The cat came back. We thought he was a goner.
But the cat came back. He just couldn’t stay away!
The loss of a beloved pet can be devastating, in a way that only animal lovers truly understand. The writers Peter Trachtenberg and Mary Gaitskill, once husband and wife, beautifully described the emotional impact of losing a cat, an excruciating syndrome that we term Lost Cat Stress Disorder (LCSD), which includes anxiety, depression, obsession, and reverberations to other human losses and grief. Gaitskill wrote in Granta (2009) about her cat Gattino, who never came back. Then Trachtenberg described a subsequent lost cat, Biscuit—this time with a happy ending—in Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons (2012).
But what about the cat’s perspective?
For many decades, one of the guiding principles of ethology, the biological study of animal behavior, has been that scientists must never enter into the subjective experiences of animals. In part because of the restrictive conceptual influence of behaviorism, but also because of the widespread temptation to engage in rampant anthropomorphism (attributing human motivations, willy nilly, to animals), we were enjoined to simply report what animals do, not presume what they think or feel. Of late, however, that prohibition is dying, as a relatively new discipline, cognitive ethology, gains traction, notably via experimental demonstrations of complex cognitive skills on the part of animals, capacities that cannot be explained away by recourse to reflexes, conditioning, or other assumptions of animals-as-automatons.
That is thanks largely to the writings of Donald R. Griffin, whose careful elucidation of bat sonar stands as a research milestone. His unimpeachable reputation gave legitimacy to the field he initiated with such books as The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience (1976) and Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (2001).
Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is studying the complex intellectual abilities of chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates. Irene M. Pepperberg, who teaches at Brandeis and Harvard Universities, is notable for unveiling the mental capacities of Alex, a renowned but sadly now deceased African Grey parrot. In a study just published in Current Biology, researchers in Hungary have found on comparative fMRIs that dogs and humans have similar brain responses to emotional vocal cues.
Nonetheless, serious consideration of the emotional lives of animals still lags. This despite the vigorous efforts of the ethologist and animal-rights campaigner Marc Bekoff, author of the well-known The Emotional Lives of Animals (2007).
Recently we were granted insight into what Gaitskill and Trachtenberg missed: the desperation, longing, creativity, aptitude, and drive of a cat’s own, subjectively experienced LCSD. We shall begin by describing one particular feline, because his story is both astounding and revealing, all the more so because it is not unique. It opens a window into how the human-animal bond works in both directions, confirming that animals—including but not limited to cats—are capable of complex, loving emotions, which manifest themselves notably (although not exclusively) in their persistent and often successful efforts to “come back.”
Our family has many familiars, sentient beings who have ended up on our karmic credit card—and our Visa card as well. Our human offspring having fledged, at this moment our immediate dependents include six dogs, seven cats, two horses, one goat, seven chickens, four ducks, a cockatoo, and four goldfish, split between our house in Redmond, Wash., and our winter home in Costa Rica. All 32 beings depend on us for food, water, medical care, warmth, and society. When it became obvious that keeping so many crittersw on two continents was impossible, we decided to consolidate them in Washington—all but one cat, a tabby fancied by a neighbor in Costa Rica. And therein lies this tale.
Meet Sonrisa, a skinny, mostly orange kitten, semi-forced upon us by a local veterinarian after she had failed to save the life of Aguacate, our first Costa Rican rescue cat. We were grief-stricken about Aguacate, and frankly didn’t pay much attention to the newcomer. Thinking she was female and noting her cheery disposition, we bestowed upon her the Spanish word for “smile.” We were wrong about the first part, and he now goes by Sonriso, a word that doesn’t exist. But the cat definitely does.
When we decided to simplify, we gave Sonriso to our neighbor, who lived about two miles away. She promised to keep him inside for a week and to give him a good, secure home. But she was inattentive, and the cat escaped immediately. We talked to the neighbors, we advertised on Facebook, and we offered a large reward. Nada. Sonriso had evidently vanished forever into the surrounding woods, with their complement of hungry dogs, boa constrictors, venomous snakes, ocelots, and even the occasional jaguar.
Fifteen days after he went missing, Sonriso reappeared at our Costa Rica home: skinny, torn up, and wild-eyed, but alive and well. After his return, he wouldn’t leave our side and insisted on sleeping between us. Although he was doubtless motivated by hunger, we strongly suspect (although we cannot prove) that he was more hungry … for us. In his heart, this cat was a lonely hunter—lonely for his human family. He now lives securely and happily in the Pacific Northwest.
We plead guilty to what many scientists still consider the sin of anthropomorphism: the attribution of human mental processes to “mere” animals. After all, perhaps the deepest take-home message of evolution—a message of the cross-generational genetic continuity of living things—would suggest (if not strictly mandate) a presumption of mental continuity as well. Medical research, supported by decades of success, takes it for granted that “animal models” offer valuable insight into the human condition, with respect to psychological issues no less than medical/physiological ones. Why not reverse the process and see whether we can illuminate the lives of animals by extrapolating—with care and common sense—from Homo sapiens to them?
In the mid-1950s, David’s family lived on Long Island, in Queens. They adopted a boxer dog, Bosco, from a low-life bar in northern New Jersey. Bosco escaped from his new home several times and returned to New Jersey. Did he sneak across the George Washington Bridge? Did he paw a ride?
Then there was Little Man, a solid-white horse, considerably more than 20 years old, supposedly retired. In the spring of 2010, Judith had arranged to go on a 100-kilometer horseback tour in Costa Rica. Little Man was thought to be too old for the trip, and the tour leader planned to leave him in a grassy field with other horses. But Little Man refused to be left behind and blocked the loading ramp to the truck carrying participants to the ride’s start. For the next five days, Little Man led the tour, without saddle, halter, bridle, or rider, navigating the way back to his home across beaches, rivers, and estuaries, past busy roads, and through small towns.
What inner GPS allowed Bosco, Sonriso, and Little Man to cross long distances full of dangers, and without obvious landmarks? True, birds and monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles. Salmon return from the open ocean to spawn in the same stream where they hatched. But how can animals with a heritage of five to ten thousand years of domestication navigate man-made obstacles like the George Washington Bridge? And why do they bother?
A review of the literature quickly shows that dogs haven’t published any accounts of their navigational techniques or their motivation. The searchable record for cats and horses is comparably scanty. “Publish or perish” clearly is not subject to Darwinian-selection pressures for domestic animals. But there is little human documentation of the homing instinct in domestic animals (other than in a breed of pigeons).
The homing ability of dogs is a bit less puzzling than it is for cats, since dogs are descended from wolves and thus carry an evolutionary history as long-distance-pursuit predators. Cats are derived from creatures that made their living quite differently: as ambush specialists. Not surprisingly, many people run with their dogs; with their cats, not so much.
Who would take his or her cat even five miles from home and drop it off in a strange area for scientific monitoring?
And yet Sonriso is not unique. According to the PBS Nature website Extraordinary Cats, Sooty the cat returned to his previous home, in England, after his family had moved more than 100 miles away. Pilsbury, an 8-year-old English cat, made the eight-mile journey back to his former home 40 times. But perhaps the record “incredible journey” was made by Ninja, a tomcat who moved with his owners from Utah to Washington State in 1996. He disappeared shortly after arriving in his new home, only to turn up at the old Utah address—850 miles away—a year later.
All well and good, albeit anecdotal. No double-blind controlled studies. After all, who would take his or her cat even five miles from home and drop it off in a strange area for scientific monitoring? (And how would such research ever be approved by the various ethical review boards?) Moreover, if cats and owners have a bond, the humans would not do the experiment. And absent a bond, there is nothing to test. The same is true for understanding the emotions of a horse or dog. It would be equally true for a human child: No responsible parent would turn a child loose in a strange place, sit back, and take notes. There are limits to what a strictly empirical approach can provide. Researchers cannot make definitive, empirically based statements about what animals actually feel.
That speaks to a problem with much scientific research itself: physics envy and blind adherence to statistics and degrees of proof or falsification. If it ain’t got numbers, with p less than 0.01, it ain’t got proof. No number of anecdotal n=1 stories amount to “robust” verification (or alternatively, confirmatory failure) of any hypothesis.
We are not convinced that all research must be falsifiable, nor that nothing should be considered “true” without statistics. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that certain truths are “self-evident.” Just as it is self-evident that it would be cruel to abandon a child in a strange city or woods. And we, in turn, hold this truth to be self-evident: Domestic animals can form bilateral attachments with their familiars, relationships that are often durable, intense, and reciprocal. Disorders like LCSD are not limited to people. One could measure the cortisol levels of lost cats, dogs, and horses, or other physiological parameters of stress. Ditto for controlled experiments on lost children. But like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, we “would prefer not to.” Rather, let’s acknowledge that disrupting social bonds is painful, and that we should all make efforts to reduce such suffering.
Animals can love; not only that, the objects of their love can be human beings. Animals will struggle and sometimes win, over nearly impossible odds, to reunite with their lost human families or homes. We don’t know how. But we think we know why: “We be of one blood, ye and I” was the magic incantation Mowgli learned from his animal caretakers in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. We are one.
There is no fundamental human-animal disconnect, except perhaps when it comes to French cooking, quantum mechanics, writing articles about the animal-human connection, and certain other skills. At the emotional level—that of oxytocin, mirror neurons, mommies and daddies and connection—we also be of one blood. Not only that, but we love one another; it’s a two-way street. We know it, and we would bet that most readers of this article know it—even those trained in the conceptual straitjacket that has long denied animal awareness, emotions, and cognition. Moreover, on this knowledge and this love depend not only the survival of displaced animals and their bereft families, but also that of our shared planet.
Judith Eve Lipton is a retired psychiatrist and David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Their most recent book together is Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge (Oxford, 2011). Barash’s most recent book is Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science (Oxford University Press, 2014).