No foot-tapping cats

For today's profound, blog-worthy thought, let me share this cogent observation: never seen a cat tapping its foot in time to music. Have you?

Meet Ivy the Cat, compliments of Dani Snell Photography:



 Ivy is best buddies with Laurielle who ostensibly owns the animal, if one can truly say that a cat can be owned. People own dogs; cats own you.

Now, while studying and listening to a Mairead Nesbitt CD [okay, I admit it, I was 'sposed to be studying, but was really watching Ivy] it occured to me. Never have seen a cat, or any other animal, tapping it's foot in time to music [or tail, or any other body part]. That's an amazing thing, when you think about it. Humans are totally wired in to music. We dance, we celebrate, we sorrow, we rejoice, through music. Part of what makes the movie Inception is the brilliant Hans Zimmer score. What communicates in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, if it is not Howard Shore's genius?

Music speaks at a more basic level than perhaps even words themselves, transmitting emotions such that the feeling the artist is engineering is reproduced in the experience of the listener.

And yet animals are more or less impervious to music. Perhaps, at best, you can agitate a creature with obnoxious sounds. But it does not bring forth celebration, like music does in people.

Now, some contrarian is sure to say that in a controlled laboratory condition, an animal's pulse rate or some such mechanical response to music can be detected. But that's the point, isn't it? We are not talking lab conditions nor exceptions. We are talking about an essential difference between the masses of people and masses of animals.

We dance to music. Its got something to do with the image of God.