No Organized Cat Religion

"Last summer, scientists figured out how cats long ago in the course of evolution lost the ability to detect sweetness. Dogs can taste sweet things, as can many other mammals, like rodents. But neither alley cats nor lions have a sweet tooth. They do have sweet receptors. But sometime after cats and dogs diverged, a gene was turned off in cats, so that they no longer make one of the proteins necessary for the receptors to work.

This may be why they seem so independent. The desire for sweets can certainly make people do foolish things.

Humor genes could have been lost. Or, the capacity for humor may not have evolved in animals like dogs and primates until long after they diverged from cats. But this was not the reason I decided to tackle the cat/humor issue again. A colleague and friend who had a dry, slightly wicked sense of humor and who loved and identified with his cats — he was known to meow on occasion — died unexpectedly. I thought, how could he have been enamored of an animal that does not have a sense of humor?

So I began to rethink the issue, and I have concluded that I may have actually been thinking about laughter rather than humor.

Laughter is not always about what’s funny, as Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has studied laughter, has noted in books and articles. It is frequently a social behavior unrelated to jokes or wit. It can serve different purposes. It can be friendly or submissive, hostile or dominant. Witness the old distinction between laughing with and laughing at someone.

This makes sense when you think that some of the people who laugh all the time are actually not funny, or even appreciative of a good joke. They just laugh to punctuate conversation, or sometimes to seem unthreatening. Or threatening — I know those people, too.

Perhaps, I thought, this is what dogs and other social creatures have, not a sense of humor, but an “I’m just happy to be part of the pack/team/company” sense of laughter. You know when your dog lies on its back, looking goofy, with the tongue falling out one side of its mouth? Just think of that as laughing.

Dogs amuse us. Cats, I suspect, amuse themselves, as a creature unconcerned about its place in the corporation might well do. With a mouse, or a ball of yarn, a cat may play and be amused, whether we are watching or not.

Obviously, this can be solved only by mining the genomes of dogs, cats and people. Most of the detailed DNA research on humor so far has to do with the aqueous humor or the vitreous humor. Those are in the eye and, from my brief survey of the literature, are not at all funny.

There is, of course, a school of thought that a sense of humor in humans is not genetic, but depends on one’s upbringing. This may be true within species, but I’m thinking it doesn’t apply in cross-species studies. However, if cats or dogs have a true capacity for humor, as opposed to some version of social laughing, they may well acquire their taste in humor from their owners.

So, I’m now prepared to acknowledge that some cats may have a sense of humor. Very dry and slightly wicked, I’ll bet."

~ JAMES GORMAN, NY Times