CAT: A SYMBOL OF LIBERTY. Being an appreciation of “THE MODERN CAT”
By Georgina Stickland Gates
Author of “The Modern Cat: Her Mind and Manners.” An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. By Georgina Stickland Gates, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. (The Macmillan Company; 8s. 6d. net.)
Illustrated London News, 5th October, 1929

“CAT" — says our old friend Brewer — “Cat. A symbol of liberty. The Roman goddess of Liberty was represented as holding a cup in one hand, a broken sceptre in the other, and with a cat lying at her feet. No animal is so great an enemy to all constraint as a cat.” There is the truth of it. She walks alone, in comfortable complacency; delicately, decidedly, disdainfully. Not for her the fealty of the dog; she is the better or the equal or she “obliges.” There are those who argue that she owes her every move to the natural machinery we name instinct; that she does not think; that she is minus memory; that her vaunted homing powers, her maternal care for her kittens, her preying, her little friendships and her age-old enmities, her responses to the spoken word, her trifling tricks, are accidents, the vestiges of ancient ancestry, as uncalculated as breathing in word, that, as an American writer put it sardonically, she must be regarded as an automaton that is valueless save as self-setting mouse-trap!

These will not quarrel with Dr. Gates’s findings when she affirms that, although the cat may be superior to her mistress in the twilight — "Cats, like men, cannot see in absolute darkness — in her quickness, strength, and accuracy in the activities that are peculiarly her own, in falling on her feet, in orientation, she is “notably below the human level in certain other respects. She is blind to colours and deaf to tones. She shows no evidence of that ability which we describe popularly as ‘reasoning,’ she does not suddenly ‘see through ’ a situation, she does not learn by’ jumps ’ as man does when he is not only fumbling but thinking. She is apparently unable, for example, to discover that of four doors, three of which are to be unlocked and one locked, the experimenter will never lock the one which has been locked on the previous trial, nor that it is futile to push repeatedly at one door and inefficient to neglect persistently one possibility. She fails to perceive that the way to obtain meat stuck on the farther end of a stick is to pull the nearer end towards her. She apparently can rarely remember under experimental conditions for more than a minute which of two similar entrances she must approach in order to obtain food. Seeing another cat perform a trick and receive reward does not lead her to attempt to repeat the act in the hope of like recompense. Even moving her limbs in the desired direction does not give her the ‘idea’ of an act. She seems to have few, if any, of those mental elements which we describe as ideas or thoughts.”

[“AN OCCASIONAL ACTIVITY”: A CAT SEEKNIG TO CATCH FISH BY THE “SCOOPING-OUT” PROCESS. Cats have even been known to enter the water after fish, but this is most unusual. Cats who display this ability, according to the author (E. W. Gudger), usually belong to millers. They are accustomed to catch water rats, and get into the habit of going into the water to get them. You might picture a cat some day missing the rat at which she was aiming and catching a fish instead. Gradually, perhaps, by such accidents as this, she would build up the habit of fishing." Reproduced from The Modem Cat" by Courtesy of the Publishers, Messrs. Macmillan. ]

[“CAN THE WHITE KITTEN LEARN THE TRICK BY OBSERVING THE ACT AND ITS OUTCOME?": A CAT USING HER PAW TO GET THE MILK SHECANNOT REACH WITH HER MOUTH, The general answer to the question is: These and other cases, the investigator feels, should described as instances of voluntary imitation, though of a low order. 'The cat imitates the act of another, with a definite purpose in view.’ The imitation is of a low order because it does not occur until the required act has been performed many times by the trained animal.’” Reproduced from “The Modern Cat" by Courtesy of the Publishers, Messrs. Macmillan.]

That, briefly, is the case for the prosecution; and various ingenious tests are cited to bolster it; yet there comes to me the saying “A man may well bring a horse to the water, but he cannot make him drink without he will,” and what may be the more apposite assertion, that the monkey can talk but will not, lest, like his tailless descendant, he be made to work! Still, there are the tests —and, admittedly, the conclusions to be drawn from them do not suggest that pussy’s intelligence is of a high order!

Such triumphs as are registered are nullified by being classed as luck. One instance will suffice. A cat is placed in a box — a hungry cat — and outside is fish. She claws and scrambles to get out, but she does nothing “rational.” At last, she catches a paw in the release-loop, the door responds by opening, she is able to escape, and she is gratified by gaining her meal. Then she is put back into the box. As far as can be seen, her experience has taught her nothing. She fights again, and again she strikes the loop and gets out. After perhaps a score of essays, “she reaches to a point where as soon as she is dropped in the box, without making any other movements, she pulls the loop. She has learned the trick!” Or so the average would believe. But, urges our authority, a graph in either hand, in reality “the cat uses man’s second best procedure, hit-or-miss varied struggling, guided by accidental solution.” She — not the cat! — writes, in fact: “If you had observed the cat only on the final occasion, you might be moved to marvel as Romanes did at the wonders of animal reasoning powers and to make all sorts of gratuitous assumptions regarding the cat’s understanding of mechanical contrivances and the complexity of her ideas. You might say, ‘See, she understands that pulling the loop will open the door.’ Yet the cat understands nothing, she does not see through the situation. All that has happened is that the tendency to claw the loop has been strengthened through repetition and through the fact that it has brought release and food, whereas the tendencies to make those movements of biting, mewing, struggling, which brought only continued discomfort, gradually disappeared. The cat learns to escape from a box much as a child learns to button his coat. He does not think, I will hold the button thus and push it thus.' Instead, he struggles with it, twists it first this way, then the other. After several experiences with buttons, he learns to operate them immediately. That method of holding the button is retained which has brought him satisfaction. Those methods of handling have been eliminated which were awkward, uncomfortable, unavailing. He probably thought little about the matter other than to be pleased at his final achievement.” Cries of "Special pleading”! And, for the comfort of the defence and the critical, the same psychologist’s confession; She (the cat) is no philosopher, no mechanician, no student or critic of human affairs, merely a distant relative, poverty-stricken with respect to the most valuable of all possessions, but cherished for her air of aloofness and that aura of mystery which surrounds her. This, at least, is the view of the cat's mind that many students of comparative psychology hold to-day. Other investigations may be made to-morrow which shall overthrow these theories. A writer in Harper’s says: ‘From science and by reason we as yet know neither whence the universe came nor whither it is going; what I am that read this, nor what it is that I read, nor whether there is an I, nor what is energy or space or matter; nor the explanation of any force or thing, whether heat or light or electricity, or thought or imagination or love.’ We know even less about cats.”

From all of which it must not be assumed that Mrs. Stickland Gates is a cat-hater. She sees the fireside sphinx in the friendly flicker of the flames as well as in the “laboratory” of the investigator and, though she cannot find it in her professorial heart to credit all the cat yarns of all the cat “fans,” she does not banish sympathetic mention of many of them and a mild acceptance of some. As she has it: “Usually you find her in our homes. There she occupies a position much like that accorded by primitive theology to the deity. Her function is to sit and be admired. To be sure, we no longer accord the cat the whole-hearted worship which the ancient Egyptians provided. We do not feel it necessary that a whole city, or even a whole family, should go into mourning on the death of a cat. We do not even shave our eyebrows when a kitten dies, nor do we maintain troops of cats in temples, fed on fish and bread dipped in milk, nor do we tear to pieces a ‘noble Roman’ who accidentally kills a cat. On the other hand, we do not view the cat with as marked uneasiness as did our ancestors of later date. If we find (and our forebears report definitely that they did make such discoveries), a cat on some dark night engaged in an unholy rite — such as dancing on a gravestone — and if in anger we cut off her right front paw, we do not expect next morning to discover that one of our neighbours — perhaps some shrewish old woman - has lost her right hand! Some of us even scoff at statistical evidence and are undisturbed in our belief in feline integrity when we learn that in the report of witch-trials (collected by an eminent jurist) the Arch-Fiend appeared to his followers only sixty times as a cavalier, only two hundred and fifteen times as a he-goat, but nine hundred times as a black cat.”

We are tolerant — if not adoring; and Mrs. Gates is with us, despite her insistence that it is always the unusual that is commented upon, not the normal, and that there is such a thing as error of interpretation, incorrect reading into the unfathomed mind!

Very well; so be it. But do not disparage the glories of Grimalkin, the younger females of the species, and poor — but popular — father! And let the deadlier cease their proud purring as they listen to the F. H. Herrick saga of the Cat that was a Compass. “Very interesting indeed was the behaviour of the Tomcat who provided so much amusement for a group of friends one dark summer night on a lake near Madison, Wisconsin. The cat was taken for a ride in a boat and when some distance from shore became uneasy (much as one's grand-mother might do on such expedition) and anxious to go home. But, unlike grand-mother, he did not cling to the centre of the boat but climbed out on one end and stretched his head toward home and mewed continually. The men reacted in characteristic human fashion — by turning the boat slowly round and round to see what the cat would do. But whether ‘right side, left side, bow or stern, Tom was always on the part of the boat nearest home, and straining as far as he could in that direction. Fully a mile from any shore, how could he tell which shore was which! He was wrapped in a heavy blanket-shawl, so that he was unable to see, and held either in the experimenter’s lap or in the bottom of the boat and the craft then rotated. As, soon he was released he started with no mistake and without the slightest hesitation toward the end of the boat nearest home. Sometimes the boat was turned by a single stroke, sometimes it was rowed slowly round in a circle, it made no difference to Tom. He was unerring a compass.’ “ Oh, Felix, fold thine arms and bow thy whiskered head!

Seriously, The Modern Cat — is any cat modern? - is worthy of its title, and will be appreciated not only by those to whom Puss is a subject for study - a creature of a colourless and toneless universe of her own who is to be observed for instinct, reaction, and reason - but by those who, without emulating the German Lady of Rank who advertised for “a few well-behaved and respectably dressed children to amuse a cat in delicate health,” rank with the most obedient servants who continue to treat the cat as friend, as did Ben Jonson when he bought oysters for his fastidious pet, or Victor Hugo, whose cat sat unrebuked on his dais, or Matthew Arnold when he described feline gambols, or Sir Walter Scott who encouraged his pet’s despotic rule of his bloodhound, or Lord Chesterfield who left his cat a pension, or the Brontes, or Richelieu, or Mahomet, or Petrarch, or Henry James, or Robert Southey, or Horace Walpole, or Gregory the Great, or Cardinal Wolsey, whose intimate companion she was.” That is all that it is necessary to say here —and a Familiar is clamouring for her cream! Do we not all live under the cat’s foot ? - E. H. G.

A 1930s VIEW OF FELINE INTELLIGENCE AND FELINE BEHAVIOUR (1936)

Though science has established that cats have brains to be diseased, and we are learning that the word "fits" does not cover the range of their brain and nerve disorders, the fact that cats have brains to think with and do think with them is not very widely recognized. It is so easy to disparage the "harmless necessary cat." It was once said by Dr. William B. Scott, professor emeritus of Princeton University, in a speech before the American Society of Mammalogists, that the first cats in what is now America, some 35,000,000 years ago, were stupid, dull, and chuckle-headed. And you meet people who say the same of our cats today. But there is plenty of proof that cats have brains, and souls too, or whatever the vital sparks are that enable us to think, to reason, to love, and to pity.

I suppose that pity is the highest of all attributes. Few believe that the cat is capable of it. Yet I knew a cat who not only pitied misfortune but did something about it, who could give some of our modern relief workers a lesson in quick action. He belonged to the editor of the Brodhead Independent, in the Wisconsin town where I lived as a child. Mr. and Mrs. Editor adored cats and always had anywhere from five to ten. They were well fed, and this old fellow, Arthur, was particularly honest, so there was much astonishment when he was seen stealing a chop from the kitchen table. He got away with it before they could follow him, but the next day he took a piece of steak, and that time they were able to trail him. He carried the steak down the path to the barn and around to the back, where there was a hole in the foundations, laid it down, and gave a little call. Then out from under the barn crept a cat that Mr. and Mrs. Editor had never seen before, a forlorn, emaciated creature, and it devoured the food with timorous glances about, while Arthur sat by and smiled. Yes, smiled. He did not have to steal again, for Mrs. Editor placed a heaped saucer behind the barn regularly until the stray decided to come out and join the family.

In that town we knew nothing of Persians, or Siamese, or any of the newfangled breeds, but we had some fine cats that I suppose were alley cats, though we had no alleys, only lanes. The dean of the Brodhead cats lived with the minister of the Union Free Church, a society of liberal men and women. This cat was nineteen years old, and he always had his chair and plate at the minister's table. The Presbyterian deacon who lived next door thought that was terrible, but he could not deny that the cat's manners were better than those of his own children.

When it comes to the deeds of daring that dogs are always being lauded for, such as pulling drowning people out of the surf, or rescuing travellers from the Alpine snow, cats naturally cannot perform these; but I know a cat who saved a kitten from death by exposure, and another who called help for his sick mistress. Peter is a handsome tiger cat who has spent the four years of his life with Mr. and Mrs. Newton L. Otis, of New York City. They have always treated him like a dog, talking to him, playing ball with him, taking him in the car on their week-end trips to the Catskills. And he is as responsive and as devoted to them as any dog could be. A charming white Persian kitten who lives in the same apartment house often calls on Peter, coming': along a cornice to his favourite window. There is a screen, but they converse in their own way through its meshes. One cold stormy night Mr. and Mrs. Otis returned late from the theatre, and Peter, who sleeps on their bed, would not settle down. He kept going to the window and crying, until they got up to investigate. And there in the beating rain was the Persian kitten. They had not heard a sound from it, and the curtains were closely drawn, but Peter knew. He was extremely pleased with himself, and attended with the greatest complacency while they took the baby in and dried it.

It was a Philadelphia cat who fetched aid for his mistress, Miss Mary H. Leopold, when she was taken suddenly ill. The only people in the house were two stories above, where the cat had never been, but when Miss Leopold said to him, "Oh, Maltie, can't you get someone to help me?" he went up there, miewed till he caught the attention of the people, and led them to his mistress.

Both cats and dogs have been known to show concern and grief over the death of an animal friend, as well as at the loss of a loved human being. Once a Brooklyn cat, just a homeless old tom, stood guard for many hours over the body of a younger cat that had been killed by an automobile and thrown to the curb [kerb]. Neither coaxing, nor threats, nor the offer of food could break his vigil, and when at last a street cleaner removed the body with a long-handled shovel he pursued the man's cart down the block until a blundering dog chased him away. I wonder what alley idyll of companionship was broken up by this tragedy.

It is motherhood that has inspired the greatest acts of devotion and courage in cats, as in other creatures, though female cats are said not to be so intelligent as the males. At a gathering of scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, May 23, 1930, Miss A. S. Firkins of Columbia University was compelled reluctantly to confess to the men who made up her audience that in a series of intelligence tests she had made with seventy-eight cats the Toms proved brighter than the Marias. Perhaps that was because the tests involved getting something to eat.

When a female cat has kittens to feed and protect she can be very brave, very cunning. There was a New York cat who when her kittens were threatened by a river-front fire carried them one by one past the flames, through the confusion of engines and hose and trampling firemen, under the spouting water, to safety. And there was a ranch cat in a far Western state who swam a river six times, six burdened journeys across wide rushing water, to carry her babies back to the home from which, for some reason mysterious to her, they had been removed. She deserved to be allowed to keep them, and she was.

There was planning required in the process by which a Long Island cat procured milk for her kittens. A farmer was puzzled to find a cat and four kittens in his barnyard every morning when he went to milk. They belonged a mile up the road, and how had the mother got them past his dog, who had a complex against cats? But the dog was not permitted in the barnyard. Once there the kittens were safe while they lapped up the warm milk the farmer gave them. The farmer's wife, being curious, stationed herself very early with a spyglass at a window commanding the house up the road. And presently she saw the regiment coming with the mother in advance like a scouting colonel; she seemed almost to hear the kittens being warned, "Take care now, wait till I see where the dog is; so, we'll skirt this field, the corn hides us; careful, I hear him barking; creep along this hedge, jump this fence and here we are."

There was a Chicago mother cat who took her blind kitten to the Association for the Blind, but I suppose we must not credit that to reason. But the Lighthouse attendants thought it very cute. They said that being a young cat she probably had not heard that kittens are born blind, and felt that she needed their help. Anyhow, she came one morning with the kitten dangling from her mouth, deposited it on the steps, watched while they picked it up, and then departed on business of her ownprobably to forage for food. In a few hours she called for the kitten and bore it away. This went on for some days, but there came a morning when she did not appear, and the Lighthouse never saw the two again.

Cats often open doors, even manage difficult latches, but I think the process by which a Connecticut cat gains entrance to the house at night is more subtle. This cat, called Fuzzy Dear, generally sleeps in, but she cannot resist a brilliant moonlight night. About four in the morning, however, she tires of prowling and wants to come in. But she does not cry at the door. She would not be heard there. Instead, she climbs a tree outside the bedroom of her master and mistress, and jumps down on a porch roof below the window. It is a tin roof that rattles even under her light weight and wakes her mistress, who goes to the window. The instant the head appears at the window Fuzzy Dear leaps down and runs to the door, where she is admitted. This surely is clear evidence that cats can not only reason from cause to effect, but they can deliberately go about producing the effect they desire.