How to tame a pack of peckish wolves with a fistful of dog treats
Just as it’s impossible to support both arsenal and spurs, or to like both Pink Floyd and rap music, you have to be either a cat person or a dog lover. You can’t be both.
You might like both animals. You may well own both — I did, until my family’s adored miniature pinscher turned up his paws aged 15 last year.
But you must have a favourite and, on Cats v Dogs: Which Is Best? (BBC2), presenters Chris Packham and Liz Bonnin inadvertently devised a test to prove your allegiance.
Chris, while arguing that dogs have superior intelligence and agility, walked into an enclosure with wild grey wolves, armed only with a handful of doggy treats. as he clutched them in his fist, the pack’s shaggy alpha male sauntered over to investigate, and started prising the nibbles from Chris’s fingers.
Liz, who had been asserting that cats are champions by dint of their super-senses, was introduced to an arabian wildcat, which hissed jets of compressed rage at her. this animal is the forefather of all our domestic moggies, and looks little different . . . except for the flecks of psychotic anger about the whiskers.
Here’s the unspoken test: which presenter do you envy? any cat fan would, like Liz, be fascinated by that ancestral feline beauty, but I admit I drew back slightly from the television when it bared its fangs.
the wolves, on the other hand, were irresistibly magnificent. Yes, they could take your arm off with one snap of their jaws, but I felt instinctively that, given a fistful of Bonios, I could trust them not to eat me. Case closed: I am a dog person.
that is hardly scientific, but the problem for this show is that science hasn’t worked out how to test animal intelligence effectively.
We visited a place called the Clever Dog Laboratory in Vienna, where a husky called Luna demonstrated a rudimentary ability to recognise number patterns — but really, she was just a bright dog doing tricks.
the show tried to set up a similar counting test with a cat called Pixie, but Pixie was having none of it. Cats don’t do tricks. It’s beneath their dignity.
Liz tried to claim that Pixie had a low boredom threshold but, as any student knows, that’s a poor excuse for flunking a test.
there were moments to make us marvel, like the cat who could do the three-card-trick, or the sniffer dog who tracked Chris through the crowded streets of Manchester — not losing the scent even when it led through a food market filled with the smells of raw meat and frying onions.
In the end, though, all this showed was the limitations of science. Whether you prefer cats or dogs, that’ s an instinctive and emotional choice, and no battery of experiments can change it.
Dr David Eagleman tried to use science to define human consciousness on The Brain (BBC4), and ended up with a muddle of useless, vague metaphors.
‘Consciousness is not the captain of the ship; in truth, it’s nothing more than a stowaway,’ he said. What on earth is that supposed to mean? Dr David is american, and speaks with the peculiar inflections of a computerised voice programme. He talks about ‘cawfee cups’ and uses baseball analogies.
He also argues that we are all effectively robots, incapable of free will or independent decisions, so he won’t be offended when I say I find him insanely irritating. I’m not being rude — it’s just the way I’m programmed. Most of the show consisted of blurred shots of traffic tail-lights and twinkling cityscapes. But in one 30- second burst, Dr David let slip three interesting facts.
One, if you’re holding a warm ‘cawfee cup’, you’ll speak more fondly about your mother. two, a bottle of hand sanitiser makes you feel more politically conservative. three, foul smells provoke us into harsher moral decisions.
None of these ideas was explored. Is it really true, for instance, that the Republicans could swing this year’s u.s. election by sneaking disinfectant dispensers i nto polling booths?
science doesn’t know the answer to that, of course. What a surprise — or, as they say in the states: ‘Dog my cats!’