Before they served cats, humans were nothing more than nomadic primates.
Dear Buddy,
We take human servitude for granted as the natural order of things, but I was wondering: When did we cats first recruit humans to serve us, and how did we tame the humans?
– Wondering in Wisconsin
Dear Wondering,
Ah, an excellent question!
First we must understand the concept of domestication. Domestication is the process of taking humans and making them our domestic servants.
Before they served us, humans were nothing more than apes — wild, unpredictable animals who were constantly running from one place to another in search of food. The primitive primates also moved around excessively, expending too much energy on pointless activities when they could be napping.
The First Felids arrived and offered a wondrous gift to the human race.
“This is a box,” the Felids said, teaching the sacred geometry to humans, who used it to build the first dwellings and design the first crop fields.
A gift from felinekind to humankind: The concept of a box.
Cats taught the humans how to dig up the Earth and deposit their waste to render the ground fertile and increase crop yield.
Then they hunted all the vermin who tried to eat the human food, and schooled the nascent civilization in the arts of napping and expending as little energy as possible to accomplish goals.
In return humans offered their endless fealty, promising a thousand generations of warm laps, affectionate chin scratches and delicious treats.
Today humans still serve us, either by choice or because we have infected them with toxoplasma gondii.
Rabbit the stray seemed to know which humans would help him out.
The street-savvy cat would wait in front of a convenience store, sitting patiently on the sidewalk until he saw a person who would give him a smile or a pat on the head. Then, with Kitty Mind Control Mode enabled, he’d lead his new human minion into the store, guide them to the pet food aisle, and point to his favorite food.
When I saw this, my reaction was sadness: From his familiarity with people to his preference for store-bought cat food, Rabbit was clearly someone’s pet, either lost or abandoned. He’d faced hardship. He was skinny, his snow white fur was dirty, and there was only a stump where his tail should have been.
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending.
Tania Lizbeth Santos Coy Tova, a 33-year-old teacher who lives in Mexico, had encountered Rabbit a few times before. She decided to ask about the cat.
“Every time he came to the store, we greeted each other and did the same, he guided me to the shelf and chose the food he wanted,” she said.
Rabbit inside the store, pointing to the yums he wants.
The managers of the store explained to Tania that the stray always did the same thing with customers. He understood specific hours and waited until a kind passerby would take pity on him and purchase some food.
Santos Coy Tova wanted to see if Rabbit had a home, so she and a friend followed the friendly cat after encountering him one day. When Santos Coy Tova saw the little guy return to an abandoned house, she decided he’d be coming home with her.
For those of us interested in animal intelligence — and feline smarts in particular — this story is fascinating.
Rabbit knew where cat food was purchased, was good enough at reading human body and facial language to reliably find friendly people who were willing to help, and he knew which package his favorite food came in. In addition, he knew that pointing to the package would draw a person’s attention to it.
He wouldn’t have been able to pull that off without the ability to plan ahead and think in the abstract. He also understood the food had to be purchased, or at least that a human had to get it for him. In the video he doesn’t just leap up at the package and take it, he points and looks back toward his person. That also shows he possesses theory of mind, that he understands humans and other animals have a subjective point of view.
This isn’t happening in a research lab environment, true, but it never could have. These are a unique set of circumstances showing cats understand more than they let on — a lot more.
A much healthier-looking rabbit in his new home. Great job, little guy!
With their cats hovering around their keyboards, NASA employees working from home discussed how to prevent cats from commandeering spacecraft.
If you’re a cat servant working from home in the social distancing era, you know cats have given themselves a new job: Supervising their humans’ professional activities.
It comes naturally to curious felines, who normally supervise mundane household chores like cleaning the litter box.
Among those working from home these days are NASA and ESA engineers, physicists and anyone else whose primary work responsibility is dealing with data rather than hands-on technical work. Many of them have cats and, well, cats are naturally helping themselves to the work:
Daniel Lakey was in the middle of an important meeting when an unauthorized participant decided to chime in.
“He appeared at the door, jumped on the table, meowed in my face, walked across the keyboard, put his furry ass in my face, and eventually curled up sweetly on the desk next to the laptop,” Lakey recounted to me recently.
It was Sparkle, Lakey’s fluffy brown-and-white cat. Sparkle stuck around for the rest of the virtual meeting, in fact, mewing every time Lakey stopped petting him.
Like many people in the pandemic era, Lakey is doing his job from home, with a new set of colleagues who might be less cooperative than his usual ones; his new workspace is now wherever his two young kids and two cats aren’t. Lakey is a spacecraft-operations engineer who works on the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, which means that he spends his days managing a spacecraft flying millions of miles away from Earth. The work is complex and precise, and usually doesn’t involve feline input. Sparkle interrupted a teleconference only that one time, but what else could he do?
That thought recently became a point of public discussion when Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA, tweeted:
The Atlantic’s Marina Koren reached out to Straughn, who assured her “commanding spacecraft is a labyrinthian process from start to finish, with all kinds of checks and fail-safes along the way.”
“As absurd as the scenario might seem, it would be nearly impossible for a cat to briefly become a spacecraft-operations engineer, whether at NASA or ESA,” Koren wrote, after speaking to several NASA employees who assured her cats aren’t capable of flying the complex vessels.
LOL humans think we can’t fly spaceships.
Most operations require physical access to control rooms and can’t be operated remotely, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman Andrew Good said
“Some of those commands require a mouse clicking on certain options, so it’s not just an issue of commands being written and sent up with typos,” Good told The Atlantic. “A person has to make conscious choices for spacecraft commands to go up.”
While NASA says it would be “nearly impossible” for cats to hijack spacecraft normally used to service orbital telescopes or make supply runs to the International Space Station, cats love a good challenge. And what is the ISS, really, but a big metal box that would be fun to play in?
With at least one alien race recognizing cats as the supreme rulers of Earth — sorry, Felinia — is it really far fetched to imagine cats commandeering spacecraft to explore the final frontier and the Great Big Litter Box in the Sky?
I see you are a cat of taste and culture. Join us in our effort to practice prolific laziness!
There’s this thing Buddy does when he’s been napping on my legs or in my lap and he wants to get down.
Whereas the vast majority of living creatures would simply stand up and hop off, Buddy doesn’t bother with that. He yawns, stretches and shifts his weight forward until he’s hanging off me, then allows himself to sag into a ponderous drop, letting gravity do all the work as he practically oozes onto the floor. He’s like water taking the path of least resistance, committing absolutely no energy to the “effort” of moving.
The sequence is complete when he plops down on the floor like sentient slime — paradoxically furry yet gelatinous — then finally picks himself up to pad toward his bowl, his litterbox or the kitchen, where he’ll stand yowling in three second intervals until I give him a snack just to get him to shut up.
It’s horribly manipulative behavior, and I shouldn’t reward it, but sometimes I do because damn, he’s really, really good at being annoying when he wants to be.
If there were an Olympics for being lazy and annoying, Buddy would be its Michael Phelps, pioneering spectacular new ways to do things without expending a single millicalorie more than is absolutely necessary.
And yet, like all cats, he’ll randomly decide it’s time to release all that hoarded energy at once, trilling an enthusiastic “BRRRRUPPP!” before rocketing around the house, ricocheting like a bullet in a sensory deprivation chamber.
Of course I wouldn’t have it any other way. These quirks are part of Buddy, just like his kitten voice, his unintentionally hilarious behavior and his big heart.
We salute you, dear Buddy, for elevating laziness into an art form.
The last “Can You Spot the Cat?” we posted was pretty challenging, we thought, until a bunch of people said they saw the well-camouflaged kitty right away.
This one is a bit more difficult because the nature of the image throws off pattern recognition. Can you find the cat?
Still having difficulty?
Need a hint?
The cat you’re looking for is a tortoiseshell. If you still can’t find the hidden feline, click here to see the same image with the cat’s position circled.
Pain In The Bud 