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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Things to Learn from Cats - Part One I’ve often pondered on the uses of cats. No doubt they were first kept around for their rodent catching abilities, thereby protecting humanity’s grain supplies, but there’s more to it, I’m sure. Their therapeutic functions, for instance. It’s no coincidence that, when you’re feeling low or ill, a cat will insinuate itself into contact with you and pretty soon you’ll feel much better. So they have their uses. And yesterday I realised that they have an educational function too. I began to make a list of the things we can learn from them. 1. Cats are predators. But they’re not the top of the tree, the apex predator. We can gather this from the fact that a cat will have many places to sleep and will move randomly between them. This can only mean that they have fiercer enemies to be wary of. The more unpredictable they are, the less subject to ambushes and unpleasant surprises they become. We, however, are omnivores. As such, we are inevitably a compromise, having to be reasonably efficient at both hunting and gathering. The really interesting thing is that we’re the apex predator, as evidenced by the fact that we sleep in the same place every night and don’t care who knows it. Which is an interesting attitude to take when you’re a pink (or brown), naked creature without claws or predator’s teeth or ability to run fast. The only thing we have going for us is that we are good at inventing technology to surpass all those fangs and claws and the like that other predators have. We’re an experiment to see if a compromise between meat and vegetation eater can become the apex predator purely through intelligence alone. And, if we ignore that it looks as though intelligence might be the thing that’s going to bring us to extinction in the long run, it would seem that we’ve been successful. So that’s a lesson we can learn from cats. The reason they stick with us is that they’re betting on us winning the race race. Let’s hope they’re right. Word count: 347 |
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