This is another video I accidentally shot with the camera on its side (sometimes I do that thinking of it like a picture that can easily be rotated, and only later do I kick myself for having done so). That means I had to rotate it and add the black blocks on either side in order to maintain the original aspect ratio. So it’s a bit smaller than usual, but I think you can see it clearly enough.
Words aren’t always necessary to communicate what we want. Perhaps it’s a gesture or a glance, but we humans pride ourselves in being able to say without our voices precisely what’s on our minds.
Yet it’s another aspect of our unjustified hubris to think such abilities are solely the purview of clumsy upright apes with the ability to speak (but not to think, which should be obvious).
With my fanny firmly planted on the floor one day as I snapped photos and captured videos of The Kids, eventually Grendel had enough and made it abundantly obvious camera time was over. You can see he kept trying to push it out of the way so we could focus our attention on some quality time.
And when that didn’t work? Try a little affectionate rubbing for good measure.
Only at the end, and only if you listen very closely, you can hear him purring. That’s the only sound he made during the entire exchange. Everything else—volumes of information—came across just fine in touches, glances, and all manner of words unspoken. And I heard every one of them.