modeled behavior

When my cat Toby loses himself in a cloth ball laced with catnip, I wonder if, in fact, he has lost himself.  That which defines his kind among kinds.

In fact, I wonder about my own complicity in altering my cat’s natural programming, his internal software (so to speak).  You can pluck a cat’s whiskers (if you don’t mind a good bloodletting), shave his tail or coat of fur.  But if you take away some part of his instincts, like curiosity, constant grooming or stalking prey…is he even a cat?

Toby is homebound and, as such, denied the opportunity to be outside where he can hunt something more sporting than squeaking plastic hamburgers and ping-pong balls.  Ours is an old house with a basement and dirt crawlspace.  A door in kitchen lets onto the basement landing and a flight of steps.  I let Toby down there, on occasion, for critter-control.  It lets him flex his curiosity while giving him real paws-on experience stalking the crawlspace.

More than once he has brought the body of a mouse upstairs and deposited it on the kitchen floor.  Interestingly, each time he has done that, said body of mouse has returned from the throes of death and scampered back down the basement steps with Toby in tow. 

No doubt I am guilty of not providing the little guy with the proper modelling to effectively kill his prey.   

Furthermore, I have observed Toby hesitate more than once when the reanimated mouse lost its bearings and tried to exit the kitchen into the dining room.  On those occasions, rather than pick the mouse up again with his teeth, Toby has corralled—perhaps herded is a better word—it, with the finesse of a diminutive border collie, back into the basement domain.  Strange.

I hear a similar assessment from my friend John while he and Telly are visiting to try out my new find: fermented coffee. 

It went like, “Strange.”  John cants his head while he stares at the brew in his cup.

“Fermented coffee is just like regular coffee,” I tell him.  “Only better.”

“No.  Your cat not acting like a cat,” he says.  “That is strange.”

Telly waves the aromatic steam from his coffee into his ninety-two-year-old nostrils.  “It is peculiar.”

“Please don’t mistake this coffee for the fermented coffee of old.”

“Your cat,” Telly clarifies.  “How many times has he brought up a mouse from downstairs.”

“I don’t know.  Ten.  Fifteen times.”

“And it never occurred to you to call pest control?”

“Never.  That’s poisonous and expensive.  Plus, my live-in exterminator’s services are free.”

John smiles.  “You know, you do get what you pay for.”  He waits for me to frown and then he smiles. 

“Well, fermented coffee is a little more expensive.  But it has a much richer taste and it’s gentler on the stomach.  Maybe because it’s already partially digested.”

“What?”  John stops Telly’s hand from waving in the steam from his cup.  “Are you serving us repurposed coffee?”

“No, relax.  Years ago, before science intervened, the beans for this kind of coffee were fermented by cats.  The beans were ingested by a civet, which a type of cat.  The beans went through the cat’s digestive system where they were fermented, exited the other end, and were collected by humans who then used the beans to make a smoother fuller-bodied coffee.”

“You’re kidding,” John all but asks me to say as he lowers his cup.

“Relax,” I tell him.  “Nowadays, the beans are processed, naturally, in a lab.  No cats involved.”

Telly takes his first sip.  “I like it.  I can’t tell the difference between this and the coffee of old, as you put it.”

“Wait,” John says.  “You have had this….cat-crap coffee before.”

“Yes, sir.  When I was a buyer for fine rugs, I made numerous trips to India where I enjoyed the cat’s blend.  But Loch is wrong about one point.  The cat’s way is the natural way.  Not your fancy lab.”

“Would you rather drink something you knew was fermented in a civet’s bowels?” I ask him.

Telly shakes his head.  “I’m not being critical.  I like to keep my coffee and cats separate, thank-you-very-much.  Which is why I’m picking the yellow hair out of my coffee now.  I’m just pointing out the error in your claim of more-natural.”

Enter one live-in cat with mouse in mouth.

“Look what the cat brought in,” John says.

Toby drops the mouse and stands there as one waiting for applause.  The mouse lays still, as a dead mouse should, and then he opens one eye.

“He’s faking it,” Telly says.  “That mouse is playing possum.”

I shake my head.  “Mice don’t play possum.”

“If a cat can play border collie, a mouse can play possum.”

I tell him, “If you are right, I’m sure the mouse is just hoping Toby will think his job is done and walk away.”

Without thinking about it, I stand up and remove a small bag from the top of the fridge.  I shake out a few treats and give them to Toby as payment for his services.  Toby then nudges the mouse to stand up, and the two of them head for the basement door.

“Hold it right there!” Telly demands.  John’s frozen arm causes coffee to slosh onto his shirt.  I’m frozen with one finger still in the treat bag.  And the cat and mouse trying to leave us freeze in the doorway.  Telly stands and approaches the basement door.  “I have an idea,” he says under a wrinkled brow.   

Telly removes a bottle of White-Out from his pants pocket.

“Why are you carrying around a bottle of White-Out?”

“Because I might have an idea.”  He leans over the rodent, puts a drop of the white liquid on its head and gently blows, causing the white dot to dry at once.  It is one of the more surreal moments I have seen Telly have with a rodent.  When I take a step forward, the moment crashes and the mouse flies out the door and into the basement.  Telly and Toby look at me as though I am guilty of some infraction of natural law.

“So, what was that all about?” I ask him.

“I don’t think Toby has brought you fifteen mice from the basement.  I think he has brought you the same mouse fifteen times.”

I laugh.  “Telly, that is ridiculous.  Toby just doesn’t know how to finish the job.”

“He certainly knows how to get his treats,” John says.

We sit down again with our coffees and Telly asks me, “Have you tried to solve your mouse problem by any other method?”

“Actually, I have.  I bought one of those humane mouse traps a few months ago.  Within twenty-four hours, we had a mouse.”

“We?” Telly repeats after me.

John asks me what I did with the mouse.

“I kept it in the see-through plastic trap box a few days while I figured out what to do about it.”

John has a face of disgust.  “Didn’t it start to stink after the first day?”

“Humane trap,” I repeat myself.  “The mouse wasn’t dead.  I gave it food and water.  And a washcloth for a bed.  I think it was quite educational for Toby to study his number one prey up close.”

“Unbelievable.”  John now has a different face of disgust.  “And what did you do with it.”

“We let it go in the back yard.”

Like a Greek chorus, John and Telly say in unison, “You let it go in the back yard.”

“I wasn’t going to let it go in the house.”

“You might as well have,” Telly says.  “Toby!” he calls out, causing more coffee to leap out of John’s cup and onto his shirt.  “Bring me a mouse.”

At once, the cat disappears into the basement.  This is followed by scampering, feral meowing, and a natural squeaky-toy sound.  Moments later, Toby returns to the kitchen and deposits his latest catch onto the linoleum floor.  “Emm hm,” Telly intones.  “I see something.”  

We all see it. 

A white dot. 

On the head of the mouse with one eye peeping open.

“And what does that prove?” I ask.

Two men, a cat and one peeping rodent each look at me with worn patience.  “Killer here has a friend.”

John laughs so hard, he douses himself with the rest of his coffee.  “Crap!” he says.

“Cat-crap,” I correct him.  “Here, I’ll get you some more,” I say, giving myself an excuse to step away from the table and distance myself from the expressions of scorn and disbelief.

“In just a few months,” John says, “your modeled behavior has undone thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution.  The killer instinct is part of what makes a cat a cat.”

And here, John voices my very concerns.  With my back to the table, I consider that I have unwittingly done my furry friend a grave disservice.  I mean, he still looks like a cat.  He walks the cat-walk and he still meows like nobody’s business.  But is he still running the original CAT 1.0 of his saber tooth forefather?   

Their little secret now out of the basement, Toby and the dotted one drop their cat-and-mouse charade.  The mouse climbs onto Toby’s back and Toby hops them up to the counter.  We watch each other as I prepare another cup of coffee.

I take the fresh coffee back to the table and tell John to pace himself and not pour the whole cup on himself at one time.

“Is it so wrong to find a friend where you least expect it?” I ask, nodding my head toward the counter where some serious grooming is in progress.   

“Evolution,” John says again.  “How much cat do you think is still left under the coat?”

Looking for a defense, I seize on what I have at hand. 

“What about the coffee connoisseur who walks diligently behind a cat and collects its poop with the intention of brewing it?  How much of the connoisseur is left of that person if he discovers a way to harvest the same fermented beans in the steel and glass bowels of a lab?  Isn’t that an evolution of sorts?  Doesn’t that make him smarter and less likely to gross out his guests when he explains what they are drinking?”

John finally gets his cup as close as his mouth and takes his first sip.  “Hold on.  That IS good.”

“Told you.”

“As for Toby,” Telly says, bringing us back to the cat in the story.  “I don’t know that you can undo Mother Nature.  Killer instincts are still part of what makes a cat a cat.  You can’t eradicate centuries of development in a few months.  But…”  His brow begins to wrinkle, and I suspect a thought brewing.  I wait for the bottle of White-Out to appear.  “Maybe you can add to them.”

“That’s still undermining evolution,” John says.

“I’m not talking about making all cats and mice across the board friendly toward each other.  That would be as unnatural as both sides of the house and senate working together.  But maybe one can rise above their instincts…to be better than their kind.”

“How in the world?” John asks.

“Maybe by spending a little safe time with the enemy, in a humane box, of course.  Like our cat and mouse, after someone,” he pauses the hopeful thought to glare at me, “modeled a little unnatural behavior.”

“I like that,” I say.  “Being better than his kind.”

Telly puts his hand over John’s cup before laughing hard.  “Please do not think I’m giving you full credit for the new-and-improved Toby.  You simply gave him a learning opportunity.  In the end, whether he is posing for the camera with his latest kill, or making faces with you for a selfie, he has to be true to himself.  And if selfies make for a better life, he will pass that along to next generation.  That,” he says to John, “is your evolution.”

A family portrait.