The Animal We Knew What To Do With¶

Near-Cats, Aralai Convergence, and the Persistent Temptation of Panspermia¶

Article¶

There is a Near-Cat asleep across my shoulders as I write this.

This is less inconvenient than it sounds. They distribute their weight well.

His name is Tomas, he belongs to one of my graduate students, and he has spent the morning moving between three offices, two laps, the back of a sofa, and the shoulders of anyone insufficiently alert to prevent his ascent.

He has also stolen a stylus, returned it voluntarily, attempted to assist with the opening of a cabinet, and interrupted an argument between two research fellows by carrying a cleaning cloth into the room and rolling onto it.

The argument did not survive.

This is not evidence that Tomas understands humor. It is evidence that Tomas understands us.

That distinction occupies an uncomfortable amount of xenological literature.

Near-Cats have now lived in human households for long enough that most readers will find nothing remarkable about the preceding paragraph. They are common aboard private ships, particularly family ships and long-duration merchant vessels. They appear in children's media. They appear in advertisements. There are Near-Cat bedding manufacturers, Near-Cat veterinary associations, Near-Cat rescue organizations, and at least three competing standards for what constitutes an adequately sized shipboard climbing frame.

They are, in short, pets.

The peculiar thing is that the Aralai did not teach us this.

We taught them.

The Familiar Alien¶

Human fascination with the Aralai requires little explanation.

The species is one of the most extreme known examples of convergent sophont morphology. They stand upright. Their faces are readable to us. Their eyes track ours. Their expressions are recognizable. Their voices occupy familiar social rhythms. Their courtship behavior, family behavior, posture, touch, and interpersonal spacing repeatedly tempt humans into assuming similarities that do not exist.

The temptation is dangerous.

Aralai internal biology contains enough differences to keep comparative physiologists employed indefinitely. Their reproductive system is perhaps the most famous example. Familiar external anatomy disguises reproductive mechanics that would have been considered biologically absurd by most pre-contact human physicians.

The Aralai are not humans with colorful skin.

That statement has been written so often that it has become a professional ritual.

And yet the ritual exists because the resemblance remains.

The same problem extends beyond the Aralai themselves.

Their world contains organisms that human observers find disconcertingly easy to categorize.

Not correctly, necessarily.

But easily.

Near-Cats are perhaps the most famous example.

Show one to a human unfamiliar with xenobiology and the first answer is usually "otter."

This is wrong.

Ask what it does and the answer becomes something closer to "beaver."

This is also wrong.

Test its cognition and the comparisons move toward dolphins, some highly social terrestrial predators, and the more capable problem-solving animals of Earth.

All of these comparisons are wrong.

Together, however, they describe the problem rather well.

The Near-Cat is not an otter, a beaver, a dolphin, or a cat.

It merely occupies enough familiar biological territory that humans knew almost immediately what to do with one.

We brought it inside.

The Granary Animal¶

The traditional Aralai relationship with Near-Cats was not hostile.

It was not even particularly distant.

Near-Cats were tolerated around agricultural settlements because they were extraordinarily effective predators of small animals attracted to stored food. They hunted around barns, storehouses, drainage works, and the dense edges of settled land.

They learned that Aralai structures meant prey, shelter, and relative safety.

Aralai learned that a Near-Cat family living beneath a storage building was substantially cheaper than losing food to burrowing pests.

The relationship became symbiotic.

But it stopped there.

Near-Cats were not generally invited into the household.

They were useful neighbors.

An Aralai farmer might know the resident pair individually. Children might watch the pups. Food might occasionally be left where a Near-Cat could find it. A storm-damaged den might be tolerated beneath an outbuilding. An injured animal might be treated.

None of this turned the Near-Cat into a household companion.

Humans arrived and apparently found this arrangement intolerable.

The historical record contains several versions of the first exchange, none sufficiently reliable to deserve quotation. The structure, however, appears repeatedly.

A human sees a Near-Cat.

The human asks whether the animal is dangerous.

The Aralai host explains that it is not, provided one does not interfere with pups, food stores, or an occupied den.

The human asks whether it is tame.

The Aralai host explains that this is the wrong question.

The human crouches down anyway.

Somewhere in the following several minutes, six million years of human companion-animal behavior takes over.

Within a few generations of contact, Near-Cats were sleeping in human beds.

The Aralai reaction appears to have progressed from confusion, through amusement, through imitation, and finally into complete cultural normalization.

Modern Aralai households now keep Near-Cats as family companions in numbers their ancestors would have found peculiar.

One of the Confederation's most successful examples of cross-cultural exchange may therefore be summarized as follows:

Humans taught the Aralai that one of their native pest-control animals was adorable.

Why It Worked¶

The obvious explanation is that Near-Cats are cute.

This is true but inadequate.

Many animals are attractive to humans. Most do not become successful domestic companions.

Near-Cats brought something else with them.

Their social system happened to fit ours.

A Near-Cat pair does not produce a single litter, raise it quickly, and disperse. Pups require care across multiple seasons. Reproductive cycles overlap. A stable den may therefore contain juveniles at several developmental stages simultaneously.

This is a demanding social environment.

The den must remain safe, predictable, and relatively peaceful while containing tired adults, increasingly independent older pups, younger pups requiring direct supervision, stored food, and constant traffic.

Near-Cats evolved accordingly.

They are highly sensitive to social tension.

They recognize individuals.

They remember previous interactions.

They form durable pair relationships.

They tolerate temporary visitors under some conditions.

They distinguish familiar den members from outsiders without treating every outsider as an enemy.

They interrupt escalating conflict.

They initiate play.

They seek physical contact.

They learn household routines.

The adult male, in particular, appears strongly biased toward maintaining social continuity within the den. This should not be confused with dominance. In wild populations, the behavior is more often regulatory than coercive.

He patrols.

He monitors pups.

He notices disturbance.

He interrupts fights.

He investigates absences.

He remains available.

He keeps the den working.

This behavioral package translated almost embarrassingly well into human domestic life.

A human household is noisy, social, repetitive, full of objects, full of routines, and full of individuals whose emotional states are constantly leaking into posture and voice.

To a Near-Cat, we may simply be an unusually large and incompetent den species.

Ships proved even better.

The Spacer's Near-Cat¶

The modern popularity of Near-Cats among spacers was initially expected to be a novelty.

It was not.

A ship provides almost everything the species values.

The physical territory is limited and learnable.

Important individuals return to the same spaces.

Meals occur predictably.

Sleeping places are stable.

Machinery provides endless opportunities for observation.

Crew members disappear through doors and return.

Social contact is frequent.

Environmental danger is generally outside the den rather than inside it.

Near-Cats raised aboard ships rapidly learn that departures are normal.

This becomes important.

A Near-Cat whose preferred human leaves for six hours does not necessarily show separation distress. It has watched crew members leave and return thousands of times. An individual can be absent without being lost.

Near-Cats are remarkably good at that distinction.

They are also remarkably bad at many things humans assume an intelligent animal should understand.

A Near-Cat may watch an engineer struggle with an incorrectly sized wrench, inspect the available tools, and bring over a more appropriate one.

The same animal may be completely unable to obey the instruction, "Bring me the fourteen-millimeter wrench."

This has disappointed generations of owners and delighted generations of cognition researchers.

The Near-Cat understands situations better than symbolic instructions.

It sees the fastener.

It sees the failed tool.

It sees the engineer's repeated attempts.

It has watched similar sequences before.

It can infer that another object may solve the immediate problem.

What it does not necessarily possess is a symbolic category corresponding to the spoken word "wrench," much less a compositional linguistic understanding of size specifications.

This is an important boundary.

Near-Cats are intelligent animals.

They are not small sophonts with inadequate vocal anatomy.

The Famous Clowning Problem¶

Near-Cats are particularly sensitive to social conflict.

Anyone who has kept one in a household has probably observed some version of the following:

Two people begin arguing.

The Near-Cat becomes attentive.

Voices rise.

The animal inserts itself into the interaction, initiates play, steals an object, climbs onto someone, produces exaggerated movement, or otherwise causes everyone involved to stop what they are doing.

Frequently, people laugh.

Frequently, the Near-Cat does it again during the next argument.

Popular accounts describe this as humor.

That claim exceeds the evidence.

A simpler mechanism is sufficient.

Near-Cats evolved in crowded, long-duration family dens. Escalating conflict among den members is costly. Individuals that recognize tension and successfully interrupt it improve the stability of the social environment in which their own offspring develop.

The animal therefore does not need to understand a joke.

It needs to understand:

The den is tense.

I dislike this.

When I perform this behavior, everyone looks at me.

Sometimes they make the positive vocalization.

Afterward, the den is less tense.

Repeat successful behavior.

A Near-Cat that has spent twenty years around humans can become exceptionally good at this.

Whether that constitutes a primitive understanding of humor is an excellent subject for a grant application and a terrible subject for an argument at dinner.

Hospitality, Apparently¶

Then there is the matter of guests.

Wild Near-Cats maintain den territories, but territoriality is not absolute.

Field studies have repeatedly documented temporary shelter-sharing during dangerous weather. An unfamiliar hunting or foraging individual may approach an occupied den during severe conditions and be tolerated for a limited period.

The guest is monitored.

It is expected to avoid certain resources and sensitive den areas.

It is expected to behave quietly around pups.

When conditions improve, continued presence becomes progressively less tolerated.

If the visitor does not leave, resident behavior escalates from withdrawal of affiliation, to blocking, to directed movement toward the exit, to physical expulsion.

The temptation to call this hospitality is overwhelming.

Professional caution suggests "conditional refuge tolerance."

Nobody outside the profession calls it that.

The problem becomes worse when individuals recognize previous guests.

An animal that previously sheltered peacefully may receive easier access during a later event.

An animal associated with food theft or aggression may be refused.

Again, no abstract social contract is required.

Memory is sufficient.

This individual was here before.

This individual did not cause problems.

This individual is safe.

That explanation is entirely adequate.

It is also exactly the sort of explanation xenologists find themselves repeating while privately admitting that the animal has just behaved in a manner uncomfortably similar to someone offering a stranded traveler the sofa for the night.

Grief Without Philosophy¶

Near-Cats form long-duration pair bonds.

The loss of a mate can be devastating.

Affected individuals may reduce feeding, sleep excessively, withdraw socially, abandon normal activities, reject potential replacement companions, or repeatedly investigate locations associated with the missing mate.

This should not be romanticized.

It also should not be dismissed as simple separation distress.

Near-Cats appear capable of distinguishing temporary absence from persistent irreversible absence.

They do not need a philosophy of mortality to accomplish this.

An individual can learn:

My mate is absent.

My mate has been absent before and returned.

This time my mate has not returned.

Searching has failed.

Waiting has failed.

The previous social pattern is not resuming.

That is enough to produce grief.

Whether the Near-Cat possesses an abstract concept equivalent to "death" remains unknown.

Whether it can suffer the permanent loss of a specific individual does not.

This distinction is one reason responsible Near-Cat placement now considers entire households rather than assigning a single "owner."

A Near-Cat may strongly prefer one person while remaining socially embedded in a larger group.

That is healthier for the animal and, from everything we know about wild den structure, considerably closer to what its nervous system expects.

And Then We Return to the Aralai¶

This is where comparative xenology becomes uncomfortable.

None of the preceding behavior proves anything about common ancestry.

Near-Cats do not possess terrestrial genes.

Aralai do not sit on a hidden branch of the human evolutionary tree.

No credible phylogenetic reconstruction connects the two biospheres.

The farther down we drill, the less comforting the resemblance becomes.

At the largest scale, however, life across known space repeatedly displays biochemical similarities that remain difficult to interpret.

Certain molecular preferences recur.

Certain structural solutions recur.

Certain basic metabolic problems appear to have been solved from suspiciously similar starting positions.

Ancient migratory organisms complicate the picture further. Over geological time, a species capable of traveling between systems while carrying microbial ecosystems, parasites, spores, symbiotes, waste, shed tissue, and environmental material could move astonishing quantities of biology through interstellar space.

The possibility of deep panspermia therefore hangs over comparative biology like weather.

It is visible in the forecast.

It is difficult to prove that it ever rained.

If microscopic life or prebiotic chemistry was redistributed across worlds in the remote past, we might expect some common chemical biases without recoverable shared ancestry.

Or we might not.

At sufficient time depth, evidence disappears.

At sufficient evolutionary distance, resemblance becomes statistically treacherous.

And with enough living worlds, extraordinary convergence must occasionally occur even without any shared biological origin at all.

This is the trap.

The Aralai look too familiar.

The Near-Cat looks too familiar.

Neither provides the evidence required to explain the familiarity.

At some point coincidence stops feeling emotionally satisfying.

It does not thereby become data.

The Human Contribution¶

Perhaps this is why I find the history of Near-Cat domestication so appealing.

Humans arrived on an alien world containing an alien sophont whose body already made comparative biologists uncomfortable.

Beside their storehouses lived another alien organism that looked vaguely like something from an Earth riverbank, behaved in ways our brains found immediately legible, hunted pests around settlements, formed complex social bonds, and tolerated physical contact.

There are grander first-contact stories.

This one may be more representative.

The Aralai showed us their cities, sciences, languages, medicine, history, law, and art.

Humans looked behind the agricultural buildings and said:

"Can we pet that?"

Eventually the Aralai said yes.

Then, after watching us for a while, they started doing it too.

Today a Near-Cat sleeping across an Aralai child's shoulders attracts no attention.

Neither does one occupying the copilot's lap aboard a human freighter, provided local safety regulations are being ignored in the traditional manner.

The animal has become part of both cultures.

Not because it was destined to.

Not because our species share some mystical affinity.

Not because the Near-Cat secretly possesses a human mind.

It happened because three unrelated organisms discovered that they could read enough of one another to make room.

That is less dramatic than panspermia.

I find it considerably more interesting.

Tomas has now moved from my shoulders to the windowsill.

The argument in the next office has resumed.

He has noticed.

I expect to lose my cleaning cloth shortly.

Related Review selections¶

• She Meant It When She Signed
• The Great Navigators
• The Species Without Mothers