RUSTY THINKS AHEAD

Okay, I guess if you're writing on the Web, you need to write about cats. So here's one of mine.

There is a school of thought that believes animals react instinctively to what is in front of them, but can’t plan ahead—can’t think in “levels of abstraction.”

Well, my cat Rusty begs to differ.

I was in bed, at twelve years old, when I suddenly found myself awake. As I wondered why, my tabby Rusty came out from behind the rocking chair at my bedside. I kept my eyes nearly closed, not betraying I was awake, and Rusty approached the bed and looked up at me.

I wanted to see what he’d do if he thought I was still asleep. Seeing my (almost) closed eyes, he went back behind the rocker, got into a wastebasket and tramped up and down, raising a racket in the papers there. He came out to see if I was awake yet, and this time I let him see my open eyes. He jumped up on the bed and gave me a light bite on the wrist—a signal he had long used to tell me he had to go outside to do his business. I let him out.

The point of the story is not the wrist-biting signal, but the cat’s reasoning that he had to do something to wake me up before he could use the signal.

I once read a story in a science magazine, written by a reporter who was interviewing an animal behavior expert and, before starting the formal interview, asked him to explain her own cat’s behavior when she came home every afternoon. Her pet waited by the door, so that she hit him with the door on coming in. Then he jumped up on the counter, whereupon she picked him up and dropped him on the floor. “He knows he’s not supposed to be on the counter,” she explained.

The animal then stood in front of the refrigerator, was hit when she opened it, stood with his head over his supper dish so his dinner bounced off his head before it fell into the dish, and started to eat. “By now, he should know he’s going to get to eat. Why get in the way all through the process?”

“What you don’t understand,” said the scientist, “is that he has a procedure at the end of which he gets to eat. He doesn’t want to take the risk of monkeying with it.”

Another expert, when asked how smart pets are, said that it depends on the context. “Could you walk all the way around the house in the gutter to reach a tree you could use to go down to the ground?” It seems to me that this behavior does not depend so much on intelligence as on having small feet…

One of the joys of owning a pet (or being owned by one?) is watching and attempting to figure out why they are doing what they are doing. I wonder if they are doing the same when they stare at us

…