dogs, cats, animals, and “personhood”…

shelby and maddy, fort collins apartment

at some point these cats stopped being cats and became people…

when I was a sophomore I took a metaphysics class in philosophy and my professor, Dr. Dallas Willard of USC, challenged us one day to define what a person was, what constituted a person, a human being. the topic under discussion was identity, and he was making the point that evolved society over the years has had politicized moving targets that legally defined what it meant to be a person at all. the most obvious example of this moving target continues to be the abortion issue. at what point does an embryo become a person and thereby earn the legal protections that come with that categorization? the pro-lifers continue to insist it’s at the point of conception. the pro-choicers continue to insist that personhood isn’t bestowed upon the individual until they are born. Dallas Willard posited the possibility that actual personhood doesn’t occur ’til you’re about maybe 5 or 6, or possibly even older, his reasoning being based on how we define what a person is. of course it’s a question we all take for granted, and possibly we’re the better for it, what with our busy schedules and people waiting to take our coffee and lunch orders. but what makes a person a person?

blue, fort collins apartment

naturally the discussion got the class all heated up, which I guess was also part of the point from a teacher’s POV, and we endeavored over the course of a couple of hours to try to define what personhood meant. long story short, it largely came down to when the being in question was capable of 1. self-awareness, 2. engagement with others (family) in a largely intuitive relationship, and 3. communicating and acting on self-interest. of course this led to all kinds of shouting and arguing over defining each of these points…philosophy classes can either be incredibly fun and exhilarating or crushingly tedious to the point of wanting to kill yourself. but anyway.

madison (maddy), fort collins apartment

I remember one spring I had gone to CA from CO to visit some friends and go to a wedding and then go backpacking in joshua tree, and one of the friends happened to have recently adopted a cat, a little tortoise shell boy, and I got to really enjoying playing with this cat I didn’t know but who I came to know over the course of 24 hours and whose memory once I got to joshua tree and inside a tent by myself in the middle of the night to miss very much and as a result made me bug out of joshua tree at like 5 in the AM in the dark with a flashlight over a compass following a bearing to try to find my car with pretty much no sleep so that I could hit the road that much sooner in order to get back home to my own cats and wife Lauren, that when I finally got back home and saw our cats, I was shocked to realize that, oh my god, they’re actually cats(!) because I had gotten so used to not thinking of them as cats but as people, as our babies, as friends, and the experience of befriending a stranger cat, my friend’s cat, something I hadn’t done in a long time, on the trip had reminded me that, oh yeah, our guys really are cats, too.

shelby, fort collins apartment

the point I’m trying to make here is that, yeah, I think cats, dogs, horses, captive wild animals like dolphins and seals and orcas and elephants, pretty much any mammal that for better or for worse establishes a human-animal bond or at the very least a relationship of some kind based on hopefully some measure of respect and kindness, eventually wins or earns some real measure of all 3 of the prerequisites we managed to identify in Dr. Willard’s class that day like a hundred and fifty years ago back in los angeles. and in the case of the cats who happen to be members of our tribe, Lauren’s and mines, I know for a fact that they meet all three quite readily on pretty much a minute-by-minute basis, for which we’re constantly grateful. because they remind us they’re more than just cats, to us. they’re people, persons, with all manner of what we ascribe as worthy of protecting and honoring and respecting and loving and all that good and gooey stuff. hell, they’re more people-ish than most of the assholes we read about in the news every day. fuck lindsey lohan if she can’t get her shit together.