I'll tell you something. I once allowed a python to be placed around my neck. It was on a field trip I went on with my daughter and her sixth-grade science class. Her science teacher (an extremely cool man — one of the best teachers Maggie ever had) was standing right there to leap into action the instant I would start to lose it.

But I had to at least match his coolness.

Having said that, I think I will stick with cats (and I hope, very soon, dogs).

Um, should I take this to mean you like neither dogs nor cats?

I know you work in a vet's office, but I'm not clear on what you do. Are you a vet yourself? A technician?

What about cats? “

Reptile rule, mammals drool!

You have demonstrated numerous problems lately with your “awareness.”

What about cats?

Interesting comment. I wasn't aware that you'd ever stopped.

In addition to being a vegan, my friend in DC is an animal rescuer and home-finder, and (sane) animal rights activist. She finds that at some point this cooption and channeling is wrongful (and anthropocentric), from an ethical standpoint. (I'm preoccupied with thinking about the difficulty and the danger where the big cats are being trained, who cannot be domesticated, but merely tamed, and even then, far from reliably so, necessarily.)

Still, most of the stuff I've read about how to train them takes the cat perspective and how you have to coopt their natural impulses to channel it into a human oriented appliance.

Not where it doesn't apply, Sil — and if it may be projection, that's where it is remarkable.

Sometimes they clearly are intelligent, and at other times they may be imitating humans, or viewing humans as not that different from themselves. When I was growing up, we had a cat who clearly had learned the cause-and-effect relationship between turning a door knob and opening a door; when it wanted to go from one room to another in the house, we saw it reaching up with its paws on the door knob, attempting to turn it, and we'd check at other times if the cat wanted to go through the doorway by holding it up to the door knob; if it wanted to go through, it would reach for the knob, otherwise it would not, and sometimes turn away.

I think the take home points about intelligence and social structures is that each species has its own adaptations based on the social needs of the species- and that's again a reason not to anthropomorphize. Of course just the fact that there's evidence of the evolutionary basis for social adaptations and advancements which rely on more advanced cognition can be a source of discomfort for some people with religious viewpoints, but personally I don't consider it any more of a deal breaker than heliocentrism ultimately proved to be.

It also highlights another point that has been long overlooked but is starting to get more attention, and that is how important social mores are for trying to infer intelligence. Elephants have the most complex death rites I know of, and given that it'd be tempting to say that they were really intelligent.

While they are fairly intelligent, it's hard to judge how much. That's because most intelligent creatures are predators and are either solitary or based on small groups, while elephants have scalable herds and social structures that are completely dependent on the distribution of food available. You'd never see a chimp or gorilla give respect to a different clan because their social structure would forbid it. Similarly, the great apes are really touchy about the dominance of the alpha male and the amount of display shown seems to be related somehow to his acquiescence. Elephants have a more distributed social power structure.

And interesting that you brought up Cesar Milan because I agree completely there too. He respects dogs for being dogs, with all of their unique qualities, and that's why he is able to bond and affect behavior so well. I recommend his techniques to all of my clients, but I often find that people don't 'get it' because they actually prefer to think of their pets as humanoid companions and they don't want to think about how the dogs react to being treated that way. And that's fine as far as it goes, but it's frustrating for someone to ask my advice on changing a behavior that they can't live with when they're unwilling to change other behaviors that they find desirable.

Anyway, I'll also mention that another thought I had before reading the thread was that it might have been about this story, which I really did find rather touching.

But so is the opposite stance, anti-anthropomorphiztion – the denying that traits that are considered uniquely 'human' exist in other animals. The list of those that have over time been disproved is very extensive, such as self-awareness, tool use, cognitive thinking, true family and tribal units, recreational sex, awareness, memory of and reverence for their own dead, empathy towards both same-species and non-species members, etc.

We have a strong emotional and intellectual need, it seems, to identify ourselves as something more than just the dominant species of the planet, to be the one that is 'special' compared to all other animals.

But for those of us who do not believe in the Divinity of Man, i.e., that we are endowed by some God, Entity, Force, whatever, with a true innate uniqueness and superiority over the other species, the simple fact is that we are indeed just another animal of the planet Earth, more evolved in some aspects and less evolved in others when we compare ourselves to the other species, and that all the traits that make us 'human' in our minds can be found to one extent or another in one or another of those species.