Are Mice More Despicable Than Cats?

Why would a comic book that retells the story of how the writer's father survived The Holocaust and how he lived being the son of a survivor to the most similar thing in earth to hell is told with cats and mice and not with human beings at it happened?

People tend to see animals as something less important than human beings but, some of them are perceived more despicable than others as mice that are used in the representation for survivors of The Holocaust and jewish people.

On this blog's entry I am going to explain the big mistake that the cartoonist had when choosing the right animals for the visual novel "Maus".

According to "Discovery", because of adaptation in the era of dinosaurs, what is now known as human being or as homo sapiens sapiens used to be something similar to a mouse (around 66 million years ago), so, wouldn't we all be mice? Why does Art Spiegelman drew cats?

Watch minute 20 with 19 seconds.

If "Discovery" was right, weren't we as human race be highly respectable because of the fast adaptation we have had during these million and million of years and the ability to hide and run because we knew or perceived danger was near? 

As seen in the old show "Tom and Jerry", the mouse was always the one who won, the one who did and thought everything in order to survive so, in that sense, according to the book mice were the survivors and the ones who won (even though many and many died at that place). Why are German then represented as cats? 

Instead of drawing hundreds of different human beings, the Author uses animals, not only because it is easier to do it but because it is a way to differentiate different nationalities and races. He does give some individuality to each mouse letting them use different pieces of clothing, this took no longer time. Mice are always considered as pests, this is also what German people or Nazis particularly thought of Jewish. The mice fought to survive, scavenged food for that and hid as they could from Cats.


If in the visual novel Germans are the one that hunts, capturs, tortures and finally kills as cats do to mice. Polish people are drawn as pigs are as Americans are represented by dogs in a way to tell the reader that they are against cats and will do anything to stop them.

In my opinion, I believe that the author uses daily life animals to represent what could have been seen as "routinary" but it was not as Cats attacked Mice and finally Dogs helped the needy. I used to believe that cats were more important and mice were despicable because of the way our culture influence us, but while reading the comic, I learned to see things which are learnt in a compulsory way somewhat differently.

Sources:

• Maus, Art Spiegelman (1980)
• Discovery's Documental (https://youtu.be/sQBmDHVTNDU?t=20m19s)
• The Simpsons (https://youtu.be/2ni64PzYFY8)