My default assumption is that when animals do something I would do, they also think what I would think and feel what I would feel. If I’m having fun playing a game with a cat, the cat is having fun playing a game with me. Obviously animals can’t do everything that I can do, but that doesn’t mean that animals are somehow less sophisticated than I am when animals and I do do the same thing.

My dog and I usually did things as equals. For example, we both liked going outside when the weather was nice, hugging, wrestling, and visiting our friends. People would tell me that I was supposed to train him so that he would obey me, but I wouldn’t want to be trained to obey someone so I never trained him beyond the basic “don’t poop indoors.” (This makes certain other dog owners so mad for some reason.) The one issue where I really wish he could have understood me but he couldn’t was food. I had so much food, so why didn’t I feed him more? I don’t think he held that against me, but he did try to correct the imbalance by helping himself to anything edible that I left where he could get to it.