“_But when she came back the dog was laughing._”
Counterbalancing the rudimentary powers of æsthetic pleasure in the
cat, we find in the dog a more facile intelligence, and a far more
adaptable nature. Some boast that they have taught tricks to a cat;
but the fact shows not so much that the cat was intelligent and docile
as that its owners were; for their ability has been usually to seize
on some natural movement of the cat, in jumping or in sitting up, and
gradually to induce the animal to exaggerate it. But the tricks we
teach a dog are against his nature, and it needs not only intelligence
but docility to take a savoury bite and abstain from swallowing until
the precisely right word is pronounced.
A cat walks about with a great purpose dimly imagined in its brain, but
a dog plans; he is “the low man adding one to one,” but his sums are
the most correct, for he is of a practical nature. He does not have to
pretend that a stick is alive before he can glean pleasure from playing
with it.
How far a dog, or indeed how far any animal is capable of using an
instrument for effecting its purposes is an undecided question; but
I have heard on near authority of a dog scraping a mat up against a
swing door through which he had to pass so that the door was kept
open. To use an instrument involves a complicated mental process, in
which not only association but reflection on the nature of the thing
is required. Taffy associated his muzzle with his walk, and fetched it
with pleasure when the association was established; but reflection did
not sufficiently come into the process to prevent him from fetching a
clothes brush or a Bible instead if convenient.
One clear point of superiority in the dog is his rudimentary sense
of humour. Almost any good-tempered dog, when well treated, will try
from time to time to laugh off a scolding. If he is encouraged, the
fooling is repeated again and again with growing exaggeration as he
rolls over with wide mouth and absurd contortions, or flies at one’s
face to lick it. He appreciates humour in others at his own expense, a
thing which not every human being is capable of doing; if he is teased
laughingly, he too will play the fool; if he is teased cruelly he is
cross or wretched. No dog likes one to blow in his face or ear, but
Taffy, though not wholly good-tempered, will allow the bellows to be
placed even in his mouth if he is assured that it is a game. When the
puff of air comes he darts up, jumps at and licks the person who is
teasing him, and barks with a wagging tail. If he is really bored or
tired he licks the nozzle of the bellows, or the hand that holds them,
deprecatingly; he declines the game, but in perfect good humour.
Now a cat has no sense of humour at all. Its very comedies are serious;
and to tease it is to outrage its dignity. The better bred a cat is
the more easily it takes offence. But after all the “sense of the
ridiculous” is a gross quality, and the humour of one age or of one
class seems vulgarity to another a little in advance. A cat is never
vulgar.