Yes, so much yes.  (Although I believe people will be able to).

Marie Schatz
Fairborn

On 1/17/2018 12:00 AM, OHIO-BIRDS automatic digest system wrote:
> In 1813 John James Audubon returned to his family in Kentucky after a
> long trip finding and studying birds. Upon opening a trunk that
> had contained over two hundred drawings of birds, he found a pair of
> Norway rats had been raising a family inside, turning most of his
> artwork into urine-soaked tatters.
>          More often than the uncomplimentary--and not always apt--analogy of
> rats in a trunk, the condition of human beings in the universe has been
> compared to that of cats in a library. Creatures of many admirable
> traits, cats nevertheless can have only a very primitive understanding
> of a library. Given only an hour or two, they'll wander
> among the bookshelves, completely oblivious of their contents. My own
> cats loved to sniff a stack of borrowed library books I brought home,
> with all their intriguing mixed scents of food and sweat and tobacco.
> Patrons of my local library have been known to leave a slice of ham,
> presumably used as a bookmark, in a returned volume. Given the run of a
> library over a longer period however, cats will eventually knock all the
> books to the floor and use them as litter. Not unlike the rats, in the
> final analysis.
>          A being of broader and more complex understanding might look at mankind
> in a similar way. We seem to poke curiously around, interested
> mostly in personal gratification, often with only a vague notion of the
> meaning of the things we find and disturb. Like Audubon's rats, we have
> been able to prosper and reproduce our kind--and hence succeed by many
> biological criteria--based on the destruction of things we have not
> understood.
>          All too often we behave like rats in the environment we inherit, and
> often enough like cats with regard to the great works of nature. Cats
> may keep rats under control, and we can govern them to some extent, but
> it seems only we can keep ourselves in check.

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