It never actually rains cats and dogs. That’s just an expression.
Even though the rain may sometimes pour from the sky in such remarkable quantities and with such force that we feel compelled to comment on it in exaggerated terms, buckets do not naturally fall from the clouds, nor do dogs or cats. It’s just that while the sky is showering rain upon our world so enthusiastically—in a marvelous display of Nature blessing and nourishing the earth—there is little we can do other than sit in our houses and make each other laugh at the funny things we say about it.
It’s raining today. It’s raining very nicely. The new plant-life that has been springing from the soil will be well moisturized and happy. As we all know, happy plants feed happy animals and—in the great, nearly-untraceably interconnected system of life—it all goes toward making a happy earth. However, no matter how much it rains—even if it rains far more than is really good for the human population of the earth—it will never literally rain buckets or cats or dogs.
Strange as it may seem that a writer should feel that it is necessary to make this distinction, it is nonetheless an important point because our figures of speech sometimes keep us from seeing obvious truths. If we allow ourselves to suppose that cats and dogs arrive in our world because they fall from the sky, we overlook the significance in the real history of cats, dogs, chickens, eggs and the human thought-modes whereby we attempt to understand these things.
A lion is a cat in the same way that my fuzzy little housemate Pippin is a cat. If Pippin wasn’t neutered, Pippin’s sperm could make a lioness pregnant. Of course the delivery of that sperm presents some tactical difficulties since Pippin is much to small to mount a lioness in the natural way that a male animal would impregnate a female animal. I’m sure he’d give it a go if he could. That’s the main reason Pippin has been neutered: to decrease his interest in mounting lionesses.
A wolf is a dog, genetically capable of mating with any other dog.
And—all legends to the contrary and with all due respect—The Great White Buffalo is—as a physical creature—in the same family of creatures as the ones who give their lives for Big Macs.
Each of the types of creatures mentioned above shares several common traits. I won’t enumerate the entire list of those commonalities here, but I do want to point out an often-overlooked fact about dogs, cats, cattle, chickens and human beings: the developments of their species has been influenced and guided by the needs, wants and sometimes just the whims of humans.
The various breeds of dogs are as we see them today because of the efforts of dog breeders. A Shi-tzu looks nothing like an Irish Wolfhound, which looks nothing like an American Pit Bull Terrier, which looks nothing like a wolf, but they’re all dogs; they can all breed with one another (if the tactics are worked out and the mood is right) and the only reason they look so different from one another is because over the course of many generations and in many different places, humans have manipulated their “breeds” and “races” according to what particular breeders wanted from particular breeds of dogs.
We did the same with cats and with the game fowls that eventually came to be known as chickens. The really scary part is…we did something very similar to US, in the name of fashion.
Did you ever wonder why most people have to have their wisdom teeth pulled? Sure, you probably know that if you don’t have them taken out, they put pressure on your other teeth, pushing the teeth together until they all start to go crooked or—even worse—start to break because they don’t have enough space in your jaw. But why? If it’s natural for us to have 32 teeth, why don’t our jaws accommodate all of them comfortably?
It’s because the big jaw that it takes to hold all those teeth isn’t a jawline that we consider attractive. When it comes to human breeding, what isn’t attractive doesn’t get mates for us and if we don’t mate, we don’t pass our characteristics to the next generation. The jaw that it takes to hold 32 teeth comfortably is the jaw of an obsolete human. We unconsciously bred ourselves away from the kind of jaw that can hold all the teeth we’re “supposed to” have.
In questions of chickens and eggs, you can say with all confidence that the egg came first. It came from a precursor to the chicken (working backwards in time) first from a game fowl, from some other bird, from a reptilian bird-forebear, from a sexually-reproducing creature of any kind (all creatures who reproduce sexually do so by means of some type of egg) and so on back to the earliest single-celled critters. An egg—before it is fertilized and begins to grow into an animal, bird, reptile, marsupial or primate—is a single cell: the most basic of all living things. There were eggs LONG before there were chickens.
Chicken ranchers have known this stuff all along. They were just messing with us. Today, thanks to the internet, we all have access to the information that lets us stop believing that animals fall from the sky. Especially chickens—the modern chicken cannot fly. The only way a chicken will ever fall out of the sky is if it’s being transported on an airplane and the cargo hold bursts open and…well it’s not a nice scenario.
And I like for my blogs to have HAPPY endings.
3 Comments
Home, home on the range, where Pippin and the lionesses play…where seldom is heard, a discouraging word…and the skies are not cloudy all day…
Pippin doesn’t know he isn’t a lion or that he isn’t pretty much the same kind of creature that I am. He knows only that I do stuff that he isn’t able to do, such as fill his food dish. I talk to him and he understands what he is able to understand of what I say. Then he says “mrrao” and probably expects me to know what he means by that. Sometimes I do understand. One kind of mrrao means “would you please put some food in my dish”; another means “pay attention to me”; and yet another one means “I don’t want to give up my sopt on the couch right now even though you seem to be trying to get me to move off of the couch.”
Cats have a rather limited range of vocalizations. Even though most of the words in cat language sound pretty much the same, intent and context gives that one word a few different meanings.
Well okay, there are really just three things Pippin ever tries to say to me:
1)Feed me
2)Pay attention to me
3)Leave me alone.
I have all of these in my own vocabulary, plus two or three more things that I know how to say.
One of those “extra” things that I know how to say is something I know about because I’m not neutered like Pippin is, but it’s still roughly the same as Item 2 above.
Um, many years ago, I was an egg.
I’m too chicken to say the rest.