The sun is shining

When the sun is out I don’t complain so much about this country. It was unfortunate that my space ship crashed in the UK. It would have been better if I landed somewhere near the Bahamas, but the ship lost power when it was just flying over the jet stream and I was dragged here against my will. However, East Anglia is said to be the sunniest place in the whole Great Britain, so not everything was so bad. I could have landed in the Lake District, or worse yet, in Aberdeen.

While I laid in the grass watching the Guinea pigs grazing stupidly happy, Rat-a-Lin emerged from his hole under the hut and got inside to perform his daily inspection. Food had not yet been supplied, so he came back and laid in the sun beside me, certain that I would protect him from the unwanted interest shown by the other four cats of the household enjoying the sun in the garden. Despite being well fed, some of them had a strong sense of humour and enjoyed racing after frightened rats.

Finally I got myself the courage to ask him, which planet did he come from, but Rat-a-Lin was quick to answer with that tiny high pitch laughter that only rats can do.

-Which planet, you ask? I was born in a genetics lab at some research centre far away from here. When I was still a baby they put me in a box and flew me all the way across the ocean to this country and landed in a University near here. I spent my life unwillingly taking drugs. One day a white coated human was preparing to give me an injection of some stuff from a suspiciously looking brown jar. The human handling me was still an human juvenile and while I was struggling to escape her hand, she dropped the jar on the floor. Scared by the impact she opened her hand and I jumped as far as I could, hiding under some boxes ready to be dropped in the recycling bin. Once out of the building I managed to jump inside the boot of some car parked by the wily bins, and that is how I ended up here.

I assumed that Rat-a-Lin was a genetically modified rat purchased from some lab, probably in the US or Scandinavia, and brought into the UK to serve as one of the 6 million animals that are submitted to experiments each year. Luckily it seemed to me that the drugs experimented on him, enhanced his cognitive abilities. How else could his witty sharpness be explained?

I did enjoyed chatting to him, he was a very inspiring rat who provided me great insight into human behaviour. So I was preoccupied about how long the effect of the drug would last. Will it last forever? Will he lose his abilities?
The survival of Rat-a-Lin was important for my project. Not only did he have very useful inside information about what was going on at the University, but he was constantly asking intriguing questions, that kept me thinking.

In order to ask the right questions you need to have a good insight of what you are studying. He knew how humans behaved in their work place, I knew them in their home. Humans at work and home behave in different ways. It is important to get information from both settings to get a better idea of what is real human behaviour.
Also, Rat-a-Lin could give me insights of places where a cat could not go. I could use his motor dexterity to be my eyes in places where I would not be allowed in my cat shape. Besides my biology restricts me to the amount of morphs I can do during a life time. I had already morphed five times in different earth species, and I had only four left, and I had to save the last morph to go back to my original me. So, as long as I could take advantage of my cat form, I would stay that way.

In the moonlight

Yesterday evening, under a bright shining moon, Rat-a-Lin asked me what religions are there in my planet. I stared at the moon for a while trying to make sense of what he meant by religion. Despite having learnt many words from several Earth peoples, sometimes it is difficult to me to make sense of them in the same way as humans perceive them.
I revisited my encyclopaedic memory in search for the meaning of the word religion. One of the stored dictionaries spelled out a random definition: “Religion is the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or a set of beliefs concerning the origin and purpose of the universe.”
This suggested more questions than provided answers. What is the meaning of belief?, What are gods? Purpose with the Universe? The word purpose has specially activated my recently acquired cat feline neurons. What do they mean by purpose. Surely the Universe has no purpose. Life has no purpose! It just is! Then I understood while browsing some information about how the human brain is built, that they have a tiny programme that makes them look for purpose in everything, as if their life wasn’t enough living just as it is. Being part of a community of other living beings, interacting with each other, trying to negotiate survival between themselves and the environment, that is their life. If survival is not enough purpose, what else would it be?
Then the word belief. What does it mean? I asked Rat-a-Lin if he had beliefs.
“Of course I do!...” he answered intrigued by my question. “Each time I visit the Guinea Pigs’ hut I expect to see freshly laid food. If food is there each time, then I believe that food will be there again in the future.”
Ah.. so belief is nothing more than an expectation for something to happen. Having sampled that thing before, the belief is formed. However humans believe in things they have never sampled, like gods, gremlins, ghosts and fairies. How would you explain this Rat-a-Lin?
-Well, Cat-a-List, it is enough for them to create the images in their own minds, and if these entities exist in their mind this is enough for them to believe that they exist. The mind plays trick on humans. This does not mean that the object of their belief actually exists in the real world.
I wondered that the very trait that made humans so different from the other animals, was also their biggest handicap. The trait that will lead them to their own end.
Some crawling nocturnal insect softly touched the hairs of my tail, and I was prompt to lick it. What bug was that? A spider? I could not see in the dim light of the night. By now a fat dark cloud had obfuscated the moon and we were in total darkness. I realised that I formulated a belief based on a sensation. I could not really see what it was, but I assumed it to be a spider, because I am terrified of spiders. Assuming that the infamous bug was something that could be harmful to me, has actually provided me with a survival advantage. This is the adaptive value of belief. Getting away from what could be dangerous. Even if it wasn’t dangerous, the most I could have lost was time or energy moving away. However if I did not assume it to be dangerous and it really was, I could have lost my own life. So belief does have some survival advantages.
Rat-a-Lin’s eyes shined again in the new light piping out of a crack in the cloud covering the moon. - You got it right Cat!...
Rat-a-Lin was an old sage and I wondered which planet he had come from. I assumed he was nothing else but a common Earth rat, but the wise words that came out of that tiny creature were as large as the world itself. Earth creatures are not gifted with such levels of wisdom , but then I remembered that I read somewhere thoughts that have been produced thousands of years ago in the history of humanity. There were some ancient humans who said pretty wise things once in a while. I wonder if they were inspired by some extra-terrestrial creatures morphed into the shape of rats!!!
I have a problem about accepting that wise thoughts could have come from humans alone, and so many thousands of years ago. From what I have observed of human behaviour since I have landed on Earth, they did not sound like very clever creatures, and to make things worth those who were supposed to be the leaders of their tribes, where perhaps the worse of them all.
I asked myself, why would these hordes of humans follow leaders that seemed to be so ignorant, despite the amount of wisdom available to them? And more importantly, why would intelligent humans, support such leaders? I realised then that all can be simply explained through a simple understanding of evolution and animal behaviour. There are a lot of common features that link humans to other species. Actually the more I look at it in depth, the more difficult it gets to identify any differences between what does it mean to be human.
So I decided to get back in the house, as it started to get cold, and download some information from the human female. By now she would be deeply asleep and it would be easy to dive into her deepest memories.

Who are Cat-a-List and Rat-a-Lin?

With all the gazillions of blogs clogging the wires of the internet, why would I bother to write another one, and why would anyone bother to read it?; This is certainly just a another drop in this ocean of nonsensical mental outbursts. However a blog is our revenge against ideologically controlled media and our opportunity to let our thoughts out of this rubicund bony box of ours, that protects our mind producing organ; the brain.
So, independently of who reads it, I find a freeway to silently shout out loud, what I think. Surely enough among the 6 billion people cramping up our planet , probability theory predicts that at least a handful will agree with me.
So, not as frequently as I would like, I’ll attempt to use this space as the playground of my mind, and if I do not change the ways of the world, at least I have a good excuse to exercise my Anglophone writing skill , since you might have spotted by my accent, English is not my first language. I am not apologetic if I unduly trespass the grammar rules , because I speak 8 European languages, while I know of few English speakers who bother to master more than two. And with all this said I’ll start my ramblings.
I am a foreigner. In fact I am an extra-terrestrial biologist who arrived on Earth to do a study of the life forms of this planet. After I arrived I morphed into a cat and while I wandered around some random houses in some random village, I was kindly taken in by a nice cat loving pair of humans.
My task was then to use the opportunity to access the information sources of these humans and produce a list of impressions about these life forms. Unfortunately, my space ship disintegrated when it hit Earth and I am now stuck here in the shape of a cat. However I have not much to complain since I am well fed, protected from the elements and have a diverse number of life forms of other species sharing the same house. Thus I can study and compare the different cognitive systems and social arrangements that characterise each one of them.
My humans call me Catalyst, because I start up complex arguments . I live in a household populated with many other species. Other real cats, Guinea pigs and even an old Chinese rat who calls himself Rat-a –Lin.
Since I have no hands you may wonder how do I write this blog. Well, I wait patiently until the female human gets ready to work on her computer. I walk softly over her keyboard persuading her to stroke me which induces her into a state of trance. Then I connect my mind to hers, and make her write. When she wakes up I retreat to same original position and she thinks that nothing had happened in between. At night I curl myself very carefully around her head on her pillow, and I download all the information from her mind into my memory system.

Rat-a-Lin gives me insights about human society and constantly compare is with his rodent origins. Since I have the ability to understand animal language, I do not need to resort to trick mind download processes with the rest of the house community.
This blog expresses what I have learn about these complex living creatures on this planet from the point of view of an outsider.