Mindy Dog looked like an ironing board. If you could get her to stand still, you could use her as a small four-legged tea table. She was a black Labrador Retriever who enjoyed eating just as much as catching ice cubes.
Mindy had an enormous appetite. Food and ice cubes were her priority in her short life as witnessed by her swollen size (see diagram). One thing was certain, when Mindy was hungry, no such thing as peace existed until her dog bowl was filled with crunchy food.
In addition, when her mistress was still alive, Mindy not only finished her food, but then she barked until my mother-in-law repeatedly tossed portions of any edible scrap from her own plate to Mindy—thus maintaining her ironing board girth!
How Dogs Think (Stanley Coren) claims that Mindy has no human-like mental ability because dogs can’t think. Mindy simply acted on instinct. Years ago, William James defined instinct (Scribner's magazine: / Volume 1, Issue 3).
“(Instinct is) the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance.”
When Mindy’s stomach was empty, she demanded food in the only way she knew how—barking. Of course, it may have been the time of day that the dog associated with hunger which made her salivate and begin to carry on. For sure, it never entered her mind that without Friskies, she could not survive.
Flatworm Planaria
Like Mindy dog, a tiny, flat, worm-like creature named planaria must eat to survive. The worm has a strange shape with a definite head and tail end. It ranges from three to twelve millimeters in length. To eat, it extrudes a muscular pharynx tube out through its mouth and into its prey (Biology: The Study of Life, 1993). The tube is on the underside of its body, about 2/3 of the way from the head end.
How does it know when and what to eat? Planaria has a very primitive nervous system. A tiny brain-like thingie is located between its two eyes which, by the way, appear cross-eyed. Somehow, this primordial, many-celled creature is wired to eat and multiply in order to survive. I detest calling planaria’s hard wiring “instinct” because that mystifying word shoves any real understanding of the creature’s eating and regeneration habits back into the unknown.
One-Celled Paramecium
Now, we arrive at the very small. A paramecium is a tiny single-celled organism 
that can best be seen with a microscope. Mostly everyone who has gone to high school has studied one. It is about .02 inches (.5 mm) long and is typically found in pond water. Although microscopic, it is a rather complex creature.
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