee in the middle of the night, and is just generally hateful to me and everyone else on the planet except E and her son. For those two, she’s about equal parts evil and snuggly love. I’ve never done anything to the kitty and E swears the cat was never abused, or at least not enough to account for such antisocial behavior.
I bought a kitten last week. He’s 3 months old and black as coal. We named him Chicken. The mean kitty’s name is Tigger. As I suspected, Tigger doesn’t hassle the kitten at all really. Well, no more than any other independent adult cat who encounters a new kitten strolling around the grounds. There’s a little friction, but Chicken gives as good as he gets; they’ll be pals in a few months.
See, I know cats. I know they have feelings, desires, goals (albeit nebulous ones) and I have absolutely no doubt that they are self-aware. They are difficult to communicate with because they nearly always insist on communicating on their own terms. One has to keep that in mind lest one decide, “fukkit, cats are just stupid animals.”
Did you get that last bit? Cats are stupid animals because they don’t step outside of themselves and communicate with us in human terms. They won’t follow rules except when the rules coincide with their interests, don’t typically come when they’re called unless they think they might be amenable to whatever it is we’re calling them for, and all sorts of other things. A lot of humans … most humans … are the same way. Does that mean that humans are just stupid animals too? Not all of us, I guess. But then I’ve had a cat who would come when I called him, who would seek me out when I was upset and try to comfort me, who would actually chase other cats off the kitchen counters because he knew I didn’t want cats on the counters.
He was an exceptional animal because he was willing and able to work with me in human terms. And because I reckon cats to be sentient and can work with them on their own terms I consider myself to be exceptional. And although I don’t have direct experience working with Chinese, Indian or Bushman humans, I understand that they will not respond to my traditions and expectations in the same way as someone from England. Effective communication will require a lot more than simply overcoming verbal differences.
So we live in a world packed with sentient creatures, all of which have a unique perspective on life and who have their own priorities. And yet we can barely communicate with our own species, and only occasionally does someone manage to cross that line and recognize the vastly different mind of another. We give up on each other. Humans regard foreigners as “sub-human,” and cats and humans regard each other is inert objects in their universes. Because we don’t take the time to try and grasp minds outside of our own.
I wonder, when The Space People come to visit, if they will recognize humans as sentient? Will we be worth talking to and working with? Or will they maybe have better luck with Elephants, or ants, or brook trout? And what if then? What use will they find for us? Will we be nourishing cattle or innocuous finches? And will I have an opportunity to present myself to them as my old sentient cat did to me and be seen as a worthwhile exception? And maybe they’ll feed me and playfully scratch me behind my ears (because I like that).
