$JOBDOG
He got the post. The form they review him on was written for the animals in the other half of the picture.
The questionnaire on the desk is real. Fe-BARQ, University of Pennsylvania, 100 items, 23 factors, built from a survey of 2,068 owners and 2,608 cats. No working programme anywhere uses it to hire an animal for anything. It was never built to decide a career. It is the form in front of him anyway, because the post he holds is a cat's post.
The same lab published one for dogs fourteen years earlier. Also 100 items. 14 factors, not 23, and about twenty five guide and service dog organisations run it on a young dog to predict whether he will make the work at all. That instrument is his. It is not the instrument on the desk.
Ten items below, each filed under the factor it was validated on. Fill it in for him.
Feline Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire
Duffy, de Moura and Serpell, Behavioural Processes 141, 2017
The form on the desk measures 23 traits. His own instrument measures 14. Matched by name, and this mapping is ours so argue with it: 6 land, 6 land partly, and 11 have nowhere to go on the paperwork that raised him.
| Fe-BARQ, the form he is reviewed on | C-BARQ, his own form |
|---|
There is no field for purring on the exam he is taking today, which is fair enough, purring was never his to have. But eleven of these twenty three boxes were never on his own form's radar either, and one of the ones that partly is, Resistance to restraint, sits on his form as Touch sensitivity, about being handled, not about being carried by the scruff. His own paperwork mentions the animals now filling out this exam beside him exactly once, under Chasing, item 8, loading 0.81.
Against one cat with a Crown appointment and a title that has outlasted six Prime Ministers. The dog side of the ledger is a wager book from a tavern in 1862 and a sport that was outlawed in 1911.
Both forms are guesses at the same question: can this animal work alongside a person. Put all three species through the same test, the strange situation, and count how many come out securely attached.
0 percent secure100
Four points separate the two animals in this picture, and a fraction of a point separates either of them from a human infant. He was never hard to measure. He was handed the sheet built for the one now sitting across the desk from him, and reached for it anyway.
