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Nobody Teaches Cats How To Clean Themselves
Reflections on instinct and learned behaviour and why may need questions more than answers if we are to live together.
We have all seen cats wash themselves. They do it frequently, too. Even if they stick their heads into the empty yogurt tub and get their whiskers dirty, those whiskers won’t stay dirty for long. Cats are constant and thorough in their approach to hygiene. Nobody taught them to. In fact, some of these clean creatures have never even met their mother — or any other cat, for that matter. They still know how to clean themselves, though, and they all execute the necessary movements just as gracefully. It’s instinctive.
At the risk of disappointing the reader, it isn’t my intention to write about cats but about instinct. In contrast with cats, most of what we humans do is learned behaviour. Think about it. Pretty much every action in our day to day we’ve been taught to perform. It is the only way we can live in society, it is how we climbed to the top of the food chain (viruses allowing): by moving past our instinct and passing on our learned behaviour to our descendants.
Indeed, this is what sets us apart from animals. If we abandoned a few human babies in the wild (theoretically, dear reader, for the sake of argument, no…