cats

i am not much of a pet person, which is lucky considering the state of my flat as i am pretty sure that any pet would soon be lost amongst the junk.
most pet people i know are a little like parents it doesn’t take much to start them off on a tale of wonderment about their gorgeous bundle of fun. most of the time the story leaves me a nonplussed and i just smile and nod in an encouraging manner (but with the hope that the look abject fear that they will tell another story is apparent in my beginning to glaze over eyes).
mind you every now and again you hear a story that makes you laugh.
i was out having a curry with my pal joel the other night when he told me this great yarn. a little bit of background first has become a cat-sitter for one of his friends and this regular event has turned him from a “cat’s are ugh” to “it’s not a cat it’s a person “type of person.
so there we are having the curry (and a very good one it was too – soon i must start writing about the curries i have – i am pretty certain that now i have eaten in each of the curry houses in brick lane!) and he decides to tell me his cat story.
he had come back from a gig and gone to bed at some point in the night he was woken by the cat jumping up on to the bed and deciding to snuggle up against joel. past occurrence if this had been pleasant experiences – something warm furry and purry next to you as you sleep – better than a hotwater bottle and cheaper than an electric blanket! only problem was that this time the cat decided to snuggle past joel’s head and as it went brushed its tail against his mouth. said tail was still damp with cat’s piss. now that is what i call an effective alarm.
the closest i have come to that sort of thing was way back when i was living with my ex and we were having a long lazy snooze in bed on a sunday morning. her cat was purring away (no you smut monkeys her cat and not her pussy) making that noise that could have been either let me out or feed me. i was too tired to know which it was and i was too snugily & comfy to want to get out of bed to find out which it was. it was ok the cat had its own way of letting me know what it wanted. it went to the centre of the room, turned its arse in my direction and then proceeded to do a turd the size of a wedding cake in the middle of the carpet, but this thing that grew from the arse of the cat was not a solid rope of shit. oh no my girlie’s cat had decided to unleash the lava pooh, and in a pretty convincing impression of a cement mixer the cat deposited what seemed to be 3 times it’s bodyweight in shit on the carpet. once finished it gave a wiggle of its tail and walked out. me i turned over in bed and fell asleep again – luckily i didn’t dream.
so what has this got to do with anything you scream? both stories seemed relevant in light of this from the independent newspaper.

wisconsin is in the process of authorising hunters, farmers and anyone who owns a gung to take to the countryside and start shooting cats, no not the big game one the cute little tabby ones. apparently the state has a severe problem with feral cats, with estimates saying that there are some two million of the tabbys out there and they are killing between 47-139 million birds a year (nothing like a little accuracy in your stats is there…) this has led to fireman mark smith to proposal that the feral cats be treated like gophers and skunks and become the target of hunters. all cats not with a collar or not under the control of an owner would be fair game.

the governor of the state, jim doyle, should just be singing this bill and moving it into law however he is not so keen and will not put pen to paper as "i don't think wisconsin should become known as a state where we shoot cats," he said. "what it does is sort of hold us up as the state that everybody is laughing at right now."

unease has not been helped by mark smith’s comments that if you kick a cat out at night you change its status, which implies you make it a target.

while i am not sure that as a hunter i would be overly impressed with the challenge of taking out a cat, even a feral one, i can see that there might be a desire to get all the available breeds to have their heads stuffed and mounted on the wall of the den!

perhaps it is something that could be offered to the disgruntled hunters over here. we could pay for them to go to wisconsin to help in the hunt of the feral cats. or perhaps they could start to claim that there is such a problem in the uk and offer their services to help.

one thing i do know is that given the chance that sunday morning many years ago i do know a cat that i would have happily shot in a mr. shush kinda way. (enjoy that reference pop culture addicts!)