A Cat

"The Deserter."

"A cat lying on a window ledge watched us, idly curious." (p. 88)

This is a good contrast between feline and human consciousness. The cat watches the men but cannot understand what they are doing and does not even know that there are activities that it cannot understand. I once saw a dog in a church and reflected how religious practice was beyond it.

I have twice (scroll down) referred to a comparison that Olaf Stapledon made between a member of our species and a cat.

The full quotation from Stapledon is as follows:

"If one of the First Men could enter the world of the Last Men, he would find many things familiar and much that would seem strangely distorted and perverse. But nearly everything that is distinctive of the last human species would escape him. Unless he were to be told that behind all the obvious and impossible features of civilization, behind all the social organization and personal intercourse of a great community, lay a whole other world of spiritual culture, round about him, yet beyond his ken, he would no more supect its existence than a cat in London suspects the existence of finance and literature."
-Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men IN Stapledon, Last And First Men/Last Men In London (London, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972), pp. 5-327 AT XV, p. 284.

Finance and literature are very different from each other yet, physically, both are marks on paper. All that the cat can do is to see and smell the paper. What might be undetectable and incomprehensible to us in a future civilization or even in a currently existing extraterrestrial civilization? Poul Anderson is on it -

Four million years after 50,000 AD, the time projector brings Martin Saunders (in "Flight to Forever") to a city where he sees and senses:

titanic, looming, wavering, blurring, ever-changing structures;
throbbing, pulsing forces;
flashing, roaring, booming energies;
hissing, stinging air;
unreal-seeming light;
a thought that addresses him as a creature out of time and tells him to leave because otherwise the forces of the city will destroy him.

Unlike the cat or the dog, Saunders at least understands that there is much here that he does not understand.