Crossing the Chasm

For almost seventeen years, I have owned a ginger tabby cat named Chester. Anyone who has ever owned a pet for any length of time knows that each animal has its own unique personality and particular idiosyncrasies that can be cute, maddening, or downright annoying – similar to human beings, I guess. Chester is no different. His idiosyncrasy is quite straightforward. For almost seventeen years, he has consistently, persistently, and insistently meowed for most of his waking life (which for cats, thankfully, is only about 20% of the time).

I used to fantasize that perhaps Chester was a handsome prince who had been turned into a cat and was trying to say “get me out of this body!!” If only I knew the spell, I could transform both our lives and live happily ever after! (Although it also occurred to me that, if he were a prince, he’d be way too chatty for me - I prefer the strong, silent type.)

Over the years, I have been able to figure out a few of Chester’s meows and been able, at times, to respond to him in ways that obviously satisfy his needs or wants. But much of what he says remains a mystery. Plain and simple – I don’t speak Cat, and Chester doesn’t speak English. There is a chasm between us that even seventeen years of togetherness can never bridge – we are from two very different branches of the evolutionary tree. I simply don’t know what’s going on in his feline brain.

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me that she thought that human beings really had very little idea about non-human intelligence. She believed that we are only able to project our own view of intelligence onto other species, and thus we render them as less intelligent than we are because they do not measure up to human standards of intelligence. But what if, she asked, they were capable of different but equally highly evolved intelligence that made them successful species, albeit different from us? It was an intriguing thought, especially after two bottles of wine shared over dinner, and it is one that has remained with me ever since.

Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, puts forth the thesis that four particular plant species – the apple, the tulip, cannibis, and the potato, have used human desire for their particular charms as a means to profilerate their species. In other words, human beings have been the unwitting foils to the proliferation of these species, and in some cases (such as the Irish potato famine of 1848) collateral damage along the road to the species’ success. While his thesis has the ring of anthropomorphism about it, it does suggest that not only humans and animals have the drive to survive and evolve. Is Pollan onto a form of botanical intelligence – using another species’ desire as a driver to success? We simply don’t know. But scientists are now studying plant “behaviour” and all the related implications that the term implies.

Placing anthropomorphic tendencies on non-human things is an example of how we overlay human, or systems thinking, on everything we observe. But is it possible that our very human thinking is actually limiting our understanding of the world around us? Have we, in fact, shut ourselves off from the rest of the world by operating within very specific and limited processes of thinking, by placing human expectations and standards on living things that we don’t really understand? If this is the case, we may need to change the way we look at things before we can truly understand them.

Will we ever have meaningful communication with another species? It’s difficult to say – it’s possible that the chasms are simply too wide, and that all species are stranded on their own communication islands, humans being no different than any other species. But there are flickers of hope. Anyone who has ever successfully trained a dog to sit or had a peaceful cuddle with their cat, knows that communication between species does happen. Is it possible that we have missed the communication signals that other species have been sending us all along? If you believe that only humans can make the first move in interspecies communication, read this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12whales-t.html?ref=magazine.

It may change your way of thinking about other species. And that may be the first step …