"How Would You Taste?"

NPR.org did an interview with anthrozoologist John Bradshaw, who wrote a book about what cats are thinking. The post title is my best guess about what cats think most of the time, and I lived with one for 20 years. Other possibilities are, "What would it be like to watch your lifeblood drain from your body as I delicately lick it from my razor-sharp claws?" and, "How in the hell did something as dumb as you get to the top of the food chain?"

Dr. Bradshaw, who as an anthrozoologist studies interactions between humans and animals, has written a new book, Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet. He says that one of the things that makes dogs and cats act differently is that dogs, descended from wolves, are socialized animals. A pack is a cooperative venture that works when everybody plays their assigned roles.

But cats have generally been loners -- lions are the exception. Since their faces do not need to communicate information, they have not evolved different emotion-conveying expressions as dogs have. The exception, of course, is when cats are supremely ticked off, as is the anonymous animal in the picture this blog uses in its header. That emotion -- murderous psychopathic rage -- they have little trouble expressing.

To me, the most telling sentence is one Dr. Bradshaw uses to describe how dogs and cats will play differently with people and their toys. For a dog, the goal is interaction with a member of the pack. The toy is a tool to facilitate this. Cats operate differently:

"In the case of a cat, we've never really found any particular significance to the human being."

Neither, I submit, has the cat.