May 31, 2004

Of cats and goldfish

Cerafin having taken his cat back, I am now catless.* This means uninterrupted nights, a nice-smelling apartment, chair legs and sofas that are safe from scratching, and no pooh to clean.

But I miss him and his cuddliness. And no matter what the rightful owner might say, I am sure he was happier with me. It does not mean though that he's unhappy now. It depends on his memory span. If he can no longer remember my place, then he's happy. Someone told me that dogs have a two-year memory span. That means my dog will have forgotten me by the time I go back to Mauritius.

But the goldfish beats all records. They have a memory span of 30 seconds. That's why they don't mind a bowl, because after 30 seconds, when they touch the bowl's glass wall, they think: "Hmmm, interesting new territory, let's explore!" A new take on "Live life for the present moment"!

*Incidentally, "catless" is also a term used to describe a meat patty in Mauritius. Very tasty, nothing to do with cats.

Posted by Val

1 comment:

Cash Johnny said...

Right, referring to the *, I'm glad I've taken him back on time!! :P

But seriously, I've seen many TV programs about reseach on animal education and on their mental abilities, as well as I read quite some stuff on the subject (that was in the time period when I was very upset that only birds can reproduce all human sounds and actually speak, and other animals can't, and how I can improove their 'vivid' communication skills to make men understand them more easily). So, I've learned that in all the researches the result depends only on what the researcher wants to proove or disproove setting up relative experiments.

Hence, it was prooven many times that most mammals have an at least eqal memory abilities as men when it comes to any details of their surroundings. Meaning - smells, sounds, actions, settings, pictures, people and even emotions towards all of the latter. Moreover, their men-comprehencive communication skills depend fully on their will to use them in relation to the researcher and the result of going through the effort - treat in foods (most of the time) or in moking the researcher in front of his/her colleagues!!

It was also prooven many times that the same mammals (sometimes the same exact animal!!) have no capacity of remembering what-so-ever, with zero communication skills and, of course(!) no avilit of reasoning at all! (a case that comes to mind is about a few gorrillas that were studied by two different groups of researchers in the states from 1970s to 1980s who performed very similar tests and got opposite results!! In fact, the first group who prooved that those garrilas had some kind of intelligence in the 70s repeated the tests again on same animals in late 80s after letting the second group perform their study (with opposite results) and without any new training or even retraing to recall the 80 or so verbal and imagewise communication sings with orders to perform fairly complex tasks and a report of how the gorilla felt about it and wanted to do it again or what did it want as a treat and whom from the group did it most like to work with, got the same score exactly as 10 years before that! (Similar tests were performed on other animals as well)

So judge for yourself about animal's memory span, their ability of reasoning and having feelings, wishes and communication skills!

June 01, 2004

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