The Animal's Companion by Jacky Colliss Harvey

Author:Jacky Colliss Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

For some weeks past we have had with us by the sea-shore a beautiful little Italian girl… who has a remarkable fondness for a pretty little black and white kitten belonging to the house. All day long she will have her pet in her arms, talking to her when she thinks nobody is near; telling her everything; charging her to keep some story to herself as it is a very great secret.27

The writer Jenny Diski, a century later, on her many visits to London Zoo, did the same with Guy the Gorilla. “I stood in front of his cage every day,” she writes. “I thought we were friends. I loved him and I told him things.”28 Abuwtiyuw’s bow! or Meone’s meow is seen as perfectly sufficient for their side of the conversation (and note how we have borrowed and made a language of their “words,” as well). Any kind of sound in response to us will do. We can read into it anything we need. I find it most intriguing that when my cats encounter each other, it’s with a brief, silent sniff, nose to nose, but when they jump onto my lap it’s always with some sound or other, usually a two-note chirrup that I’m going to call a greeting, and a habit that they seem to have acquired from my two-syllable “Hello!”

Now this nudges us up into the very misty territory of anthropomorphism, something the besotted owner has indulged in forever and the scientist is meant to shun with contempt, but the times they are a-changing. Anthropomorphism is at least one way of exploring and interrogating our companion animals and their emotions and sensations.29 Carl Safina, writer and conservationist, has even called it “our best first guess.”30

But we need to be realistic in how we use it. Bird, with her friendly creak of welcome, her polysyllabic chirrups, and above all her yowling “Song of the Mighty Huntress,” is an astonishingly vocal cat, but if I read meaning into those sounds as if they were speech, I fall all too thoroughly into the trap of taking them as expressing what I would be feeling if I were she; still me, in other words, just in a little black velvet cat suit—not what she is experiencing and expressing being her. Or, as the novelist and proto–animal activist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé; 1839–1908) put it, “Man, having but one conception of intelligence—his own—does not endeavor to comprehend another which is different and differently exhibited and expressed.” I particularly like the way in which Ouida, who at one time was looking after thirty dogs, most of them rescues and strays, on the proceeds of her more that forty novels, manages so cunningly to exclude women from this definition. Anthropomorphism can tell us a great deal about ourselves in our relation to our animals, but it can’t be trusted to tell us as much about them.

In particular, once we start putting words into our animals’ mouths, it is all too easy to assume they understand them.

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