Cats & Dogs

One suggestion I got recently was to talk about the differences between cats and dogs as far as how they interact with each other, and how we as the humans in their lives interact with them.  Now, I think this individual wanted more me to discuss why cats rule and dogs drool, but I am going to take a different approach and examine the different ways in which each species is intelligent, and what those forms of intelligence mean to us.

I’ll start with dogs, then, because dogs are the species that we are most familiar with.  We, as humanity, have been befriending, working with, and selectively breeding dogs (from the grey wolf) for potentially as long as 30,000 years.  They are the first animal we domesticated, and the closest from day one.  Many scientists believe that humans actually nursed wolf cubs in the early years of domestication (from Grandin, T. 2005. Animals In Translation, an excellent book regarding comparative psychology and sociology).  It’s really little wonder, then, that today we feel much more at home with dog emotions, whether they have become more like us or we have become more like them.

The first and most obvious similarity is that we are both highly social animals, and rely very heavily on each other and social hierarchies.  Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not view their owners as “the alpha” – the pack mentality was bred out of them long ago, and we can see this today in the looseness and disorganization of feral dogs descended from domestic breeds.  They do, however, tend to put a great deal of stock in our happiness as individuals that they cherish, and retain a great deal of the social intelligence of their lupine ancestors.

Some of this intelligence is in their willingness to display how they are feeling in terms that we understand.  Dogs use facial expression well, including using their eyes.  Perhaps ironically, though, while they have little qualms about being embarrassed or making mistakes that impact them personally, they are more likely to inhibit themselves if they feel it necessary for the happiness or agreement of their enigmatic human companions.  I want to write a significantly creepier article on this later, but for now, this means simply that we as human beings must not fall into the hole created by the dog’s usual openness, and learn to read the more subdued cues they give, especially when they are uncomfortable.

I want to talk about cats more, because cats are far more mysterious – and they seem to like it this way, so I apologize to any cats whose veils I am preparing now to lift.  This desire to not show certain aspects of themselves, particularly anything that may make them appear weak, is pervasive across all breeds and species.  Perhaps the most famous and distressful example of this is that cats will seek complete solitude when they are dying.  Many cat owners, even those who have not lost a pet, are aware of this solace-seeking behaviour when kitty is ill; she will hide beneath or behind a piece of furniture and not come out for anything, even if she has had no prior experience with the veterinarian.  The etiology of this behaviour is pure instinct: a cat that is ill does not want to bare herself in the open as an easy target, and it is instinctive behaviour like this that often separates them from dogs.

Cats have been domesticated for a long time, but not nearly as long as dogs – only at most 9,500 years ago.  More importantly, we have never become partnered with cats – apart from, on occasion, using them as hunting partners, and even in combat, we have mostly just kept them around the grain bins and barns to keep away rodents.  We give them a place to stay and a nice source of bait for their food, and they keep that bait from being eaten by their food.  Only relatively recently, mostly since the late Bronze Age according to region, have we done much for keeping them as vanity pets and companions.  It’s therefore little wonder that they have much more for instinct, and we understand them far less than we do dogs.

However, one can learn cat.  While cats are still so well tied to their feral nature that they can even be expected to survive in the wild if abandoned, they do have some surprising social skills.  Although they are not nearly as tightly-knit as wolf packs, cats do form small social groups that are mainly for collective hunting and protection of queens and kittens.  Cats also have a huge range of communicative abilities, but there are two difficulties that we have in interpreting them.  Firstly, their base level is the way that dogs are when they are concerned with your reaction.  They keep their emotions tight to the belt in order to not appear weak, until they are needed.  In short, they are the opposite of dogs in their expressiveness.  Secondly, their ways of expressing themselves are much more foreign to humans: rather than using the direction of their gaze or ecstatic activity that are very easy for us to interpret, they use their ears, whiskers, tails, eyelids, and very minute tactile methods of communication that we simply are not very well-acquainted with.  Someday, perhaps, I will talk about these as well in more detail, but the simple fact is that unlike both dogs and humans, they put a great deal more stock in hearing, smell, and tactile information (ie whiskers) than they do sight, which leads to differing forms of communication.

Due to both the historical nature of our relationship, then, and our varying methods of communication that neither side has a great deal of ease in understanding, we tend to assume that cats are less amiable or even less intelligent than are dogs, which is not true and is merely a gross oversimplification of the differences in their respective psychologies.  The last number of posts I have made, I have left the reader with an overarching message to chew on until next week, and I believe this is a fine time for that: each animal genus and even species has its own idiosyncrasies, intelligences, and methods of communication, and all are deserving of respect and striving towards understanding, even (especially) if we need to leave behind our human mindset.

Genes, Animals Mating, and You

Some conversations I’ve been having recently have had me considering how sex is different across species… but also how it is the same.  This isn’t a new train of thought for me, but it is a new topic for this blog, and I imagine the handful of readers who have found this page without my linking them directly to it or finding it through some other zoophilic page have probably been waiting for me to talk about animal sex.

The conversation in particular I’m thinking of had to do with vorephilia, specifically why it exists in the first place, and I as a well-read academic and aficionado of kinks, paraphilias and orientations of all kinds immediately jumped up to posit the theory (not my own, but someone else’s) that vorephilia – a paraphilia related to biting and swallowing – is vestigial of the biting that many mammals engage in while mating to give themselves a certain dominant role.

But then I thought: why do they do it?  Anyone who watches enough Animal Planet knows that the species who are known for it – cats, canines, bears, etc. – don’t always do it, and the female (or male receiver) tends to be submissive enough anyway without all the biting.  Indeed, a lot of the time it’s not even real biting, but just sort of a threat that he could bite her if he felt like it.  It appears to have little to do with physical necessity and far more to do with the psychological, so we’re back to square one.

From there, I can take a different direction and philosophize a little about how mating activities have evolved – sex across the ages, if you will.  Sexual selection in larger, more modern mammals, such as the ones mentioned above, tends to be quite complex, with the female exerting a great deal of power over precisely with whom she will mate with, and the male more or less needing to put up with this because the female, while being a bit smaller, still has many sharp devices at her disposal that she can use to make sure that even if he impregnates her against her will, he may well die of infection or of the difficulties any injury may cause him.  The only large mammals in which rape can be called by any stretch common are primates, in which the females lack this natural weaponry, or, in the case of humans, any injury incurred by the male will not pose too much of a threat to his life.

This changes when we get to smaller, simpler creatures, such as most rodents, for many of whom mating success for the males depends on how quickly he can mount and disable the female.  Mating, then, tends to be quite violent, and often does result in injury – presumably, the number of young in a litter is considered to be genetically “worth it”.  In order to prevent herself from being injured, though, it is better for the female to be submissive, since, unlike the male, she cannot be mortally injured at the time of copulation and still have healthy young, thus passing on her genes.

We do not see these power-oriented sexual activities in non-mammals: in birds and reptiles, although the mating rituals can be extraordinarily complex, the action of mating itself is quite straight-forward.  In most fish, no real sexual interaction takes place at all; only in cephalopods do we see similar interactions to our rodent cousins, and in none do we see the symbolic gestures displayed by larger mammals.

It is from rodents that most other mammals have evolved from.  Is it possible, then, that this fixation on dominance in sex that manifests in such interests as vorephilia, sexual sadism and sexual masochism, and practices like bondage and necking, still remain in our genes from millions of years ago when we were merely rodents?  Were these paraphilias, which we now sometimes consider to be maladaptive and perverse, once part of an instinct necessary to pass on one’s genetic material?  This gives us an interesting perspective on these enigmatic paraphilias, which are sometimes, in the case of ones like vorephilia, to the point of being sheer fantasy.  Although this explanation obviously does not cover every paraphilia, if we consider how such interests and activities would have affected our non-human ancestors, we can get a better idea of precisely why they exist in the first place – and, in this, derive a greater tolerance for the associated individuals.

War Horse

Out from the world of holidays and back in to the world of real life and, of course, blogging.  I apologize for the copypaste filler, but that song always cracks me up, and I couldn't resist.  But you want to hear about my holidays!  Of course you do.  Well, beyond spending time with family, and wishing I wasn’t spending time with family, and spending altogether not enough time with love, I got around to watching a film.  The film was War Horse, and because of its heartfelt content and philosophical merit that is relevant to this blog, I am going to do a second film review.

Actually, it’s not really a review, but an analysis, so for those who haven’t seen the film, plan on seeing the film, and look forward to seeing the film without having me tell you everything that happens in the film, skip this post for your sake.  Don’t worry, there will be a new one next week.

For those who enjoyed the film just fine without imagining the extent to which its iconic relationship might go… don’t you worry either; I won’t make it creepy.  For me, the relationship between Joey the horse and Albert the boy and young man was only a small part of the film: the initial development and the goal, giving it a beautiful circularity.  I’m not much of a horse fan – they always made me nervous as a child and I never learned to ride beyond the basics – but nevertheless I found the one-to-one relationship portrayed in the beginning of the film between the titular character and his first owner to have gorgeosity in equality that isn’t often portrayed in film.  Albert leads the way, figuratively, but unlike any other horse master he waits for Joey to follow.  He doesn’t command, he suggests, and what’s more he provides an example, bringing himself completely to the level of the horse even to the point of wearing a yoke.  It’s interesting to note that this ultimate action of leveling saves Joey’s life later in the film.  In short, this relationship, the film’s place of growth and eventually its paradise, is also what I feel to be the ideal in the real world: equality in day-to-day life between humans and animals, and genuine caring between the two.

Far from being some New Age notion, though, or a PETA-esque proclamation that animals are no different from humans, the film goes on to show that it is possible to have this love and equality, or at least to understand and value it, even in the inherently negative context of war, which Joey is thrown into as the steed of one Captain Nicholls.  The man dies; the horse lives on to be found in the clutches of other men who, unlike the two he has been close with, regard him as without value.  Only two German boys – boys that, although being in the forces, value the war as little as their superiors value Joey – save him by suggesting he may be put to work behind the lines, before escaping with him and a second steed.  Once again, men die, but Joey survives.  It isn’t that they died for him, but that he was rescued by them but was unable to protect them, both in the case of the captain and that of the traitors.  It sets a depressing tone for the future.

This future is realized in a sickly French girl, who takes a great shine to both the horses.  On her birthday, against the preference of her grandfather, she is allowed to ride Joey – and unfortunately in doing so winds up in the middle of a German camp.  This time, the horses are taken, and as though in determination to prevent what had happened to their last two riders, they go without a struggle as the girl returns to her grandfather. 

The message of caring human-animal relationships, though, wouldn’t be as strong without its inverse: a challenge brought about as the horses are set to haul artillery, without care for their health beyond that they continue to pull, and that their corpses don’t impede the others after they are shot once they’re no longer useful.  It is here that Joey’s life is most perilous, and it is also here in the film where Albert is reintroduced as a nervous combatant – for both, the farm at which they had grown together has become a lost heaven.  This peril is also amplified at roughly the same time for both: Joey’s equine companion up until this point is killed upon collapsing in pulling the artillery, while Albert is temporarily blinded by a gas attack.  The general image is of fear, and a desire to return, embodied in Joey’s fleeing through no-man’s land, only to be caught in the barbed wire littering it.

This is the climax, and is highly symbolic: the horse is caught in a divide, an intentional divide between two sides that fight and believe themselves intrinsically different despite the similarities we have been shown in the film, having been privy to the lives of both the English and the Germans.  We have been shown another pointless and terrible divide, however: the divide between animals and humans, and we have been shown that the ideal for this as well is for the divide to be removed.  And, lo and behold, at this very time in the film, both divides are removed at once, in more than one way: the wires are cut, weakening the divide between both sides of the war, and they are cut by the combined activity of an Englishman and a German.  Naturally, Joey is then free and is soon reunited with his likewise-injured friend.  Oh, and if you didn't quite catch it the first time, the war ends.

This is a very powerful metaphor, I feel, that can be interpreted in many different fashions depending on whether your focus is upon the morality of war or upon animal-human relations, but it always leads to the same: the divisions in question are foolish and destructive, and only in the interest of a happy ending is the destruction reversed, albeit doubtless not without scars.  It’s this, and its believability on the parts of all characters, whether good or antagonistic, that I feel makes the film such a phenomenal one, and though it was released some time ago and I’m sure its time in the theatres is nearly done, I hope that it does well, because these messages are clear even without a great deal of thought on the part of the audience.  Media changes minds.

Animals Over History, and a Human Imperative

We love our animals.  I don’t just mean we - love our animals, I mean we as humans often enjoy caring for them and taking their company.  But what do we actually think of our furrier companions?  When we say we “have a pet”, is that more like how one has a child, or a lawn mower, or an iPod?  And has it always been that way?  Most importantly: should it?

The answers to these sorts of questions will change depending on the person giving them, of course.  Some people view their animals as tools, some as sources of entertainment.  Others fawn over them, and a few write blogs about them.  But the ways in which we understand them, and thus the ways in which we treat them, has had a marked trend through history.

I believe it’s safe to say that today, we as a species view animals as inferior devices.  Fewer and fewer people are living with animals as we become more urban, and perhaps as animals (perhaps humans included) become less and less important or interesting in our day to day life.  The ratio is a little higher than the answers to a casual question at a lecture I mentioned last article – about 63% of Americans have pets – but this figure is steadily decreasing, and by and large we are becoming more detached from other species.

More importantly, the length to which we consider the thoughts and feelings of non-humans is a pale figure.  Many individuals – otherwise very bright individuals – believe that animals have a stunted or even nonexistent emotional capacity.  There are individuals who believe (somehow?) that animals are incapable of learning, and operate nearly entirely on instinct.  And I don’t think it’s stretching it to say that majority opinion is that humans are the only creatures capable of love.

What is the reason behind this?  Why do we think this way?  Perhaps it is from personal experience, or more specifically a lack thereof, with the dwindling number of people who have pets, and the even smaller number of individuals who care enough to closely observe their behaviour.  But one would think that a lack of experience would create ambivalence, or at least just as many individuals believing in their inexperience in an emotional and thoughtful animal.

This trend towards belief in a more mechanical animal, one might argue, began with the Scientific Revolution – more specifically, perhaps, with one René Descartes, who believed, as he formulated his ideas on mind, and body-soul dualism, that animals lack a soul, and thus lacked a mind.  He quite literally viewed them as machines, going so far as to say that they are incapable of feeling pain, and exercised this belief in various horrific ways.

But where did this frightful concept come from?  Descartes was, along with being a scientist, a Roman Catholic, and his idea of the soul that he is so famous for considering is from Christianity – which, among other things, states plainly that humanity is the only species in possession of a soul.  Prior to Descartes, this simply meant that all dogs do not in fact go to heaven, but as René began to equate the mind with the soul, the step towards complete anthropocentrism became obvious.  This thinking, I believe, is the origin of our modern devaluing of other creatures, and starting in the mid-twentieth century, the majority of experimentation leading to medical or pharmaceutical breakthroughs is on animals.

Before Descartes, and most certainly prior to the later Victorian Age (in which Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty was published: a highly successful piece of animal fiction that, as animal fiction generally did up until and including that time, targeted adults), animals were viewed differently.  While individuals still owned such creatures as cattle, animals who can generally be ascribed a greater life expectancy, such as dogs, cats, and horses, were not owned in the same sense as one owns a cow – the sense of a tool, or a piece of currency (the word for “wealth” was the same word as the one for “cattle” in Old Norse, an ancestor of English).  Instead, they were more commonly viewed as companions or partners, and fiction commonly utilized them as having minds equivalent to most humans (and superior to some).  Horses and dogs were indeed bought and sold, but so were humans, and it was considered improper to mistreat either one.  Wild animals were ascribed a great deal of respect; it wasn’t until after our friend Descartes that such practices as recreational fox hunts were established.

In short, there was a great deal of what we would today call anthropomorphization, which today we feel is a bad thing.  But is it?  Certainly, it is detrimental to ascribe all humanness to other animals: For instance, it’s foolish now to think, as people of the tenth century AD did, that animals have their own languages equivalent to our own, and moreover we should not pretend that they see and hear the same way we do, and that they miss the same smells; this ascription remains today perhaps the biggest crime against animal intellect.  However, does the fact that they sense the world and interact with it in ways different from our own, that cannot be immediately noticed by us without a great deal of experience and sometimes even extrapolation, that they have a comparatively stunted set of thoughts and feelings, or even none at all?

For those reading, and perhaps wondering now about just what (and how much) is going on inside the head of your household cat or dog, consider something of a happy medium: animals cannot be said to have language, so we might infer that their thought is of a different breed than what we are used to, and may follow a different logical set, like that in a dream: not necessarily inferior (I would off-handedly suggest that it is capable of less complex interactions, but may formulate them more efficiently; I won’t get into it here), but sometimes difficult to understand from a humanistic perspective.  More importantly, the majority of animals don’t care a whole lot about their eyesight, and rely much more greatly on their senses of smell, touch (whiskers) and hearing; this means that, while they miss some things that we think are obvious, they also sense a lot of things that we would never be able to.  This is also the reason that, when you are feeling sad or ill, an animal you are close to will often seem to sense it, even from a distance; and additionally, the reason your animal does “stupid” things, or appears unpredictable.

So, for the sake not only of the animals you live with, but also that of your own enlightenment and understanding, consider that there are ways of thinking, perceiving and feeling that are radically different from your own, and that their exemplification in an individual does not equate to a lack of thought, perception and emotion.  Take time to observe your animals.  When your dog goes “apeshit”, consider things from her perspective as best you can.  Make connections from recent circumstances to her actions.  When your cat attacks you for apparently no reason, don’t immediately jump to the solution that he is simply a moron.  I’ve lived with animals all my life and I can say that there is always a reason, just like there is with us, only different.  When you begin to unravel the behaviours of certain species you become familiar with, you can start to discover how they think – and then, how they feel.  And that’s something that I, as a psychologist and an animal lover, believe is not merely worthwhile, but rather a human imperative.

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Why NOT Zoophilia?

There has never, in history, been a civilization that has normatively or officially approved of overtly romantic or sexual interactions between humans and animals.  There have been times where it simply wasn’t punished, or was practiced for less-than-everyday reasons, such as ritual – certain practices involving kings and horses in certain European cultures during the Bronze Age come to mind – but it was never normal, and never considered a viable romantic orientation; in above example, the horse was afterwards devoured.  Why is this?  Extending this question, why today do we have, if anything, only an even more negative attitude towards zoophilia?

This seems like a silly question to most: when asked to rationalize an attitude towards this question, the first reaction tends to come from the gut, along with their breakfast.  Although we’re more tolerant today of that woman who just likes her cats a lot, bestiality at least is still simply gross.  But grossness, in a serious discussion, is not enough to warrant arresting or even killing someone; at least it’s not today.  Nor, for most – at least in the developed world – is religion. (And besides, the Bible only condemns bestiality twice: once in Exodus, once in Leviticus, which are two books often hummed and hawed over, and not once is it called a sin.)

People will cite health reasons too: that one can catch all manner of illnesses and infections from animals.  However, this is provably false: as I discuss briefly in my last post, the number of zoonoses – diseases that can be transferred from animal to human – are extremely small in comparison to the number of STIs that can be transmitted between humans.  As for infection, so long as an animal is well-cared-for, there is little risk.  Most infections you read about on the “lol” section of your favourite news site arise when someone sneaks onto farmland to bang X ungulate, which obviously isn’t going to be as sanitary from an anthropocentric viewpoint as an animal kept with people.  And of course, the same individuals support freedom for practices that are inherently self-destructive, such as drinking, smoking, or the use of light drugs such as cannabis.

The debate about bestiality typically boils down to animal rights: the idea that animals cannot consent.  This argument, I find, is indicative of an individual who has spent little time with animals in their life.  Indeed, I attended a lecture a few weeks ago in which the lecturer asked a room of two hundred or so people how many of them had pets.  Maybe ten percent raised their hands.  When he asked off-handedly how many felt attached to their pets, only half of that figure did.  The assumption, then, that someone who believes that animals are so unthinking and unfeeling that they are not even able to articulate a very basic desire actually has no experience to back this reasoning seems to be a fairly solid one; indeed, when I end up in a debate with such an individual, I can usually flabbergast them by showing them some random video of an animal in heat.  I beg your pardon, sir, but does your girlfriend scream and brandish her genitalia in front of you when she wants something?  Oh, but it’s not verbal consent, therefore it’s not legal.  Well, does your significant other ever even ask you if you want to have sex, or does it just happen – clothes start falling off, as it were – because it’s a natural thing to do?

This debate and the health debate are both hypocritical veils for that original, gut-driven objection.  So we’re still left with this original question: why, when so many other taboos based on nothing but faith and proximity discomfort have been abolished, is zoophilia still illegal in most parts of the world, and is despised by the majority of the population in every nation?  I believe the reason is two-part: adherence to old values, which is a hallmark of culture itself and has retarded such progressive thought, such as gender equality and religious tolerance, from manifesting; and our view of animals in general.  We, as modern humans, see animals at once as lovable, animated creatures, and as inferiors to be exploited by tools.  Hospitals employ cats and dogs to visit their patients because, as a species, we adore them, while at once administering to the same patients medications that were discovered only through cruel experimentation on, yes, cats and dogs.

What does this mean?  Simply, our animals are objects: we may dispose of them, so long as we don’t have to see it happen.  We don’t have to learn about them, because there are more important things to be attending to that involve us.  They are, in short, slaves, only without the non-crazy emancipation movements, so those who do become attached to them in some of the ways we generally reserve only for humans are treated as though they are willingly lowering themselves to the level of the slave – something we have always found distressing.  Couple this, of course, with the foreignness of non-human anatomies – as foreignness almost always produces an instinctual withdrawal – and you have a great deal of distress regarding the situation of the zoophile.

From this, we can glean a solution: although we cannot eliminate resistance to social or cultural change – nor, I believe, should we, for too much change at once can be harmful – we can work towards reconstructing the bond between humans and other animals, showing people that, apart from our ability to speak and produce culture, there is very little difference between ourselves and other species.  Following this is perhaps the more difficult imperative: we, as zoophiles, must come out in force, so that the concept of a human who desires romantic relationships with non-humans is not so bizarre to the common folk.  I believe that it is actually up to us to achieve both of these goals: with the failure of such movements as PETA and the ALF on account of being batshit insane, we are the best individuals for the job to show the world just what animals are capable of, and how similar we truly are.  Only once this is accomplished will our world take that one giant step closer towards rationality and equality, and will we be allowed to live without fear.