[Kitten by Madame Ronner]

I

It is time that the old question of the superiority of cat or dog should be discussed on some other ground than that of British feeling or human egotism.

The case of the cat is prejudged if we are to weigh his merits on practical grounds, for the cat is a dreamer and a dramatist; or if we are to estimate his character from the point of view of Western civilisation, for the cat, as William Watson says, is the type of the Orient; or, finally, if we are to consider the moral qualities of the cat solely in relation to the desires of the human being. If these are our premisses then the vulgar estimate of the cat is the true one.

According to this estimate the cat is a domestic comfortable creature, usually found curled up like the ammonite, and in a state of semi-torpor; it is essentially selfish and essentially cruel, but apart from these two drawbacks, essentially feminine. “The cat is selfish, and the dog is faithful.” This sums up a judgment founded on wilful ignorance and gross egotism.

In respect to what is the dog faithful and the cat selfish? Simply in this regard, that the dog takes the vainest man on something better than his own estimate, while of the cat’s life and world the human being forms but a little part.

Here plainly Greek meets Greek, and we had better let the accusation of egotism alone. But apart from this point, the above summary of the cat’s nature is about as true as the following summary of the sportsman’s nature from the cat’s point of view.

“The sportsman is a quiet, domestic creature, fond of his comforts and his meals; he is generally found smoking in an armchair before the fire. The only thing which interferes with his domesticity is his tendency to absent himself from the house for hours together; this appears to be the result of a curious mania quite foreign to his nature; and it will cause him even to miss his meals. If you come upon him at such times he is engaged in a prosaic kind of wholesale slaughter; he has no exciting chases after his prey, no display of ability, no well-planned ambushes; but he kills at a distance through an unpleasantly noisy instrument. The sportsman, too, is absolutely dangerous to life at such time, and I have known cats fall victims to his rage; whereas, if you meet him in his normal condition, he is usually quite tame; you can safely leave kittens in the room with him, and I have never known him kill a caged bird. The keeper is a very dangerous sort of sportsman, and must be regarded as radically unsafe. The difference between sportsmen and keepers is much the same as that between capricious bulls and mad bulls.”

The fact is, that the usual judgment of cats rests on a total misapprehension of the scope of a cat’s life; and the root of the misunderstanding goes wider and deeper than this. The average human being takes account only of those qualities of animals which have some practical bearing on human life; even the animal lover is wont to take account only of animal qualities, physical, mental, and, at a stretch, moral; whereas that which is the pivot of human life and human relations; that which, rudimentary as it is in animals, is still the pivot of animal qualities—namely, the force of personality—is altogether left out of account.

No judgment of animals can be adequate, or in any sense true, which does not take account of personality, more or less developed, and of the scope of the creature’s life as determined by it.

The more intimately one knows animals, the more one is struck by their individuality, and the varying force of their personality.

Persis had the most intense personality of any animal I have ever known. Mentu’s, less vivid, was still as individual and distinct; Ra had a little narrow nature, Alexander was undeveloped, and the tabby is frankly common; but all are as distinct from one another, as essentially personal, as five human beings.

And it is greatly through this personality that the scope of an animal’s life, as of the life of the human being, is determined; we are all more or less at the mercy of what we, in our blindness, call “blind forces;” but in all of us there is something which out of the “manifold” of the world seeks and selects a consistent experience, some principle which determines the scope of life.

Out of the many chemicals of the soil each plant draws those which are appropriate to its own life, each plant transforms them into a living thing, a definite beauty of leaf and bud.

And the alchemy of the higher creature does not only transform the material particles of the world, now into the ashen silky hair and yellow eyes of Mentu, now into the curly grizzled coat of Taffy; but through the intelligence and sensibilities, through the desire for approbation and of admiration, through the protective love of the offspring, and the pure straining after the affection of the human being, dimly understood, these dawning consciousnesses gather from the world of sensation, of intelligence, of emotion, such material as they can assimilate and transform, defining it into a life and world of their own.

If we cannot from the point of more developed moral consciousness, and higher intelligence, even seek to understand the dawnings in the lower creatures of that which makes us what we are, then to us animals are mere playthings or mere slaves, and we can have no least perception of what is meant by that earnest, if unrealised, “expectation of the creature.”

II

The difference between different races of animals appears to lie very greatly in the different scope of their lives.

The cat’s life, as distinguished from the dog’s, is essentially independent; and this, combined with finer sensibilities and a less facile intelligence, give a predominance in the cat of these elements of character which as developed in the human being we call the artistic temperament.

The cat is, above all things, a dramatist; its life is lived in an endless romance though the drama is played out on quite another stage than our own, and we only enter into it as subordinate characters, as stage managers, or rather stage carpenters.

We realise this with kittens; we see that the greater part of their life, of the sights and sounds of it, are the material of a drama half consciously played; they are determined to make mysteries, and as a child will seize upon the passing light or shadow to help him to transform some well-known object into the semblance of living creature, so you may see the kitten reach a paw again and again to touch a reflection on a polished floor, or conjure the shadows of evening into the forms of enemies.

We cannot but see this, and our mistake comes later when the kitten passes partly out of our ken to reappear from time to time, a serious, furtive creature with the weight of the world on its shoulders. We think then that the romance has ceased, when it has in reality gone deeper; the stage has widened out of sight, and if the cat no longer plays before us it is because we have lost sympathy with this side of its life; if we encourage it, it will play like a kitten up to old age. This same fact possibly explains the reason of the theory that cats care for places and not for people—it may be because these same people care for kittens and not for cats; thus the cat transfers the affection it might have felt for the human being to the scene of its romances and the places where it has experienced the surprise and joy of its kittens.

Corresponding to the dramatic instinct the cat appears to have its sensibilities more developed in the direction of Æsthetic enjoyment than the dog’s, which are almost purely utilitarian. But it is a strange fact that the most universal kind of Æsthetic enjoyment among animals—namely, the pleasures of music—seem to be keenest among those races which comparatively we rank low in respect of intelligence—namely, reptiles and birds.

I whistled “God Save the Queen” once to two green lizards in an Italian garden; they drew by little runs and jerks out of their holes, and their paths converged. Suddenly when their nerves were tense with excitement of the air (rendered slightly out of tune) they saw each other, sprang with one impulse together, bit until I saw the green skin wrinkle, rolled over and disappeared. I have never seen either cat or dog show anything approaching to the emotion which music produces in Joey, though Persis showed some pleasurable excitement in whistling, and some desire to try the notes of a piano for herself. Dogs for the most part take the pleasures of music with extreme seriousness almost amounting to gloom. It is not uncommon to find dogs who will “sing,” following to some small extent the air as it rises or falls. But they do this with an aspect of extreme melancholy, and a thrill sometimes seems to run through the whole body before the sound is produced; that they do not absolutely dislike it can only be judged from the fact that they do not try to go away.

Both dogs and cats appear to be unconscious of the sounds they utter until experience has taught them the result or until their attention has been specially directed to it. I have indeed met a Scotch terrier who would “sing” to order, but his face expressed a painful tension of will. To do him justice he sang a strain or two with apparent ease under my window in the middle of the night. Frequently, too, a dog who wishes to make his presence realised has his voice strangulated by nervousness like a shy girl at a music lesson; and a well-bred cat anxious to attract attention sometimes opens its mouth silently.

All such facts seem to point to the conclusion that many animals do not produce their voices voluntarily, but solely on physical impulse; that even imitative utterance may often be based on some such physical sensation, as many people feel a tremble in the throat when a Bourdon stop is on the organ. If this be so we are on the wrong tack in comparing the sounds of animals, however varied and specified they may be, to language, and we should rather compare them to weeping, groaning, sighing, yawning, and laughter, which in the same way produce an imitative response, which are by nature involuntary, and have no tendency to develop into definite language.

If cats and dogs have, compared with other creatures, little feeling for music, they seem to have still less for pleasures of sight. I have known a mare which again and again at the same place seemed to look out with pleasure over a view, when no definite object was moving to catch her eye, but I have never known a dog do this, and though a cat often takes up this attitude, the focus of her eyes seems to be more definitely fixed, and she is probably attracted by some movement too minute to arrest our attention. To colour they seem still more indifferent, not sharing even the susceptibility of the mad bull. I have heard indeed of a dog preferring scarlet to light blue; but it is impossible with a single instance to eliminate individual association. Cats, however, though showing no susceptibility to colour, show a very clear perception of texture. It is not necessarily the most strictly comfortable textures that are preferred; velvet may do to sleep on, but it is on thin crackling paper or stiff silk that a cat would choose to sit, and, above all, to eat. And contrary to all expectation, woolly textures are chosen to lick. A cat has been known to go round the garden in order to lick the soft underside of foxglove leaves; and will even tear a paper wrapper in order to be able to stroke flannelette with his tongue. As flannelette is prepared with a poisonous chemical this pleasure is hazardous.

But the real region of Æsthetic pleasure for a cat is the region of smell. The dog uses smell as a medium of information; the cat revels in it. The dog smells the ground to trace friend or foe, food or prey, but the cat will linger near a tree-trunk, smelling each separate aromatic leaf. If the window of a close room is opened the cat goes to it, and puts her head out to sniff the air; she will smell the dress of a friend, partly for recognition no doubt, but apparently partly for pleasure also. An aromatic smell is pleasant; a strong spirituous smell not only disagreeable but absolutely painful. Lavender water or eau-de-cologne may please a tiger but will put a cat to flight.

The cat’s drama is a drama of the twilight, when the earth refreshed gives up her secret, subtle scents. It is not to be played in broad daylight; it is a mystery play of things half revealed, subtly transformed, hardly understood, secretly suggestive.

III

Counterbalancing the rudimentary powers of Æsthetic pleasure in the cat, we find in the dog a more facile intelligence, and a far more adaptable nature. Some boast that they have taught tricks to a cat; but the fact shows not so much that the cat was intelligent and docile as that its owners were; for their ability has been usually to seize on some natural movement of the cat, in jumping or in sitting up, and gradually to induce the animal to exaggerate it. But the tricks we teach a dog are against his nature, and it needs not only intelligence but docility to take a savoury bite and abstain from swallowing until the precisely right word is pronounced.

A cat walks about with a great purpose dimly imagined in its brain, but a dog plans; he is “the low man adding one to one,” but his sums are the most correct, for he is of a practical nature. He does not have to pretend that a stick is alive before he can glean pleasure from playing with it.

How far a dog, or indeed how far any animal is capable of using an instrument for effecting its purposes is an undecided question; but I have heard on near authority of a dog scraping a mat up against a swing door through which he had to pass so that the door was kept open. To use an instrument involves a complicated mental process, in which not only association but reflection on the nature of the thing is required. Taffy associated his muzzle with his walk, and fetched it with pleasure when the association was established; but reflection did not sufficiently come into the process to prevent him from fetching a clothes brush or a Bible instead if convenient.

One clear point of superiority in the dog is his rudimentary sense of humour. Almost any good-tempered dog, when well treated, will try from time to time to laugh off a scolding. If he is encouraged, the fooling is repeated again and again with growing exaggeration as he rolls over with wide mouth and absurd contortions, or flies at one’s face to lick it. He appreciates humour in others at his own expense, a thing which not every human being is capable of doing; if he is teased laughingly, he too will play the fool; if he is teased cruelly he is cross or wretched. No dog likes one to blow in his face or ear, but Taffy, though not wholly good-tempered, will allow the bellows to be placed even in his mouth if he is assured that it is a game. When the puff of air comes he darts up, jumps at and licks the person who is teasing him, and barks with a wagging tail. If he is really bored or tired he licks the nozzle of the bellows, or the hand that holds them, deprecatingly; he declines the game, but in perfect good humour.

Now a cat has no sense of humour at all. Its very comedies are serious; and to tease it is to outrage its dignity. The better bred a cat is the more easily it takes offence. But after all the “sense of the ridiculous” is a gross quality, and the humour of one age or of one class seems vulgarity to another a little in advance. A cat is never vulgar.

IV

If the scope of life and the qualities of intelligence differ from race to race of animals, the strictly moral qualities appear to differ from individual to individual.

Cats are called “selfish”; but even on the undiscriminating view such qualities differ from cat to cat. Ra was certainly self-absorbed, but I attribute this greatly to unhappy family circumstances when he was young. Persis and Mentu were not selfish in this sense at all. Again and again they have been found in the room with food untouched. When one came in there was a greeting and short display of affection, and not till then would the cat go to its food, and eat with good appetite. Few people think of accusing a straightforward genial collie of selfishness; yet if I left Taffy alone with his dinner, or even with some one else’s dinner, there is a strong presumption that I should find the plate clean and shining on return.

What people usually mean by this assertion is that the cat does not, like the dog, depend entirely on human companionship; there are no touching stories of faithfulness to a departed master; there is no overwhelming interest in the human race. A cat has more of what the average Briton calls “self-respect,” a quality he likes far better in himself than in others.

On the other hand, a cat has more interest in other races of beings than a dog. The only creatures in which most dogs show spontaneous interest, unsolicited and untaught, are horses; and even here the interest rests on association. But we have all known cases of cats which deliberately set themselves to woo dogs; Ra and his grandmother, unlike in all else, adored the same fox-terrier. I have indeed seen a dog which had lost her puppies nurse a half-grown cat, but the cat seemed to take the initiative. On the other hand, a Manx cat, in a house where I was staying, allowed a beloved terrier to take food out of her mouth. A cat has been known to bring up squirrels; a tom-cat of our own fondled and protected chickens; finally, a cat has been known to bring a half-starved friend to share its dinner.

So-called “animal instincts” cannot account for the greater part of these cases, which involve rather definite sacrifice. Dog friendships, on the other hand, rarely involve sacrifice except for the sake of man.

This instinct of benevolence may be noticed among birds. I have heard on good authority of an Uncle canary bringing up a deserted brood, and even with apparent embarrassment taking his place on the nest; of sparrows bringing up young starlings, which, taken from their own nest and placed on a window-ledge, sought refuge in the sparrows’ nest; and finally, of a sparrow helping a wagtail to feed a young cuckoo. Unless birds absolutely enjoy filling each other’s mouths, such operations involve sacrifice; but in any case there is a large social instinct shown; and when, as I sit in the garden, the bean poles and seed sticks near me begin to blossom into robins, I find I am suddenly the centre towards which such social instincts are directed.

Temper differs in the same way from individual to individual, in extent and quality. Ra had a cross temper; it irritated him if one took liberties, and he struck without warning; but with regard to other animals cowardice kept his temper in check. Mentu had the occasional irritability of a nervous temperament, whether animal or human; he often kept a bold front upon danger, when fear made him afterwards positively sick and unable to eat for some time. Persis was a very fiend to other animals, but had an utterly sweet and grateful temper towards human beings unless jealousy came into play.

Dogs are more often misjudged in respect to temper than cats, probably because their ill-temper is more formidable; and the nervous excitability of the collie is often mistaken for bad temper. I have known a bad-tempered collie, but the clergyman who owned him did not keep him long, as it was apt to make difficulties in the parish if the congregation of the mission church was kept at bay on a dark, windy evening.

Pugnacity is perhaps a different thing from ill-temper, and appears to be a very wide-spread quality in bird-life. A great robin-tamer told me that no robin could support his position unless he was very pugnacious. Those who have tried to tame wild birds, or even those who feed birds in the winter, will notice the extraordinary displays of temper among them; how the blackbird loses half his meal through trying to chase other birds away; how the tits play with him, reckoning on this pugnacity; how the robin after he has made a hearty meal lies in wait for late comers. Barn-door cocks are too universally condemned in respect of temper; my patriarch has been several times reported to me as having placed himself between two young combatants; and he lives on excellent terms with a younger replica of himself, the only point of quarrel being the distance to which the young cock may chase a hen of the other’s harem which has strayed into his own yard. Pugnacity is indeed apt to develop into ill-temper with caged birds, but gentle handling in taming and increased freedom would probably go far to obviate this.

I have spoken of moral qualities, but the centre of all these is the question of conscience. It is impossible to deny that at any rate the higher animals have conscience, if conscience means the recognition of a law or principle higher than the immediate personal desire and sometimes antagonistic to it.

Even if we allow that the sense of duty in human beings is based on the “sanctions” of pleasures and pain, this makes no difference to the quality of the sense once evolved; neither can it make any difference in the quality of the sense in animals whether this is produced by the “sanction” of nature or of the human race.

The more intelligent domestic creatures accept to some extent a standard given by the power above them. The human standard is to them in a sense as the law written on stone to us; and all know the law has gone forth against the indulgence of ill-temper. Joey recognises this law, and it is a moral effort he makes (very seldom) to refrain from biting; he, too, has a conscience, though a singularly bad one. Taffy with the nozzle of the bellows in his mouth can choose whether to accept the situation cheerfully or crossly.

But the dog accepts his moral code more entirely from the human being than the cat does. In this respect the cat is as the Gentile, without the law, but a law unto himself. There is sacrifice of the lower desires to the higher when the cat brings a friend to share her dinner; when she lets a dog take food out of her mouth; when she carries on towards her kittens, after the immediate needs and desires of motherhood have ceased, a course of conduct more or less consistently educative. A cat, the Egyptians said, reasoned like a man, and this is true in that she determines, like a man, her own ends and purposes in life. It is not approbation but admiration that the cat demands from man; the dog accepts the purposes of life as given from above. But he recognises, as clearly as he recognises the sanction of the ginger-bread and the whip, the sanction of moral appreciation or disapproval. He claims applause when he has done well, and when the whip has been endured he still clings with renewed trust to his diviner friend, and seeks by affection to win back approval.

Such animals have wills essentially free as our own, but with dimmer intelligence these wills are more at the mercy of their passions; and the blinder intelligence leaves them, too, more at the mercy of spiritual influences which flow out from us to them. There is a quick response, as with children, not only to our treatment, but to the spirit of our treatment, for they reward our trust with trust, and answer our cheerfulness with heart and courage. And we, too, war with principalities and powers, and are helped in the high and hidden places by influences unseen. We call these creatures blind and unconscious, but our consciousness, too, is dim, and our eyes blinder to things divine than theirs to things human; we both move gropingly and feebly in a great world and battle against the Will that made us and has mercy on us—“so many men that know not their right hand from their left, and also much cattle.”

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