Debate: Cats vs Dogs, with Will Self and John Gray

uh hello i'm hannah k and welcome to this intelligent square debate cats versus dogs now this event has been a long time in the making because although i always knew that will self was my dog man and i've always found him quite obedient i didn't have someone with the intellectual heft to defend cats until a few weeks ago when penguin press flagged up to me this wonderful new book feline philosophy by john gray there's absolutely no doubt about john's intellectual abilities so we had a debate and i'm so happy it's happening tonight now you can get a discounted copy of feline philosophy if you click through the link that we're going to be posting in a minute in the audience chat there are various ways in which you can get engaged tonight of course you can vote at the beginning and then again at the end of the debate you can ask questions join in the audience chat and tweet using the hashtag iq2 we've got two events coming up next week we have the psychologist and broadcaster claudia hammond and she's going to be talking about the art of rest something that i think most of us need to hear at the end of this tumultuous year and then very excitingly we have daniel goldman he's the author of the massive bestseller emotional intelligence which is celebrating its 25th anniversary and goldman's talk for us in 2013 has generated over 3 million youtube views so this really isn't one to miss finally if you're stuck for a christmas present for someone who's perhaps a bit bored in lockdown you might want to think about one of our gift subscriptions or one of our gift cards which can be used in exchange for our events master classes and courses now finally i'm going to hand over to our chair she is a cultural historian and broadcaster shahid abari thank you thank you hannah hello and welcome to this intelligent squared online debate cats versus dogs it's the issue that's more divisive than brexit more polarizing than politics uh in today's debate we'll be fighting like yes cats and dogs in the battle of a household pet who will triumph fido or felix we'll find out over the course of the next hour first of all though let's find out what you think as we take our starting vote you should be able to see a slide appearing on your screen right now inviting you to vote in this and let me not understate the case the single most important referendum in recent memory uh so please vote cats or dogs and if you are unsure or perhaps prefer a hamster you can opt to vote undecided i'll give you a moment to do that this is of course our first vote and we'll compare the results of this vote against the final vote at the end of the debate to see if our debaters have got under your skin and while we wait for these results to be calculated let me tell you about a theme cats versus dogs it's a rather broad one so who knows how our debaters will take it will they make the case for the superiority of one species over another in any number of ways are cats more beautiful our dogs more intelligent should a cat or dog be the next bond just before i hand over to them let me explain how this evening will work in a moment our two debaters will make their opening speeches then you'll have a chance to interrogate them too with your questions and at 6 55 london time approximately 50 minutes time the speakers will make their short closing statement and then i'll invite you our audience to cast your final vote uh the result of which will declare at 7pm i do feel free to start posing your questions now you can simply type your question in the box under your screen and if you don't wish to be named then you can click on anonymous and don't forget to press send a reminder to you that you can also tweet as we go along using the hashtag iq2 now let me share the result of the vote from a moment ago and i can reveal that uh the vote has come back as 34 for cats and 48 for dogs with an undecided or for hamster vote 17 so that's a a fairly decisive win for the dogs um but let's see if uh john can make a difference to the standings um right now so um let me tell you about our speakers speaking up for dogs we have the novelist broadcaster and commentator will self he's the writer of the recent trilogy umbrella shark and phone and a memoir titled will in 2019. he's also the writer of an infamous lrb article where his dog discovered a lurid sex toy while being walked on clapham common if i recall will so i think he'll have lots to say and then speaking up for cats one of our most popular political philosophers john gray john's books includes draw dogs the silence of animals and seven types of atheism and his latest book as hannah described feline philosophy cats and the meaning of life has been called by the observer the intellectual cat's pajamas now will and john will have 10 minutes if either of you run over you'll hear hear a pertinent sound encouraging you to rapidly pararate um so let's start let's hand over first of all to will on behalf of dogs thank you shahida um i e 17 is a lot to play for undecided and and with 48 you might think i'm well ahead of john here and that you know it behooves me with my kind of dog-ish nature to give ground immediately you know i'm strongly invested in a fight flight mechanism and i already feel myself retreating here uh you know and what i want to say at the outset is i bear no animosity towards the cat fraternity at all to humans who who favor cats or to cats who favor humans or any of that i don't really want this to be a kind of and i think the the the idiom is appropriate a pitting contest of any kind at all uh to be blunt i i consider john a dear and and our old friend now we've known each other for we first met nearly 20 years ago and i am a great admirer of his work not least this book which i i think is utterly stimulating and a delight to read and moreover you know i've had i've i've lived with cats myself and and and been very close to them so i i'm really just not interested in going in that direction nor may i say am i interested in what we might call the anthropomorphic direction which is to take the question from solely the point of view of the human being and talk within that experience of uh you know i think we need to talk in terms of uh of what jacob von weckscool the great founder of animal mythology called the life world the lebensvelt of the creature and and not prejudice uh the view for example with our human capabilities of investing just about anything in our environment with the possibility of being sentient the way we are you know i think of of um i'm waving an ancient hand axe in front of the camera because i think if i wave you know if this hand acts sort of noses into the camera view and then nose is out again and then comes back and perhaps it nuzzles against my face people out there are going to start thinking it's sentient that it has a form of of consciousness and that they could probably start trying to predict where it's coming from because that's what humans do you don't need to be a disciple of simon baron cohen and his views about theory of mind in autists not to understand that we we will do this willy-nilly we will anthropomorphize and we will project onto anything in our environment the possibility of sentience so i don't really want to go down that route either i don't want to kind of as i say indulge in a pissing contest but if john is going to try any sort of speciesism of any kind at all including any arguments that strongly favor cats over dogs i i would have to rub his nose in it like a naughty philosophic puppy because the fact of the matter is he himself argues very strongly against even the concept of species certainly when it applies to humans and i i don't see why uh cats should be or dogs should be exempt for this either it's the very poorest barrier of the species barrier so you know we don't want to commit the sin the dual sin of speciesism and anthropocentrism so we're not we're not going to go there all right i am not strictly speaking i have to say a dog lover at all uh lots of dogs i i really don't like i don't want to go anywhere what i am is a uh my dog lover and he's actually curled up on the bed right behind me and it puts me in my conversation i had quite recently with a man called stephen whittle who founded the pressure group press for change that fought long and hard to get transgender people recognized uh in britain legally as the the gender they wished to be and i i had dinner with stephen i did a book with him back in the 1990s when i was interested in transgender and we talked a lot about those issues of you know what we think we are and i had dinner with him two or three years ago and he said i no longer think in in gender terms at all i think of myself as a stephen primarily that's who i am uh and so i'm a maglorian lover in the same team my my dog is called mcglorion he was named by my third son after magorian a centaur in the in the magic forest next to hogwarts yes i have suffered for jk rowling's many millions um he thought that was too gory so he called the dog mcglorion and uh you know i i had a bad relationship in a sense with dogs as a child the the dog in our family was the the unhappy center of an unhappy family and the woman i was sent to to who really brought me up because my parents you know weren't for the job a lot of the time happened to be a dog obedience trainer and i grew up literally with a dog that placed second at crafts in the obedience class so a dog of considerable intelligence in in human terms kate the salsation dog could perform i kid you not anything up to 10 tasks in sequence that could be given to her verbally and it was an extraordinary sight but here's the key point about dogs dogs have an adaptive advantage if they get on with humans and humans have an adaptive advantage if they get on with dogs basically we are in true symbiosis as species we have genetically altered in order to be with each other this is not true of humans and cats and that's the most salient thing if there's going to be any argument win lose we have to address this fact uh you know my late wife put it quite well when she said um dogs love us more than they love each other and we love each other more than uh and we love dogs more than we love each other as well and i'm not saying that's true i don't think it is true but the the level and depth of affinity between humans and canines what we loosely call humans and canines cannot be gained saved ask yourselves even you fanatical cat lovers out there touching a dog's body feels completely natural they do not feel odd to us dogs they never have felt odd in in many traditional societies hold on to your hats everyone it is commonplace for young women to suckle puppies to breastfeed puppies this is not considered a weird or a strange thing at all this is because of the selection pressure that we both share so what are we to make of this in terms of humans and in terms of dogs in terms of cats john's brilliant book makes it clear that cats were never domesticated they if they live with us at all they do it by choice what we imagine to be choice of some form they seem to live alongside us they are not engaged with this in that way john uses the cat and i think beautifully as a symbol of a kind of non-human intelligence a non-human life world that we do well to revere in a sense and to understand in a way as a portal to perhaps a biophilia a love of the natural world that our human society represses a lot of the time and i think that is you know and i don't mean this in a cheesy way i think that's a beautiful thought john and i can go with you in that thought a long way but dogs tell us who we really are and the truth of the matter is we are bounded by this society we're bounded by this culture and if you'll forgive the dog-ish idiom we're in deep and and the symbiosis of human and dog the useless symbiosis of human and dog that has us going round the corner here in the oval south london to the hound hut to buy special biltong for mcglorion that has me buying him a little uh fair isle jumper from diamond dogs in birmingzi for 55 pounds that sees me lavish care and attention on him that frankly he probably neither wants nor cares about that too is a symbol of the we're in yes we dogs and humans are embracing each other as we rock it towards the inevitable catastrophe and indeed the fact that our only access to the natural world is through a creature who we've domesticated to the extent that we've bred it into being a ridiculous little pygmy wearing a fair isle sweater is just proof of that fact so i ask you to support dogs because they're in it with us you know basically if you keel over your cat will eat your face immediately but a dog will wait about half an hour until it's absolutely sure that civilization's going to and that's the basis on which i want you to vote emphatically for dogs marvelous thank you so much will you were so uh impudent that you were on time and i didn't get a chance to play uh my um my cue decided to stop talking but wonderful um and simon in the chat has already um uh cat whistled i guess cat called you let's see this so-called dog then will and if your dog really is chewing biltong and wearing a fair i'll jumper then i think simon speaks for all of us um while will uh grabs his dog uh let me uh hand over to john uh and we'll find out whether will is barking mad there's my galore in brilliance arthur jack russell the most aggressive dog breed there is bar none wow yeah um a bracing account there from will but is he barking mud uh let's hear the counter case for cats from john gray well the counter case thank you will for all the nice things you said about my book and for your defensive dogs against cats and it's the only possible defense as well as the most compelling defense to say um dogs are better than cats because they're happy to be in the with us most of the time i mean until the point where we expire and it's clear that civilization is really gone they'll they'll wallow in the same with every delight of which uh they're capable cats here are different and this is perhaps one of the reasons why i think there have been far many cut haters in human history than they've been dog haters they've been whole anti-feline cats uh cat movements in europe uh particularly in the period of early modern modernity in late medievalism uh right from the start of christianity cats were singled out as uh untrustworthy uh somewhat evil creatures uh whereas i don't think that's been the case for dogs and the fundamental difference between cats and dogs in their relations with humans is the one you mentioned will which is that um dogs have been so to speak in the form and which forms in which we live with them created or invented or fashioned by humans as their companions we share so much of them whereas cats first of all elected to live with humans i think for what might be described as their own uh reasons and their dna though it's changed though there are many breeds that have been even over bred hasn't changed so much that their nature has assimilated to what might be called human nature or the human mind they remain very very different from us now one other point that i fully share with you will is that we shouldn't rank um uh animals including the human animal in any cosmic hierarchy uh that's partly a moral thing i think it's rather solipsistic and narcissistic and slightly shitty if you like but it's also true unless you're some kind of disciple of plato or some kind of monotheist that there's no great chain of being what the what the medievals and early moderns thought of was a kind of cosmic hierarchy in which we all there isn't there are just different uh animals uh with very porous boundaries even between the different species of these animals as you point out in the end i follow spinoza in this there are only actually individuals which happen to have um some kinships with um other animals that are like them and so that is true so on what ground could i then argue for the superiority of cats over dogs they're not so to be metaphysically superior they can't be there's no uh great chain of being but i think they give us something my basic argument is that cats give us something because they're so different from us that other human beings or dogs which are part human in their very souls i think other sentient species have souls uh uh that's to say parts of themselves they don't understand parts of themselves they'll never understand and that the dog soul is closer to the human soul than the felines so this close is is closer to the human soul or the dark souls so what is it that they can give us well it's precisely this window into another world a word larger than the human world now it may be will and i often think that this is the case and i know you often think of the case even more than i do that we can't get out of this increasingly shitty human world the only way of getting out of it is that the whole bloody thing perishes in some vast cosmic diarrhea or of some kind that may be the case um i'm not yet ready to make a judgment on it whether i can't make a judgment or there's still too much uncertainty but we can see out of it as individuals we can look out of it and we can get strength and beauty and a certain kind of life affirmation if you like affirmation of life itself by looking out of this shitty human world um and that's what cats give us cats are a kind of biophiliac icon they're an icon through which we look out at the vast world which still exists despite all the mass extinctions that are going on human created which is still there and will in my view survivors because one of the worst anthropocentrisms is the idea that humans are going to save the planet or that they can even destroy they can do enormous colossal damage to other forms of life but the earth is vastly older vastly stronger vastly more resilient than um uh we humans tend to think and it will emerge in some other wholly different form when we are long gone long vanished and so it's it's in a sense the difference from cats the remoteness of cats from us that makes us those who love cats love them because they're so different from us love them even though we know they don't love us back in the way that we love them or that we love other human beings uh um we know that they may have a kind they may have a kind of love for us i think their relation to us is not purely instrumental in the sense of being based on food i mean the common idea that they cats love us because or like to be with us enter our households for covered love because we feed them um i think it's falsified by many instances because cats will eat what they're given if it's pleasant to them but if they really dislike the person who gives the human being that provides the food they'll find another home pretty quickly they'll move on and find they'll hunt outside or they'll move to one or other homes and this by the way is a fundamental difference between dogs uh hannah and i were talking about this the other day i don't think there's any recorded case i may be wrong about this of dogs wandering off and adopting another household certainly not two or three which cats quite regularly do uh so the paradox of feline love the love that cats have for us i think is that they may come to value us as companions even though they don't need us if they stop needing us or if they stop liking us they're off and so every moment you spend with a cat is in that sense a gift of the cat from the cat to you and makes it kind of special they're not loyal to us in the way that dogs are they don't have the human virtue quite rare i think of loyalty um uh uh they don't even pretend to have that they are what they are they assert their natures as the cats they are they affirm their natures they enjoy life uh but part of that can be with uh be with uh involved being with a human being and one of the writers um i love i like the most as well as uh your books will is a more recent writer that i've only come across in the last um uh year actually or so just before i wrote the book out is mary gateskill the american uh a brilliant original highly original writer who wrote a memoir which has now appeared separately as a little book called lost cat which is about uh her adopting a cat uh a small one-eyed frail little cat but an intrepid cat and she felt she came to believe a loving cat who she lost and the experience lost irretrievably uh and the experience which sort of unraveled her mind in many ways led she thought unlocked many of her relationships with other humans with her father who she had a very conflicted relationship he died of cancer partly because he wouldn't take treatment she was unable to communicate them she had difficult relations with the children she's adopted um with her partner uh and with humans in general and she in this book attributes to this short relationship less than a year with a tiny little cat uh a capacity to undo uh unnot untie many of these um knotted contradictions that she felt it attended her love for other humans and human love and generally that's to say um loving someone when you don't want to love them might lead you to hate yourself for loving them someone loving you who you don't love might lead you to feel that their love is a burden and an intrusion on you all these uh some human loves express a desire for power over the person who is loved or not loved all of this she thinks is lacking in fellaini love not that it means we should therefore confine ourselves to feline love what she writes about in this wonderful little book is how this short abrupt and from her point of view tragic relationship nonetheless unlocked her capacity to feel love for other people in a other human beings in a way she didn't feel before so um uh i think only a creature as different from us perhaps could give us that maybe there are some people who've had similar experience with dogs but it's the very difference of cats from us um which makes them so beloved uh to those um who who love them so what i'm arguing for is not the superiority of cats over dogs cats are cats dogs are dogs humans are humans um and each individual cat dog and human is what it is and the most fundamental fact of all as you say is that is that of this kind of individuality um but it's also true and here i'll happily concede something to you that we differ from cats profoundly in that we i mean one of the reasons we're in the is that we need to be with humans in a certain kind of solidarity that cats don't need i mean male cats don't uh uh look after their kittens female cats will die for their kittens uh to protect them but male cancer and they're solitary hunters they're solitary predators so they're not like us they're utterly different humans need to form pacs congregations uh uh they need to form um communities in a way that cats don't and that's essential to us and that gives us many of the many of the got it got it just a gentle key uh got it uh so um and that's a valuable feature of humans we don't want to become so feline that we lose the valuable attributes of being human but we can do with an admixture of non-humanness if we are to be happier as human beings and um i think that's uh something illustrated in gateskill's great book and that's why i urge you all um to uh whether i urge you all to uh vote for cats uh over dogs because unlike dogs they give us something that's not human and that enriches and even liberates our humanity thank you so much john passionately advocating there for pussycats we'll head to audience questions in a moment but i'm going to encourage you our audience to start sending them to us now so you can type your question in the box under your screen if you don't wish to be named click on anonymous and don't forget to press send and a reminder to you that you can tweet whether catty remarks or a font path on the head using the hashtag iq2 now while you're busy doing that let me interrogate our debaters a little more well i've got a question for you i wonder what you think of john's argument about what i take to be the volition of cats cats have elected to live with humans and that act of volition their ability to act uh make a decision um that makes their company a greater gift to us what do you think well well i i think it's pretty flimsy as an argument it's the problem it's it's based on not a lot of empirical evidence and such empirical evidence that there is is i'm afraid highly tendentious uh at any rate even if the argument does have some purchase i i think you could make the case oddly enough you can certainly make the case you know dogs may share uh you know so we may be in a symbiosis with them but particularly since we ceased working with them in a meaningful way it's questionable how driven towards our practice and our being in the world that symbiosis is uh it's much more likely for most people it's an emotional symbiosis as i was saying it's about a love object or a love person i mean i we can get into that but i definitely think of the glorion as a person uh and i and mclaren is is very other to me i mean he's he's uh close enough to me that i consider him as one of my fifth child in a sense he fits into that and and i i i think there's something very moving as well and i've spoken with john about this before about you know you know john has this marvelous thing in the book where he sort of reflects on this idea you know of course the egyptians worshiped cats that maybe you know there's something god-like in in the way that we look towards cats but i also think for our domesticated animals they must particularly for dogs there must be something god-like about us and i think that kind of hands the baton of responsibility back in an appropriate way you know because the glorion you know maclaurian is looking around him now he's he's got very bad arthritis he needs a lot of medication he's not that old for jack but he's not i think he's in his old age now and he must be looking at me and thinking hang on a minute he was middle-aged when i arrived and he's still middle-aged now what's going on you know so i think there's something there and i think that dogs offer us just the same portal to biophilia that john claims for cats and i think that that where i think john's argument falls down most clearly and and i'm touched that he is in a sense came to join my argument is on this business of our our relationship overall with what we insist on calling the natural world but which is really just the world and it made me think of a great science fiction story i can't remember the writer i'm just going to match literary texts with him called i think it's called a dog and his boy and it's a post-apocalyptic story and it's basically about a boy that hunts with a genetically enhanced super-intelligent dog that he's telepathic with but of course it's not really science fiction dogs are telepathic with humans when it comes to hunting behavior when they they work together uh anyway the the boy has a kind of an affair with a young woman he finds uh in the wreckage of this post-apocalyptic wreckage and you know plot spoiler in the end he feeds the girl to the dog not the dog to the girl and that's why it's called a dog and his boy i suppose and and the point about this is to press forward with my argument yes i don't know how severe uh what how severe the impact of this mass extinction event and the associated climate emergency is really going to be on human society in the future but i know for one thing's for sure if we do make it through what stephen hawking memorably described as this pinch point i want to have a dog [Applause] to hunt in the post-apocalyptic ruins not a pussycat john what do you what do you think will will was a little bit catty there about your argument but i wonder what you think of will's argument that dogs have an adaptive advantage if they get on with humans because we know that cats are not leading the blind they're not sniffing out drugs they're not detecting cancers does the usefulness the inherent usefulness of dogs even at the end of the world as well as imagining it mean that your pay end to pussycats will always come short well it's even more their cats are even more useless in practical terms than you say because they don't they're not even terribly interested in pest control there's quite a lot of evidence that they just watch mice and see how they behave but unless they have unless there's some clear benefit to them in in hunting the mice they're indifferent to it uh and they don't do it when they're not watched a lot of the time either so um that's perfectly uh true uh but that increases the uh to my mind the value of cats to humans and it makes it clear that the value of humans accounts is not in their practical usefulness so the fact whether or not they give us some kind of comparative survival advantage is neither here nor there uh i mean to me in a way i mean i turned the wheels question around the other way supposing we i suppose by we he means we humans don't get through this uh um this huge combination of climate emergency and mass extinction where among the uh creatures that don't to me it's a source of um life-affirming joy to think that the world will still contain cats most likely because there'll be parts of the world probably that are inhospitable to humans uh like the upper reaches of the himalayas but which do contain cats of a kind which the upper reaches of the himalayas also do um so uh um to me uh they have this um they're very beauty their very uselessness if you like or very not limited uh practical uses um adds to their uh uh as to their uh to their to their value and so uh that's why i kind of um insist on this idea that their value to us doesn't depend upon anything practical it doesn't it isn't it isn't that they give us any comparative rights they don't give us any comparative advantage at all in the struggle for survival but they give us um perhaps a degree of um uh consolation if we're not going to survive yeah i have a lot of time for a defense of useless things thinking of myself here let me let me turn to the the audience we've i can tell you we've got some terrific questions and if you haven't yet asked a question and had your say on the matter please feel free to do that you can uh type in your question in the box and remember to send it to us let's start with with this question um i like cats more but i'm concerned about their effect on the wild bird population what do you think about this well i talk about that in my book a bit uh there are ways of dealing with this practically they can bells can be attached to them you can you can pursue policies which limit that impact it's also true by the way though that birds can be harmful they're more likely to spread contagious diseases than cats all most animals have this feature and the big thing i think the big thing beyond this is which species let's use the language of species just for a moment is most responsible for mass extinction it's not cats or dogs or birds it's the one we belong to however porous it is so i think that's what we should be focusing on but i take the seriousness of the question the question is serious but one can adopt this put a bell on it cats get used to it they still enjoy uh trying to capture birds but they do so much less frequently when a bell alerts the bird to will is uh maglorian a predator mclaren being a jack russell of course is bred as a ratter his job is to keep the rat population down in in farmyards traditionally or in fox hunting which is a completely this is about as useless to humans as cats um the fox as oliver rackham the great historian of the english countryside puts it the fox would have been extinct by the tudor era if people didn't enjoy hunting it so they kept artificially alive whatever the hunting lobby tell you in order that they can hunt them and instantly they're still doing it that drag racing is just a blind um so mcglorion would be put down the set would be carried on the huntsman's saddle and then would be put into the set to drag the fox out and then it would be dispatched so in true dog fashion he acts as the the hitman for the human hierarchy and and uh you know one thing we we need to recognize about how closely intertwined we are is you know so in traditional societies in australian aboriginal society dogs have their own dreaming dogs lineages are are accounted for they have their own totems uh they have a complete interlinkage with with human cultural knowledge in that way no mclaren's never hunted or killed anything in his life he's notably pathetic in that way and and i was never seriously arguing even in the post-apocalyptic situation for the profound utility of dogs i'm not arguing for them as therapy dogs i'm not arguing for them as objects of of slavish affection in that way at all that's not my argument my argument is quite simply that we really really are in it together and you know yes john's is perfectly free to project a future in which cats you know sort of dominate the earth and everything's sort of beautiful and that you could just it would be beautiful a planet of cats sunning themselves in the vast red dwarf that's about supernova shout out for dogs as well bear in mind in every situation in which you get uh social collapse meaningful social collapse very quickly you see charming packs of mixed former pet dogs hunting together poodles and chihuahuas are like bringing down game i find that very reassuring i don't think in my in my urge to associate dogs with humans at this very profound organic level i also wish to allow them their autonomy and i and i think they are perfectly capable of knowing uh if you'll forgive the the continued scathological idioms when the really has hit the fan and i mentioned one one climate scientist said to be look it won't be all bad the polar bears will become brown bears well they already are of course because their fur is in fact transparent yes yes yeah but they'll become visibly brown yeah let me let me uh what that sounds like episode two about um polar bears versus other brows bears but let me um ask you this question which i think is actually a very deep one actually did they domesticate us or did we domesticate them and i think that applies to both cats and dogs and that's a question really about power who's in charge are cats our dogs or us well if i could just jump in there there's no evidence that cats have done anything that sort of chip up they're not domesticated effectively i'm not going to argue that and i think that you know i'll give them a mark for that that's impressive marvellous book came out last year called uh against the grain on domestication in early mesopotamian civilizations and and the author whose name has just slipped my mind annoyingly from anything it's james scott he's the doyan of the subject points out that almost every domesticated species that's been domesticated by humans is about a third less intelligent than its wild con specifics and considerably more docile and herd-like he calls it he calls these mesopotamian civilizations uh late neolithic species resettlement camps and which i think is a marvelous phrase and it captures the subtext of the entire book though he never of course states it explicitly because it's too subversive which is of course not only did we uh you know uh domesticate other animals we domesticated ourselves or rather this was a collective event and and i'm sorry domesticated humans are probably a third stupider than their wild con specifics and certainly a great deal more docile as recent events have proved yes again and oddly enough humans or perhaps naturally enough dream less well than they're pre-domesticated comparing them with uh the australian indigenous peoples for example they dream less interestingly dreams are much larger part of the life of so-called pre-civilized or prehistoric uh species no i i i i i don't think we're very far away from each other uh on on on this point i i wonder if you can answer this next question which i warn you is a little bit personal and if you feel bashful that's absolutely fine um where do you both stand on kissing your cat or dog too anthropomorphic i never did even uh that's all i can tell you i mean maybe we rubbed noses cats like to rub noses if they trust you if they like you they don't do it for long and they turn away pretty quickly but they do do it and they do seem to enjoy it they don't resist it being it being done uh uh but i've never if i kiss you've been mouth-to-mouth i've never done it yes well i mean i i i have to paraphrase uh martin amos's uh brilliant air pursue about siblings about how why um uh sex in long married couples is like sibling incest uh it happens remarkably infrequently and when it does is attended with great shame by both parties which is all by way of saying that i have great shame in this matter and uh marvelous book by j.r ackley um about his dog uh my dog tulip he gets pretty close to admitting to having a sexual relationship with the dog pretty close well in fact he does admit it i've certainly met people who have had sexual relationships with dogs uh i've had a rich and full life and as i to go back to what i said at the beginning i'm not surprised i mean it doesn't float my boat it's hard to imagine the dog could consent uh meaningfully which would make me worried ethically but that being noted you know a there's a good old uh american country blues band back in there in the 1960s called three dog night uh well every every night from the glorion is a two human knight he covers himself with the bodies of the two humans he sleeps with and and the way he kind of and as i say i feel no uh kind of let or hindrance cuddling him or having the kind of intimacy with him including kissing him that i would have with any of my other children it would not occur to me to feel awkward or strange about that and it's not to do with being anthropomorphic it's to do with the fact that he's a dog and and it's natural in as much as anything is natural for us to kiss dogs it's not a problem great to have you be so confessional um this is a question from shay uh i've had an argument that the cats versus dogs debate is less about their qualities but really about our own human personalities in that we each have an instinctive affinity for one or the other so my question is do you feel that you can tell whether someone you know is a dog person or a cat person before they confirm one way or another joe i can't always tell um for one thing if you're feline in your behavior you might not reveal cats reveal what they want to reveal this is by the way relates to something else whereby if i noticed someone flashed up a questy which i thought was very uh interesting question that there's a special joy in communicating with a cat because it's so difficult most of the time i mean on the one hand they're very explicit about what they want they're in no way inscrutable or impenetrable if they want their breakfast they'll tell you relentlessly until they get some satisfaction if they don't they'll push off somewhere uh um but on the other hand it's hard to uh for them to communicate uh to us in the way that dogs can if you look i look into a dog's eye you can see them looking directly back at you and interacting hardly ever happens with cats because if you look in the cat's eye it's it's programmed evolutionary to see that as a thread so you have to be kind of indirect but when you can from time to time and i've had this experience when they when they want to communicate something to you it's even more um it's even more in a sense precious coming from beyond the human world it's almost like it is like an alien species communicating and the communication is normally friendly if you've had a long friendly uh relationship with me just rephrase your question shahida the one you started with it was it's about whether we know whether a person is a cat person or a dog person if there is anything well i think i i can't tell i mean i think that's a that's that's a a stereotype which doesn't really first of all lots of people like both some people don't like either yeah they prefer birds for example some people uh um i can't really tell uh um unless i know the person rather well well we could test it because neither you nor will know me very well i wonder what you think i am can you tell i would say you're a cat person well um look deep into my eyes [Laughter] i i i suspect you may come from a muslim background by your name oh so this is a real detective work quill in which case while it's absolutely not true that people who uh you know in the several cultures that make up the muslim world are absolutely opposed to dogs nonetheless i believe you can if somebody can correct me if i'm wrong that they are considered to be haram in other words you don't have them in the home uh it's you don't keep dogs in the home so if you do come from a muslim background i suspect that you might be more likely to be a cat person but only by culture acculturation i will reveal all later um but let me ask you some more questions and i'm going to encourage our audience to keep asking these questions because they are they are they are excellent um uh i'll ask this question cats have a whole range of meows to let us know whether they want something dogs only have a bark does that not make cats superior maybe this is about animals and language is there a distinction here between our cats and our dogs well i mean if i can jump in there i mean one that's just not true dogs have lots of different kinds of what we have to call vocalizations as well and in fact you know the dog just now was kind of whining away wanting to need to let him out of the room so they've got lots of different vocalizations uh this question of communication because i think john has been quite eloquent there and saying it's the very kind of difficulty in the struggle you know he was slightly kind of adding to wittgenstein's famous atmosphere if a lion could speak we wouldn't be able to understand what he said and i i'm with with john and contra wickenstein and the analytic philosophers i think that's absolutely nonsense of course if a lion could speak we very much would understand what he was saying because otherwise it wouldn't be speaking it's a sort of meaningless statement in the first place and anyway i think there is a lot of inter-specific communication and i despite the impact of social linguistics on our philosophic thinking i do not think that all thought is language at all absolutely in quite that way and it's and and or even semiotic in quite that way i think there is room for sub language imagistic communication effective forms of communication all of that i think that the advantage that the dog definitely has over the cat is the communicative one though and against john's point that you know you you feel a sense of victory when you've managed to communicate with your cat uh i have to say that the ease and fluidity of the communication with the dog especially emotional communication is part of what makes the relationship so attractive and listen i never wanted to go to this place and it's certainly not my point and i wouldn't want to win the art no oh well you slightly cut out are you back sorry are you back you're back at least in in in cognitive terms as humans understand it dogs are way smarter than cats they just are i'm sorry they just are and and in terms of therefore the ability you've cut out again will oh sorry i i don't know what to do about it but you're right now you're right now i think we got your point was about cats being um intellectually perhaps intellectually winning the argument and perhaps i can pick up on the the philosophy we've talked about wittgenstein um john your book of course is called feline philosophy and uh you begin with an epigraph or the the very famous cat paradox from montana uh whether is is my cat playing with me or am i playing with my cat and monteney can't work out and that's repeated by derrida actually a few years ago when he undresses in front of his cat and realizes that he is naked next to his naked cat so are the cats are in the philosophy does this mean that are dogs not intellectual do dogs have a place in philosophy well this i mean the person who wrote j.r ackerly who wrote that wonderful book about his love his love relationship with his dog uh queenie wasn't it uh um uh wasn't a philosopher so he didn't pursue philosophical questions but he plumbed the depths of philosophical inquiry by exploring and getting ever more deeply into what love relations are like for humans and dogs and one of the things he brings out by the way and this is one of the differences between cats and dogs is the jealousy of queenie of accolades human relationships in other words queen is not jealous of accolades relationships with other dogs i don't think he had any at least not simultaneously cats object when other cats come into a human world that they inhabit and treat as their own i don't think they give a toss about other humans unless they sense that the other humans are hostile to them otherwise they don't count and that's a fundament by the way on um wittenstein i did cite frankenstein to someone i knew for some years who kept lions in a very humane out-of-doors way for 30 years and he said well he obviously that bugger knew nothing about lions and that was it was just ignorance that led freaking scientists say that or rather a theory as we'll say a theory yeah of what language must be so there couldn't be a counter example for wittgenstein because then it wouldn't you say but you know what about this he communicates all the time with the lines oh well that's not language there was a marvelous uh video that went viral a couple of years ago of this couple uh from london who had adopted it you know being the 60s have acquired a lion cup a female lion club then grew up with them and obviously became a bit of a handful so these guys they were a gay couple took the lioness i think to kenya or wherever that woman joy adamson had her her lion reserve and released the lion into the wild and there's a marvelous video of them going back to visit the lion like 15 years later getting out of the jeep and this lioness this fully grown lion see the video yeah hugging them embracing them running across and leaping up on them and embracing these humans and not harming them no not at all of course not no i mean dogs are really part of the family they just are and you know when my partner uh and i started living together more because of the pandemic she started seeing a lot more of the dog and eventually they fell in love with each other with a deep and passionate love and really intensely and uh they're together they've gone into another room together now and i am very jealous and i'm jealous of both of them here's the interesting thing so it's back to john's point about in a strange way he wants to claim cats as teaching something about human love relations instructing us but actually the dog does it too yes yes by arousing us to this capability we have for jealousy in that way both of the non-human and the human they again draw our attention to the ridiculous nature of speciesism well they're both neither of them cats and dogs aim to do this or want to do this or perhaps even care that they're doing it but they're both tremendous aids to human self-knowledge yes well i mean i i emailed uh when we were setting up the debate saying talking about mcglorion and saying you know like dogs of his age he is still relentlessly involved in politics which is which is a big mistake for anybody particularly for dogs let me let me ask you both about politics i did notice that during the recent u.s election much fanfare was made over the fact that biden will be bringing dogs and i think cats back to the white house and that the fact that president trump didn't have pets was taken as indicative of something could could that be right not the lack of pets are having an antidote it's a bad sign it's a bad sign uh um it may not be conclusive though it didn't need to be in his case but it's a bad sign because it means he's more interested in himself and he doesn't think he has anything to learn either from other human beings but still less from non-human beings and that's what it means so to me it was a bad sign uh um i don't know whether it was true that the blairs didn't like the number 10 cat i don't know if that was true or not i believe it [Laughter] he was probably uh you know agreeing with with george w bush to go into iraq uh you know and cause untold suffering yeah the same day that he was hating humphrey the downing streak well the bad thing about cats from a playwright point of view is that they're not interested in progress they're very content with the life they have and if they could understand progress i mean one of the things i imagine is what would a feline philosopher a cat with intellectual powers of a of a human but otherwise a cat would be very i think very skeptical about progress let's um make some progress ourselves uh the final vote uh draws very close gentlemen so let's hear our debaters close their arguments i think you have one to two minutes each john do you want to speak for cats first yes i mean i'll just repeat what i've said it's not a new argument it's that they're not superior to dogs people who love cats and don't love dogs so much are not superior to dog lovers it's not about superiority or any kind of hierarchy it's that cats can give something to our lives that dogs can't give because dogs are too close to us too bonded to adapt to our our souls and our ways of life to give what cats can do cats can live with us intimately and yet be utterly different from us so that when we do interact it's a miracle will your closing argument for dogs yes we're in it together we're in the together and and their great advantage is that they will stay in it with us and uh you know i i said i wouldn't resort to this argument but i will nothing if not contrary um i i used to be very friendly with the notorious ex-gangster and bank robber john mcvicker who was at one time britain's most wanted man after a jail break uh from wakefield a special unit that had pretty much been constructed in order to imprison him because he caused such trouble in in the prison system and he he once uh he had john had a little terrier that he got from his mum called clem he loved clem very much as little terrier and he once said to me you know what will i think if during my youth when i've been in all that trouble and particularly when i was in prison i think if i'd had clem i wouldn't have caused any trouble at all on that note it's now time for you our glorious audience to make your final vote on the motion cats versus dog you should see the slide now on the screen uh please vote cat or dog or undecided if you're still after all of this a hamster person if this feels all rather final and dramatic then let me reassure you that this is all in good fun and neither cats nor dogs will be harmed as a result of this poll in fact they'll probably be petted a little bit more while we're waiting for the votes to come in and be counted it's like the state of georgia all over again um let me ask our debaters one final question um i'm sure you've both heard of the sports term goat greatest of all time but is there a goat of cats or a goat of dogs who's the greatest cat of all time john oh well an answerable question because they don't any hierarchies they form themselves are very fluid and very temporary and practical otherwise they just pursue their own i have a question shady you said you would tell us which one i know i i i am uh uh but i have to tell will that there are lots of muslims who love dogs and you're right that the cultural antipathy to it means that it's a love that does not speak its name very often but i admit that i am wild about cats but i have been very impartial in this debate i think you have yes yeah well who's your greatest cat you're the greatest dog of all time well my greatest cat was my cat spike who i loved despite the fact that he not only killed birds he used to rip their wings off and herd them into the garage where they would kind of keep them captive impressive behavior very big beautiful tabby but of course the greatest dog of all time is my jack russell mcglorion who because i i love him it's as simple as that that would also be true of me uh the greatest one for me was probably sophie with one of the burmese i had who died at the age of 13. ah who can uh argue with those examples uh shall we see if our final vote our result has come in are we ready oh wow okay we're ready uh votes are in and we can declare an animal king or queen a reminder that the result of the first vote was cats 34 dogs 48 undecided hamster 17 so we started with dogs leading and the final count is cats 47 dogs 49 undecided three wow so john you clawed back quite a lot there pun intended it's very close it's very close a whisker between you 47 49 so commiserations john but it was a very close run thing and will you're like a dog with two tails today thank you so much to wilson thank you john gray a reminder that you can purchase a discounted copy of john gray's feline philosophy by clicking on the link in the audience chat thank you to to you our audience you've been totally delightful um i'm sorry that your pets couldn't be involved as well um and antoine intelligence squared thank you for hosting us this evening and i'm going to hand over back to hannah k thank you so much john and will that was such a terrific debate i was laughing crying it was just wonderful i have to declare myself i am a dog lover and i really can't believe looking at the the vote here that it was so close i'm all credit to you john [Laughter] we'll have you back we'll do bears versus hamsters whatever you want to do anyway i'd just like to remind you all all you who are watching um that all the books we feature um during this year in intelligent square are available at discount um under the shop tab on our website um thank you so much for watching and from me and all of us at intelligence squared have a lovely evening good night

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 10,948

Keywords: cats, dogs, intelligence squared, pets, animals, will self, john gray, philosophy, debate, feline philosophy, intelligence squared debates

Id: 4TEJZWQW7wE

Length: 63min 49sec (3829 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020