Does your cat just think of you as a gigantic cat? Maybe. But what do other animals think?! Let’s interview this star-nosed mole to find out.

Background:

When humans draw pictures of animals, they usually “human”-ify them in ways that don’t really make any sense: for example, adding eyebrows to a fish, or adding a face to a jellyfish.

Humans also typically represent an animal as whatever is “most noteworthy” about it to a human: for example, a spider might be drawn as basically just a circle with 8 lines coming out of it. The main element, to a human, is “eight legs.”

But the question is: how would OTHER animals think of humans?

Proposal:

Figure 1 proposes some ways that other animals might draw humans.

Fig. 1: According to the world’s greatest cat-ologists, cats supposedly see humans as basically a giant cat (https://www.google.com/search?q=cats+see+humans+basically+a+giant+cat).

Animals with particularly distinctive “weird” features might also project those features onto a human, much as a human might add human eyebrows and eyes to a cartoon snake / fish / worm / etc.

Fig. 2: The alarmingly-proboscis’d star-nosed mole (https://www.google.com/search?q=star+nosed+mole: trigger warning: mole) might think of human hands as being basically equivalent to the star-nosed mole’s weird nose.

It’s unclear how exactly a snake would go about drawing, what with the no-hands and all, but might think of humans as shown in Figure 3.

Fig. 3: A snake might just think of a human limb as being “basically a weird faceless snake,” thus resulting in this strange four-snake combination animal.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, more zoological research is necessary to confirm / deny the theories proposed above.

PROS: I guess there aren’t really any “pros” or “cons” of this idea.

CONS: See the “pros” section.

Originally published 2025-07-07.