NOBODY OWNS A CAT.

Lake County Mail, Issue 28, 3 December 1947, Page 7

NOBODY OWNS A CAT.

Helpful as they often are, cats cannot be bossed. When a cat makes up its mind what it wants, it goes straight at it. If that try fails, the cat waits its chance and tries again. This singlemindedness is abhorrent to people who aren’t happy unless they’re bossing somebody—they say cats are sly. Cats are the most forthright of creatures, That is why crime is incomprehensible to them, and punishment almost futile. Once a cat finds out that you aren’t going to kill it, nothing short of a deluge is convincing. Nobody owns a cat.Unchanged jor 4,000 years. People have been meddling with cats for 4,000 years, but haven’t been able to change them, writes Margaret Cooper Gay in “How To Live With A Cat.” They haven’t been able to breed extra large cats or extra small cats or lopeared cats. The cats that thrived in Egypt 4,000 years ago looked just like cats to-day. The peculiarities which distinguish the breeds of cat, such as blue eyes, long hair and taillessness, are merely variations which isolation has fixed as types. In every instance the distinguishing characteristic is recessive—ordinary cat and you get mostly common kittens, alia dominant. Cross a Persian with a common cat though one or two may turn out fluffy. Cross a Siamese with a Persian and you get not even, a blending of Siamese and Persian: you get common ordinary kittens. When you consider that a hundred generations of pure breeding can be wiped out in an evening stroll, the i'wonder is that there are any pedigreed cats. Scientists generally agree that cats are colour-blind. As an experiment I bought some vegetable dyes, odourless and tasteless to me, and dyed a piece of veal brieht green. My three cats pawed it tad left it. I tried blue veal, with the

same result. Thinking they might have detected the dye by smell, I put red dye on beef, where it scarcely showed. They ate the beef. I mixed green dye with string beans, and they ate the beans. I coloured their drinking water blue. They stared hard at it, but refused to drink it. Cat’s ears are sharper than ours. My cats used to recognize the footsteps of their human friends five flights down in the noisy city, and went to the door to meet them before I knew anyone was coming.