# Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language

Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. This suggests that:

1. Animals are capable of recognizing Schelling points
2. Therefore, Schelling points do not depend on language for their Schelling-ness
3. Therefore, tacit bargaining should be understood not as a special case of bargaining where communication happens to be restricted, but rather as the *norm* from which the exceptional case of explicit bargaining is derived.

# Summary of cat situation

I don't have any pets, so my backyard is *terra nullius* according to Cat Law. This situation is unstable, as there are several outdoor cats in the neighborhood who would like to claim it. Our two contenders are Tabby Cat, who lives on the other side of the waist-high chain-link fence marking the back edge of my lot, and Tuxedo Cat, who lives in the place next-door to me.

```
      |           |
      |  Tabby's  |
      |  yard     |
      |       (A) |
------+...........+--------
      |       (B) |
      |           | Tuxedo's
      |  My yard  | yard
      |           |
|
| --    tall wooden fences

....    short chain-link fence
```

In the first incident, I found the two cats fighting in various locations around my yard. Eventually Tuxedo emerged victorious, and Tabby fled back over the fence into his own yard. Tuxedo looks to be younger and more robust than the comparatively elderly and scrawny Tabby, so this outcome was not surprising.

In the second incident, Tabby and Tuxedo had a staredown through the fence, where they spent almost an hour meowing loudly at each other and refusing to budge from their respective seats (Tabby at A, and Tuxedo at B) a few inches apart, with the fence in between. This appeared to be a symbolic extension of the physical fight from earlier - whichever cat were to retreat first would be taken to concede the territory on the *other* side of the fence. That is, if Tabby retreats from A while Tuxedo is still at B, then this means Tabby will no longer enter my yard; and if Tuxedo retreats from B while Tabby is still at A, then Tuxedo will not attempt to take the fight into Tabby's yard.

> *Scratching is a continuation of meowing by other means.* -- Von Clawswitz

(Because Tuxedo had already established a provisional claim to my yard in the first incident, this seemed more plausible than the other possible interpretation of the staredown, i.e. that the retreating cat would be conceding the territory on the *same* side of the fence.)

As it so happened, Tuxedo backed down first. This surprised me - I was expecting Tabby to retreat, because Tuxedo had already proven that he could win in a fight if it came to that. However, I had not accounted for the home-field advantage, or conversely the importance of leaving your enemy a way out. I now realize that this confrontation had much higher stakes for Tabby than for Tuxedo. Tabby will fight more desperately in his own yard than either cat did in my yard, because if he can't even defend his own yard, he'll have nowhere else to go. Therefore, in a fight over Tabby's yard, Tuxedo is likely to take considerable damage even if he does ultimately prevail, and the risk isn't worth the reward. And it seems that both cats figured this out by meowing at each other for an hour.

> *Leave your enemy a litterbox to piss in.* -- Sunbeam Tzu

# Why the fence?

The settlement seems to have held, and since the second incident I have not seen either cat venturing onto the "wrong" side of the fence. What's funny about this is that the chain-link fence is a more-or-less arbitrary line - again, it's only about 3 feet tall, and any cat can easily see through it or climb over it.

But it's clear that the fence is the only plausible Schelling point in the contested area, and so it sticks. Dividing the territory along any other line would be impermissible in Cat Law.

# If animals have Schelling points, then...

This implies that negotiation is conceptually prior to language. When Thomas Schelling introduces the topic in *The Strategy of Conflict* (ch. 3, pp. 67-9), he explains why the study of tacit bargaining (exemplified in seemingly artificial scenarios where the parties are prevented from communicating with each other) is relevant to the real world:

> The concept of "coordination" that has been developed here for tacit bargaining does not seem directly applicable to explicit bargaining. There is no apparent need for intuitive rapport when speech can be used; [...] Yet there is abundant evidence that some such influence is powerfully present even in explicit bargaining. [...] The "obvious" place to compromise frequently seems to win by some kind of default, as if there were simply no rationale for settling anywhere else.

But now it seems that Schelling doth protest too much - in fact, tacit bargaining ought not to be understood as a special edge-case which is relevant only insofar as it approximates the more general case of explicit (verbal) negotiation. Quite the contrary: The fact that animals can negotiate and discern Schelling points, despite not having language, helps us understand what we humans are doing when we talk about things such as "ownership", "fairness", and other value-laden concepts, whose lack of obvious real-world referents is otherwise apt to engender no end of confusion among various rival meta-ethical philosophies.

> *One has to have a reason for digging one's claws in somewhere; at least, "If not here, where?"* -- Tortoise Shelling