A Cat Named Darwin (10 page)

The first project was trivial and idle and had nothing to do with civil behavior. I resolved to train Darwin to bark for his dinner like a small dog. It would amuse my friends, it would amuse me. The thought did not occur to me that it might not amuse Darwin.

We began with the standard performance-and-reward method of training. I always made sure Darwin was hungry, consequently eager to do whatever was necessary to acquire food. With a broad flourish I would place a can of food in the opener and crank slowly around the perimeter until the blade came full circle and severed the lid. I would blow across the top of the can and waft the aroma of delicious cat food in his direction. Then, with slow, broad movements and loud clinking of spoon against dish, I would make a show of preparing his dinner. I would talk to him, modulating my voice with exaggerated emphases. "Oh..
..BOY
!!!! The
BIG
Moment!!! The
MOMENT
you've been
WAITING
for!!!

Darwin would sit at my feet, staring intently upward at elbows and jowls, periodically standing and circling impatiently, then sitting down again. Sometimes he would stand, wrap his tail around my calf, and embrace me for ten or fifteen seconds. Sometimes he would meow. Sometimes he would bark in that little, faraway voice. Immediately I would place the bowl in front of him so he would associate his barking with the delivery of food. If he did not bark, the next step was to brandish the food over his head and cajole. Sometimes it worked, often it didn't. Whatever the reasons, it soon became clear that Darwin's mind was not a simple Skinner box—that bizarre container of conditioned responses laid on the innocent world by the psychologist B. F. Skinner, who thought that all behavior was constructed top to bottom from learning and conditioned reflexes and had no genetic aspects. Darwin, however, would not enter that mythical box. As I persisted in my attempts to train him, I got the distinct impression that if he could speak, he'd be muttering dark comments about Big F Skinner during our sessions.

Well, if I could not mold Darwin into a walking, barking cat, at least I could teach him some civil restraint, and I returned to the project, abandoned earlier, of combing his hindquarters for fleas, where many went to spend their vacations. Now that we had arrived at a state of spiritual intimacy, surely he would be receptive. As before, I waited until he was eating, then tried ever so gently to run the comb through the thick fur on the backside of his hind legs. I have an image—I will die with it—of Darwin, ears laid back, pupils dilated, legs splayed, claws digging into the linoleum floor, tail snapping back and forth, and a deep, hoarse yowl coming from his throat, the posture and vocal emissions of a cat about to kill.

Apparently I had no choice but to back off. I did so, but sanctimoniously. After all, I was only doing this for him.

I
NOW REALIZED
that Darwin's feelings had to be considered. He had become my constant companion, my friend, and in its noblest form, friendship requires equality, that Holy Grail of Western civilization. The American colonies, in declaring themselves independent of England, even went so far as to contend that "all men are created equal." A civil war, a hundred years of resentment, and a less-than-civil movement later, the concept of "men" was remodeled to include all human beings. And what has this to do with Darwin?

It has to do with the peck order, or dominance hierarchy, first noted in the behavior of the chicken, and taken to supreme complexity and refinement in the human being. The peck order has its roots in the limbic system of the brain, also known as the reptilian complex. In the course of evolution, the mammals arose from the reptiles, and as the mammals evolved, the cerebrum region at the front (or top) of the reptilian brain expanded and expanded and folded back over itself, forming another layer that completely covered the section from which it arose. That layer, the cerebrum, now envelops the older reptilian brain, so inside the mammalian brain lies the reptilian complex, literally, an inner lizard.

The cerebrum gives us reason and thought and language and awareness of the self. It is Hamlet's cerebrum that contemplates Yorick. The reptilian complex gives us our appetites and lusts and sexual drives; it also gives us our competitive urges and our aggressions and fears. It is the inner lizard that drives us to participate in dominance hierarchies, rising up huge and scaly in the minds of us all, clothed in the barest bikini of rational thought and gesturing with its middle digit at political correctness.

***

What we conceive as equality is actually a special expression of the peck order—or, rather, its suppression. In social creatures like wolves, lions, hyenas, monkeys, mandrills, baboons, chimpanzees, gorillas, and on throughout the vertebrate world, groups are structured more or less according to rank, usually with some form of top dog, or alpha, to which all others defer most of the time. Beneath the alpha lurk the betas, which defer to the alpha but not to others, and so on down the ladder of dominance, finally descending to an omega creature which defers to all and which all others bully, harass, disrespect.

In human societies, those on the lower rungs of the ladder find the experience most unpleasant, and the civilizations of the West are dedicated to suppressing the more physical and brutal methods of asserting dominance. And that essentially is what Mr. Jefferson addressed in his declaration that all men are created equal, that they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In order to achieve these ends, it is necessary to create the laws of civil and human rights so that we are all, in the ideal state, crowded as equals onto the same rung of the social ladder.

Which brings us, finally, to the topic of friendship and equality. Bearing in mind that personal interactions lead to peck orders, but that friendship implies equality, it follows that you cannot pull rank on friends. You cannot bully friends, because to do so is to put them down, to place them on a lower rung and render them inferior. If friends do not agree with your position, you must restrain the urge to force your will upon them. All humans contain the most sensitive put-down sensors, which detect the slightest challenge to one's rank and to one's self-esteem; self-esteem is fundamentally linked with how successfully one defends one's rank.

I didn't like Darwin's refusal to grant combing rights, but if I valued him as a friend, I had no choice but to acquiesce. Oblivious to their good fortune, the fleas continued to prosper and multiply on Darwin's rump.

***

There was, however, one exception to all this equality and consideration in our relationship, and that concerned the good old-fashioned practice of teasing. Now teasing is an interesting activity because, reduced to its fundamental essence, one party dominates the other, as with tickling, and for the duration of the bout the relationship is decidedly unequal. Teasing can be malicious, as with schoolyard bullies, but within any good relationship it is usually an expression of affection, even love, the aggressor respecting limits and stopping short of pain.

Consider it from the reverse point of view: whom do you
not
tease? You do not tease the king. You do not even
think
about teasing the queen. Nor the Mafia don, nor the gangbanger, nor the police officer. You do not tease those you fear, those with power greater than your own.

Nevertheless, presuming a relationship grounded in love and respect, it can reasonably be said that teasing is part of a normal, happy childhood and leaves one with fond memories, the weaker trusting the stronger to control his strength in the name of love. The father tickles the child; the husband tickles the wife; the older sibling tickles the younger; and universally, children tease the dog, the cat, the hamster, whatever is available on the lower rungs.

Over the course of my boyhood we had two dogs, an Airedale named Duchess and later, a Doberman-shepherd mix named King, and one of my enduring pleasures was now and then to inflict irritation in a lighthearted way. This was nothing less than a fledgling act of human dominance, for I was learning the trade of my species. An essential aspect of that trade is learning to square one's deeds with one's self-image and emerge as an angel. Rationalization is the great genius of the human creature. Even as a young boy I was a prodigy.

I was six or seven when Duchess arrived as a little bundle of kinky, wiry hair, and already I was quite capable of rationalizing the act of teasing. I was just having a little fun. I never wanted to hurt my puppy. The thought of causing physical pain, much less injury, horrified me. I teased in the spirit of affection. Teasing was a bonding experience; it implied an intimacy that one could not have with a strange dog, and in my unbiased opinion, Duchess enjoyed it as much as I did.

A relationship with dogs, far more than with cats, is based on subordination, not equality. It is a master/subject relationship, and there is no helping it. The dog will not have it any other way. Its mind has been calibrated to exist within the structure of a pack, and the pack functions as a team, a predatory and domestic machine. Within which rank and role cannot be separated and are continually changing in relation to age, health, social situation. The dog depends for survival on its ability to adjust to the moods and needs of its pack mates and is highly sensitive to them.

And so we peer down from our intellectual height upon that writhing, licking, yapping, quivering, grinning, cringing, salivating, yelping, urinating display of appeasement gestures known as man's best friend. It is like the wristwatch that takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', except that the dog takes a kickin' and keeps on lickin'. And what do we see? Why, we see terms of endearment, of course. We see a creature expressing its unwavering loyalty, its unquestioning acceptance, its complete forgiveness, its unequivocal love. Whether we like it or not, we are supremely dominant in this relationship and, though most of us would never recognize or admit it if we did, dominance makes us feel very, very affectionate.

What drives the dog to such incontinence? The answer lies in the behavior of lower-ranking wolves as they address wolves of higher rank. There you see that these appeasements are not expressions of euphoric friendship, loyalty, character, and other human projections. No, these are expressions of the most desperate anxiety. This is primal supplication to the pack's good graces, for which the dog will endure any insult and accept the lowest rank.

Not to belittle the dog. Who cannot love this earnest, innocent creature? Compassion is more appropriate than ridicule in contemplating its excesses, as it is in contemplating the excesses of us all. Like any creature, the dog thinks and feels in the manner its brain is constructed to
make
it think and feel; in the natural overview, its behavior is no fault of its own.

The brain and mind of the dog are fashioned for politics—the pursuit of one's agenda through the exercise of power and skill in the society of one's own kind. Politics is the inevitable upshot of group living, because to live in a group is to give up the territory one would have as a solitary creature. Another way of seeing it is to imagine the territory of each member consolidated into one large territory that must be shared. The individual territories are, in a sense, stacked up, one upon the other, and this forms a hierarchy, a dominance hierarchy, and where you sit on this structure depends on how well you ply your political strengths and skills. The dog is therefore similar in its sociopolitical orientation to that of its human master, and its behavior speaks naturally to our gregarious emotions.

The cat, however, is an interesting case because its basic nature is solitary, yet it too fits the human mind. The solitary animal is usually a territorial animal, so most encounters with other cats are militant. Confrontation produces the basic emotions of threat and violence, and these in turn inspire broad gestures, strong motions: the snarl, the long, virtuoso yowl, the lashing tail, the laid-back ears, the arched back and expanded tail. Aside from that, the cat in nature has little need to express itself, particularly in facial gestures, for it has no one to face and no one to communicate with. Consequently it lacks the equipment to display the mercurial nuances of feeling and mood that distinguish the dog. The machinery is simply not there.

This is not to say that cats cannot communicate peacefully with one another, face to face, for clearly they can. But communication is simple and broad, like ritualized grooming or sniffing of the anal glands, and usually serves to identify the individuals and help establish dominance or subordination. Such gestures of action and posture and olfaction have probably remained in place from infancy and kittenhood, the brief interlude when cats are social creatures and must interact with mother and siblings. It is a relatively crude and rudimentary suite of behaviors compared to the nuanced communication among dogs; and it is the consequence of solitary life. That is why the cat simply stares and stares at its human benefactor. The human may frown back, he may smile or grimace; he may clown and mug and act the complete fool, and the cat, without the machinery to respond, stares on, without expression.

And that is why it finds a home in the human mind: the cat relieves the solitude of the self, for the self, sealed in the bell jar of the skull, is in a state of solitary confinement. The cat is a kindred spirit to the private, ruminating side of our mind, and it slips unobtrusively in and out of our solitude as it will. The cat draws us into contemplation and introspection. By its nature, the cat respects the privacy of the mind, and in this deference, reveals how invasive is the mind of another human—"What are you
thinking?!If
"None of your damned business!!!" In the asocial nature of the cat we find the deep, silent pleasure of simply being in the presence of another living thing, communion.

The social nature of the dog, on the other hand, brings with it not only the behavior to communicate its fluttering emotions and sliding moods, but also the mental equipment to read the signals. The brain of the dog, like the brain of the human, is constructed to look for sophisticated visual cues in the face. In this it is fundamentally different from the cat.