What is it about something that makes it what it is to us? Sounds like a rather odd question to ask but my recent experience with my affectionate yet incredibly obtuse “cat” (using the term loosely in this case) brought this deep philosophical question to light.
Humphrey is a very devoted creature, but not to his family. He is in love with a toy mouse. The mouse in question is a very cheap, orange mouse that came from a pack of mice that cost like $2 (he does own more expensive toys which he scrupulously ignores). He loves to fetch this particular mouse, and then bring it back to us so that we can throw it for him again and again (hence his feline identity confusion). He fetched this mouse so often, it fell to pieces in front of his sad little eyes. We were forced to abduct the mouse away from Humphrey in order to save its remains, and what ensued for the next week was the most emotional crying and caterwauling in the history of feline kind. We tried to introduce him to other mice, but he wouldn’t even touch any other toys. There was something special about that specific mouse and the material it was made out of.
We felt bad that he had lost his best friend, so we did the only thing possible for a family of engineers. We took the remains apart and cut up the string that wrapped around it to make new mice. What proceeded was the reanimation of the mob of Franken-mice. We experimented with creating several other mice assembled from a piece of string from the original mouse interwoven with new string around new mouse bodies. Some of these mice were rejected by our fickle feline, but a select chosen few survived the selection process and will be retrieved when thrown. Interestingly, these elite Franken-mice differ greatly from each other and yet they have been clearly deemed as the reincarnation of Humphrey’s original beloved mouse.
In his small “cat” brain (both cells of it), Humphrey clearly has some schema, which we will never discern, that defines the core essence of his original mouse so that he can distinguish it from all the others with all the same characteristics and even the same exact string from the original. It makes you wonder, where else in life do we do the same thing (the holey remnants of a favorite shirt, the photo from your favorite vacation spot, the last hug of a lost relative)?
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| Humphrey and His Mice |
My dog is the same way with her favorite toy. She has a stuffed lamb toy that she loves, but she has also ripped it to pieces... multiple times. My mom and I have tried to sew it up every time we see stuffing all over the floor, but it got to a point where the lamb was unable to be saved, and Fiona (my dog) was devastated. She didn't want to play with another toy for a whole week, until we bought a new stuffed lamb that looked exactly like her beloved toy. Your question really made me think about what makes something special to us... it's really interesting because I feel like sometimes, the person (or animal!) themselves might not even be sure what it is.
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