Dear George,
This evening I brought home a frog from the garden and placed it in my waterbowl in the kitchen where it swam about most charmingly and gazed up at me out of the water. I was admiring it and experimenting with tapping it lightly on the head when to my amazement my human swooped down and covered the bowl up and took it out to the garden and emptied it. Can you explain why? Does this indicate she has some serious character flaw or just very low intelligence?
Yours mystified,
Chubby (Fluffums D'Wuffums)
Dear Chubby,
Humans don't get hunting. They have the predatory instinct but it is in a very warped and dysfunctional form. For a start, we are proper carnivores-only and they are omnivores. Like chimpanzees they eat fruit and veg as well as meat. We are designed for a meat-only diet. So our hunting instinct is intact, irresistable and highly efficient. Mice, rabbits, frogs... whatever, we hunt it.
Humans used to hunt but nowadays, instead, they shop. Shopping is the new hunting. It's really bad for them - sitting at a desk and ordering stuff online. Even before the net, they only walked a few yards from shop to shop. They ought to be out there slaughtering mammoths.
Of course, your human is of very low intelligence. They all are. No doubt you love her, and you want to think that she understands everything you say, but frankly she (and they) don't. They are dumb animals given to meaningless vocalising Blah blah blah. So it isn't a character flaw in her that she didn't understand the frog. It's just lack of mind. (For the zoologists among us cats, it's been proved that humans don't have theory of mind. Extensive tests with tail and ear movements have failed to show that they can really understand what we feel.)
So frogs... A sensible human would have taken it out of the bowl and eaten it with garlic as French humans do. Your human took it away and let it go. If she'd been a cat, she'd have let it go in order to have the pleasure of catching it again. But being human, she didn't. She did the first half of the sequence and then, in her mindless human way, forgot the second half. They can't concentrate on anything more than a few minutes, Chubby.
If you keep on bringing in frogs, you MIGHT be able to train her to leave them in the bowl but I doubt it. Just accept the things you cannot change - human limitations.
George
