Back last winter, Deborah Webster, of Meadowbrook, NSW, Australia grew concerned about the way many scientists seemed to feel about the animals they studied — as “stimulus-response-driven robots incapable of thought or feeling” — so she wrote New Scientist with a suggestion: “Every scientist working in the field should be given a cat.”
That would be for training purposes. Then, when fully trained in such matters as opening and closing doors, choosing the right cat food and providing a comfortable lap to sit on, the scientist could return to his laboratory with an enhanced understanding of his subject.
Moz says:
Interesting that she should suggest an introduced pest species as the preferred pet. I wonder whether she’s trying to help “the scientists” (that nebulous group of unemotional other) develop empathy; or show them how irritating pets are so they are more inclined to perform experiments that result in the death of great numbers of feral pests. I’m also curious as to what she thinks would happen to the pests after the experiment was over, as presumably they would either return to the lab or be disposed of.
October 1, 2009, 2:30 amLee Gold says:
A clear case of Feline Fixation: a dog might be just as useful. A good dog could train the scientist to throw balls, buy proper dog food, share acceptable table scraps, and learn to enjoy having his face washed.
October 2, 2009, 12:32 amJeff says:
I just got two. Pictures here: http://jeffcrook.blogspot.com/2009/09/behold-week-of-cats.html
Then again, I’m not a scientist.
October 2, 2009, 8:14 amPaul Camp says:
Scientists can’t handle cats, because Nature is sane.
October 3, 2009, 10:41 pmPatricia says:
No matter how long one co-exists with a domestic cat, one will never come to have a greater understanding of it.
I have come to accept this.
I have to go, my cat wants to eat food now.
October 4, 2009, 10:11 pmotakucode says:
Wow, it’s as if the Enlightenment never happened. It’s as if the whole field of rational thought is still back sitting in the time before Aristotle. She believes that scientists should chuck their objectivity and instead get cats so that they will be persuaded by their biased, fallible, and almost-always-wrong intuition to ruin their science. Yeah, how about we don’t do that? She can move out into the wilderness and worship the winds and the stars and make believe that every tree is singing her a love song in the breeze, while we’ll stay here in modern society, wherever everything of value was created specifically by people refusing to give in to these stupid impressions and gut urges human intuition throws in the way of reason.
There is no reason I know of why human intuition, as an evolutionary tool to enhance the survival of the human species or individuals of it, would evolve to have an implicit understanding of the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent property of a massively interconnected neural network. We know very little about it, but know enough that we cannot say for sure whether or not animals have any form of consciousness of the kind we enjoy. We have significant evidence to suggest they do not, given that even a small reduction in brain capacity in humans results in drastically reduced capabilities, but it is remotely possible that consciousness is a more simple property than we currently guess it might be. But to suggest someone should get a cat, and then indulge in the rationally invalid practice of anthropomorphization, assuming complex and sentient behavior when much simpler models could completely explain everything… you’d have to put forward a much better argument than “I want them to be nicer, and I think this might make them nicer”.
March 5, 2010, 11:55 amthe blog team says:
otakucode, Perhaps you should spend more time at I Can Has Cheezburger. Then look up “irony.”
March 5, 2010, 9:45 pmChurchHatesTucker says:
LOLHUMANZ!
March 7, 2010, 9:01 pm