CATS AT COURT

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 60, 4 December 1926, Page 24

CATS AT COURT

STRANGE JAPANESE AND EGYPTIAN CUSTOMS

Enraptured as all modern cat lovers are with their feline pets, their attitude towards them is not quite sq fantastic as that of the Japanese Court ten centuries ago (says “M.A” in the Westminster “Gazette”). In those days—the extravagant, luxury-loving Heian epoch—kittens born in the Imperial Palace at Kyoto (the then capital of Japan) were treated with much the same consideration as was bestowed upon Imperial infants. Courtiers sent the cat-mother the ceremonial presents after childbirth, and there was much competition among the aristocratic ladies-in-wait-ing for the honour of being appointed guardian to the young kittensl Moreover the feline pets ’were given human names and official titles, and on death were buried with elaborate pomp and ritual No likelihood then of a kitten coming to an untimely end by being surreptitiously drowned. In ancient Egvpt cats were treated less like humans and more like gods They had the free run of the temples and the priests guarded them So venerated were the cats by the populace that when one of them died every member of the household shaved his eve-brows; and custom further decreed that the feline corpse should be embalmed before burial. Not that the Egyptian cats led an idle, pampered life. There are sculptured records to show that she was trained to be the companion of sportsmen and to retrieve game much as does a dog in the stubble at a partridge shoot in Europe to-day. There is no doubt that Egvpt. being then- the grannrv of the world, was where pussy first learnt to be a good

mouser, though not, unfortunately, to the eradication of her tree-climbing, bird-snatching instincts. Between the pictured lineaments oi the goddess-cat Bu-Bastic of Egypt and tlie living type of the Abyssinian cat fancied by so many English breeders to-day there is sufficient resemblance in length, limb, and slimness of body and tail to warrant the assumption that the one' breed was the original of the other. Shortness of body as well as of fur distinguishes the Siamese cat. And if not deified like her Egyptian sister four thousand years ago, she is a liv ing symbol without which no royal coronation in Siam is considered complete. On that occasion she signifies happiness in domesticity for the sovereign , and it was one of the finest specimens of the breed—a cream-col otired beauty with china-blue eyesthat was carried by a Court dignitary in the strange procession to the Throne Room in tlie royal palace at Bangkok last February, when the new King of Siam was crowned. Pn;sv fared far less well at a six-teenth-century Coronation in England Instead of being gentlv cradled in human arms, she was thrust—to the number of several score—into a wicker effigv of the Pope and burned alive to make a Reformation holiday And that, too, in celebration of the crown ing of a female sovereign who went down to historv as “good” Oueen Bess' We treat our cats with a difference nowadays. But we hardlv go the lengths of the Persians, who permit cats to glide about at ceremonial banonets in almost as great numbers as the waiters.