Reading Richard Stevens’ fine piece on feline compassion, prompted me to offer some thoughts on feline intelligence in general.

He pointed to the way a mother cat calmed down a seemingly feral kitten simply by refusing to be triggered by anything the kitten did.

Now that set me reminiscing. For example, when I moved to Ottawa some years ago, I adopted three orphans, Tom, Dick, and Harry, whose mothers were killed by the Storm Sandy blowby over Lake Huron.

They were all toms; two were 12 weeks old and one was 6 weeks old. Perhaps surprisingly, the two bigger toms looked after the much younger kitten. Essentially they did what they remembered their mother doing (except for nipple feeding him). But that last part did not matter; by then he could feed himself.

And he did. He stuffed himself. He quickly grew to be bigger than they were. He was soon Top Cat.

Cold and unfeeling?

Although cats are often considered in popular culture to be cold and unfeeling, a lot depends on how a cat understands a situation. A female cat who has lost her kittens might adopt baby squirrels.

You can even smuggle a baby squirrel or a small puppy into her litter of kittens if you camouflage its scent. The main thing is not to startle her. Don’t force her to make a decision. If she just accepts what is happening as normal, things may turn out fine.

It is helpful to see that the cat is not taking a census. In fact, she does not even know how many kittens she has. She may not know whether the life forms she is feeding are even kittens. If nothing is startling her, nothing much will happen…

But — and I do think this is important to keep in mind — if she has a litter of kittens to feed and she encounters a baby squirrel out there, she will take it home to feed to them. She is not a moral agent.

Animal mind

I asked Michael Egnor who has a more philosophical approach to these matters than I do what he thought about animal mind:

Animals have minds just like humans except for two things: they cannot think of universals, and they don’t have appetites that follow from thinking about universals (i.e., they don’t have free will). Emotions arise from physical body states and are shared by animals and man. Cats can love and care and be kind etc., but they cannot abstractly contemplate love, kindness and caring. A cat can feel maternal feelings (or just kindness) toward a strange kitten. My dog is sweet and kind a lot. But humans alone contemplate universal concepts of kindness, love etc. We write books and emails about theories and concepts without specific reference to particular objects of thought. Animals don’t. By nature, they can’t think that way.

We shouldn’t denigrate animals’ capacity for thought. They are capable of cleverness, great skill, subtle perception, powerful emotions, etc. But they can’t think abstractly or freely choose based only on abstract considerations.

That sounds right to me. The cat is not asking herself whether it is right to raise the baby squirrel or kill it to feed her kittens. She responds to her environment in terms of what she knows and is never a judge of it.

Animal souls?

At the close of his article, Richard asks, “As humans have an immortal mind, might some animals have such a mind beyond biology, too? Countless cat and dog lovers say yes. Love going beyond instinct points to minds beyond matter.”

This is a concern that apparently tormented prominent neuroscientist Christof Koch: “I grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family with Purzel, a fearless dachshund. Purzel could be affectionate, curious, playful, aggressive, ashamed, or anxious. Yet my church taught that dogs do not have souls. Only humans do. Even as a child, I felt intuitively that this was wrong; either we all have souls, whatever that means, or none of us do.”

As we noted here at the time, the matter is subtle: “What might make a dog immortal is his identification with humans, who are immortal. One thing is certain: Purzel would not have been “Purzel” at all if he were a wild canine. Humans created “Purzel,” whether they recognize it or not. The question then becomes, does any part of that identification — “Purzel” as created by humans — participate in immortality? We can’t know that. But we can be sure of one thing: To even entertain such a hope, one must begin by believing in some form of human exceptionalism and immortality.”

So — on this view — perhaps the blind man’s faithful seeing-eye dog does join him in eternity. Perhaps a cat joins her human too. We can’t do more than wonder but the main thing to see here is that the special position of humans would enable it. Nothing else can.