The Unadulterated Cat Read online

  The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth has already been touched on. Other possible defences are:

  1. The Things that Rattle, Bang, Whizz and Whirr

  Look, these don't scare anything. Well, all right, maybe moles. Come to think of it, we haven't had any moles since installing them. We've never had any moles, actually.

  2. The Wire Maze

  Real cats step over it.

  3. Chemical warfare, including the Mysterious Blobs, the Terrible Dust and the Curious Gungy Stuff

  Since it always rains incessantly imediately, this barrage is laid down, we've never found out if any of them work. Anyway, we always feel vaguely uneasy about this sort of thing. Probably there's some international Accord that no one's bothered to tell us about.

  The point is that the cat's desire to get onto your pitiful plot is far greater, believe me, than your desire to keep it off. When Nature calls, it shouts. Which leads us on to:

  4. The Big Roll of Wire Netting

  The gardener's friend. Watch their Expressions when They Find An Impenetrable Barrier of Steel laid Above Your Precious Seeds!!!

  You can make little wire bootees for the beans, too, and encase the lower parts of your more valuable apple trees in demure corsets of wire. The snags are 1) a garden that looks like an MoD instalation, 2) a tendency to trip up, and 3) the fact that plants grow through the wire.

  This doesn't matter with things like onions, but we left it too late with the potatoes and they had to be dug up as a unit. But if you can't tolerate this, your only recourse is:

  5. The Catapult

  But we're not that kind of people.15

  The Real cat and children

  Ah. They can grow up together.

  Well, not really. By the time the average child is no longer doing Winston Churchill impersonations the kitten has grown up and, unless Measures have been Taken, has a family of its own. Kittens and children get on like a house on fire—and just think about what it's actually like in a house on fire…

  A Real kitten in a Real household with a junior member can expect to be:

  1) pulled

  2) pushed

  3) imprisoned in Cindy's bedroom with Cindy, Mr T in one of Cindy's dresses16, a one-armed teddy bear, a fearsome Madeofplasticoid with Lazer-zap cannon and a small pink pony

  4) fed unsuitable food. In this category can be included peas, ghastly sweet pink goo, and a fortnight's worth of Kittytreats in three minutes

  5) inserted into unsuitable clothing (cf. Cindy, Barbie, Action Man, etc).

  6) carried around by being held in the middle, so that large amounts of cat flop down on either side. (Strangely enough, most cats put up with this, even when they are great fat neutered toms. It's like all that business with unicorns. Only young maidens can get away with it. The rest of us need stitches.)

  It's not that children and young animals get along especially well. It's just that young animals aren't experienced enough to know what's going to happen. Stick to puppies. They're practically childproof.

  The cats we missed

  As has been mentioned already, Man has throughout history tried to overcome various deficiencies—his inability to outrun a hare, dig up a badger, bite lumps out of a burglar's behind, carry brandy barrels through deep Alpine snow, etc—by breeding a variety of dog to do it for him. The dog, in fact, has been a kind of handy Plasticine, rolled out thin or squeezed up fat to suit the demands of the time.

  Since speculating on what things might be like if history had been different is now thoroughly acceptable in the best scientific circles, the research branch of the Campaign for Real Cats started to wonder what might have happened if dogs hadn't been so handy.

  Perhaps there was a great plague, for example, or all dogs were wiped out by a series of devastating but amazingly accurately pinpointed meteor strikes back in the lower Obscene Age. They also uncovered some early experiments hitherto unheard of.

  Winding forward to the new-look Present Day, then, we would have seen:

  The Bullmog: Bred originally in the 14th century for the purposes of bull-baiting. However, this was not a very successful experiment and led almost instantly to the virtual extinction of the breed since it could not, when faced with an irate bull, overcome the instinct to jump on it, try to trap it on one paw, throw it in the air, etc.

  Smoocher: Something of a mongrel and a favourite with poachers, the Smoocher combines elements of the Eeke, the Bullmog and anything else that happened to be passing and couldn't run away fast enough. It is renowned for its intelligence and cunning. It is so intelligent and cunning, actually, that it is very difficult to get it to do any work at all. Its preferred way of catching rabbits, for example, is to send them a brief note consisting of letters snipped out of newspapers, making them an offer they can't refuse.

  King Charles' Lapcat: Familiar to everyone. Note length of ears.

  The Eeke: The smallest cat in the world. The Eeke was originally bred as a court pet of the H'sing H'song emperors, and was not introduced to occidental cat fanciers until the 17th century. It was, initially, a toy for high-born ladies but it was soon found to be extremely useful since it was the same size as the mice, and could go down their holes and mug them on the corners. Mouse-baiting, using trained Eekes, was a popular pastime among the sporting classes for a while. This caused long-term problems, however, since the more intelligent Eekes realised that with the mice wiped out and the walls of an entire manor house at their disposal there was no need to come out. They are still a nuisance in some parts of the country where, apart from the theft of food, the purring of an entire breeding colony can keep guests awake at night.

  The Tabby Retriever: Likely to be seen in the back of the kind of cars that are driven by people who wear green wellies and those jerkin things apparently made out of flattened mattresses. Originally a guncat, the Tabby Retriever was renowned for chasing the quarry, letting it go, chasing it again, pouncing on it, and bringing half of it back to the owner.

  The Smog: A cat bred, quite simply, to fight other cats. Owing to an unexplained occurrence of Lamarckian heredity, the Smog lost its ears in the 16th century, its tail—which opponents could hang onto—in the 17th century, and most of its hair in the ring, while its claws and teeth lengthened and toughened. An ordinary cat, going up against a Smog, might as well run into an aeroplane propeller. Good with children.

  Dachskatz: An affectionate pet, often referred to as the “sausage mog”. Popular in the home that can't afford draught excluders. Also, the only cat that can brush up against the front and the back of your legs at the same time.

  The St Eric: Many a weary traveller, half-buried in the snow, has hauled himself out and kept himself warm at the sheer rage of seeing a St Eric curl up and go to sleep twenty yards away. They were never a great success, since they depended on a cat's natural sense of charity and benevolence.

  The Pussky: Much used by lazy Eskimos, trappers, Mounties, etc. Refuses to go out in cold weather.

  The Snufflecat: This breed came into its own in the American South, when it was used to track escaped slaves and convicts, who were very lucky escaped convicts and slaves indeed because, although the Snufflecat has a superb sense of smell, it doesn't know what to do with it.

  The German Sheepcat: Never very good with sheep, actually, but a great favourite with police departments across the world. The cat's natural tendency to rub up against people has, in these 150lb specimens, become a desire to smash open doors and knock people to the floor, where they are drooled on.

  (The most famous German Sheepcat was the film star RanCanCan, who had a spectacular if somewhat brief career in the 1940s. Faced with bridges being washed away ahead of speeding express trains, or fire breaking out in tall orphanages, or people being lost in ancient mine workings, RanCanCan could be relied upon to wander off and look for something to eat. But very, very photogenically.)

  The future of the Real cat

  If you're prepared to accept the Schrodinger theory, then it
is rosy—in fact, the last man on Earth will probably look out of his bunker and find a cat sitting there patiently waiting for the fridge to be opened.

  Actually, theories don't come into it. Real cats are survivalists. They've got it down to a fine art. What other animal gets fed, not because it's useful, or guards the house, or sings, but because when it does get fed it looks pleased? And purrs. The purr is very important. It's the purr that does it every time. It's the purr that makes up for the Things Under the Bed, the occasional pungency, the 4 a.m. yowl.

  Other creatures went in for big teeth, long legs or over-active brains, while cats just settled for a noise that tells the world they're feeling happy. The purr ought to have been a pair of concrete running shoes in the great race of evolution; instead, it gave cats a rather better deal than most animals can expect, given Mankind's fairly unhappy record in his dealings with his fellow creatures. Cats learned to evolve in a world designed initially by nature but in practice by humans, and have got damn good at it. The purr means “make me happy and I'll make you happy”. The advertising industry took centuries to cotton on to that beguiling truth, but when it did, it sold an awful lot of Cabbage Patch dolls.

  You've got to hand it to Real cats.

  If you don't, they wait until your back is turned and take it anyway.

  It's nice to think, though, that if the future turns out to be not as bad as people forecast, ie, if it actually even exists, then among the domes and tubes of some orbiting colony, hundreds of years from now, dynamic people with sturdy chins, people who know all about mining asteroids and stuff like that, will still be standing outside their biomodule banging a plastic plate with a spoon.

  And yelling “Zut!” or “Wip!”, if they've got any sense.

  1. After considerable heated debate, the Committee wishes it to be made clear that this statement should not be taken to include, in order, small white terriers with an IQ of 150, faithful old mongrels who may be smelly but apparently we love him, and huge shaggy wheezing St Bernards who consume more protein in a day than some humans see in a year2 but understand every word we say, no, really, and are like one of the family.

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  2. The committee, failing despite tremendous pressure to have this phrase removed, haha, have asked it to be amended to “has a healthy appetite for a dog of his age”. This refers to the way the huge snout drops like a bulldozer3 and pushes a bowl the size of a washbasin clean across the kitchen, I suppose.

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  3. The committee can say what they like, but the Chairman, who indeed fully admits never to have experienced the joys and pleasures of dog ownership, intends never to do so, and fully accepts that there are houses where dogs and cats live in domestic harmony, has seen him eat.

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  4. If you meet a vegan it's bad form to give them the famous four-fingered V sign and say “Live long and prosper”. That's for vulcans. Vegans are the ones with the paler complexions who can't disable people by touching them gently on the neck.

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  5. All right, not perhaps a name you'd use every, day, but best to have one ready, just in case, because when you're leaning against the freezing cold water tank trying to staunch the blood with a priceless antique copy of Dante, you don't want to have to tax the imagination.

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  6. If St Francis of Assisi had prided himself on his broccoli, and saw the last little seedling turning yellow because of the ministrations of Itsthatsoddingtomfromnextdoor, he would have done the same thing.

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  7. Apart from the garden fork, and this isn't that type of book.

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  8. Or the cauliflowers and leeks, naturally.

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  9. ie, uncertain. Because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle.

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  10. One that you can't do, and which won't work.

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  11. A 17-member ring ketone, according to my dictionary, as opposed to the mere 15-membered muscone from the musk deer. Does the civet feel any better for knowingthis? Probably not.

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  12. Who invents these scents, anyway? There's a guy walking along the beach, hey, here's some whale vomit, I bet we can make scent out of this. Exactly how likely do you think this is?

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  13. It is: Cats Travelling on Shoulder (Prohibition) Order, 1949.

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  14. This is not the time and place for extensive definitions. Let's just say that the Real gardener is not the same as the Proper (or Radio) gardener. For example, when the Proper Gardener has finished digging, harrowing, sifting, aerating and raking, he has a tilth, possibly even a friable one; when the Real gardener has conscientiously done all these things he has a large heap of stones, roots, twigs and old seed row markers (Country folk used to believe that certain types of stone were “mother stones”, which gave birth to new stones every year; under our garden is a Plastic Seed Row Marker generator.) A Proper gardener has a lawn consisting of Chewings Fescue, Red Bents and Ryegrass; a Real Gardener has moss imbedded with dolls' legs, plastic alphabet characters and clothes pegs. And large areas down to Cat.

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  15. ie, can't aim properly.

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  16. This sort of thing used to happen all the time in our house. I blame television.

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  FB2 document info

  Document ID: a977bf45fe85490b29a4ad4e078ad49f

  Document version: 1.1

  Document creation date: 2005-06-17

  Created using: vim, perl software

  Document authors :

  S&s

  Document history:

  2005-03-16 Initial version

  2005-06-14 Some cleaning

  2005-06-17 Small corrections

  About

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