The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

Can a cat be equal to a human?

I have a new kitten. She's eager to learn her role in her new tribe. She's allowed to jump up on the dining table, but I don't want her stealing food, especially when I step away. So when she comes too close, I raise my voice and she becomes tense, freezes and backs away. If I do this gently she cooperates and seems eager both to be rewarded for her cooperation and to continue probing to see where the social boundaries are. If I'm too rough, she becomes hurt, her eyes darken and she sulks for awhile.

When she's not sure I'm serious she'll try to defy me. If I yell or pat her rump, it hurts her pride and she runs away. When I come to get her she'll look ashamed or depressed or at least embarrassed until I pet her. Then she yawns and stretches and the corners of her lips curl slightly in the suggestion of a smile. To show that she trusts me, she blinks. If I blink back she rubs against me.

When I was a child, schoolteachers told me that animals couldn't feel and certainly couldn't think. What a shame it is that schoolteachers can't feel ... and certainly can't think.

Equality is at the heart of any freely-chosen relationship, including those we have with pets. Even though our pets are prisoners -- even property, legally — they still need to decide what kind of relationship they're going to have with us, even as prisoners in jails and slaves on plantations do. A kitten has a brain the size of a peanut and could be murdered with a single kick, but in order for her to bond with me we must both reach for equality. Both of us undertake a social calculation that must come out right in order for the relationship to be mutually useful. We must each accurately calculate the benefit of what we get versus the cost of what we give. And no relationship proceeds unless each party gets more than he gives.

I want a little animal child to adore. I enjoy petting her and hearing her purr. And for these gifts I'm willing to pay the price of feeding her, cleaning up after her, and taking her to the vet. But she has a calculation to perform as well. The first thing I did when I took her in was to feed her, so she knows she can get food from me. And she likes it when I pet her, likes having a place to live in that never gets too cold or too warm, and likes living in a small tribe whose members do not threaten her. But she instinctively knows that she needs to pay a price for these privileges. She can't attack me except in play, she has to accept my authority as head of the tribe, and she has to put up gracefully with torments like going to the vet. In those moments when we're working out the giving and getting, negotiating how much we'll put up with and how much we demand, we are reaching a psychological equality that transcends any other metric.

This is why the political myth of human equality is so important. Not because it's false to think what we all know — that no one is exactly equal to anyone else in any measure, actually or even in principle — but because the myth of equality promotes commerce, social intercourse, and the human family itself. In those moments when we believe in equality we are reaching a psychological arena in which our equality is no longer a myth but a reality.

How knoweth [man] by the vertue of his understanding the inward and secret motions of beasts? By what comparison from them to us doth he conclude the brutishnesse he ascribeth unto them? When I am playing with my cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her? We entertaine one another with mutuall apish trickes. If I have my houre to begin or to refuse, so hath she hers.

— M. E. de Montaigne