Feature
Great balls of fur
by Matt Nippert
When cats go to war, where is the United Nations
Marc Ellis, cat person? I’d have picked the former All Black to be more into pugnacious bulldogs or wildly effervescent Labradors, but the juice baron came knocking on Sunday night enquiring about the welfare of his Burmese.
My cat, a long-haired ginger tabby named Mr Griffin, is well-acquainted with his celebrity neighbour. For the past three months, fur has been flying in the driveway, the courtyard and even my bedroom. When two cats go to war, where are the United Nations, honest brokers and armed peacekeepers?
Ellis has a fine-looking feline that I’m sure is a loving ball of fur around the home. But beneath the well-groomed coat seems to lie a local warlord with the growl of a Mongolian throat-singer trying to dislodge a diesel lawnmower from his oesophagus.
Of course Mr Griffin is always quiet (except when awake, hungry or both) and sweet-tempered (except towards birds and the occasional bare ankle). He also sports scars from a recent visit to the vet’s, where a straw was jammed through his head to drain an infected cut.
The assailant in that medical case, the Burmese, had a sore leg and Ellis was polling the neighbourhood as to how such an injury could have occurred.
“Would this be the same cat,” I asked, in a spirit of pure enquiry, “that, after leaping on mine, took being drenched with a pan full of water as an invitation to stand sodden and staunch and hiss some more? And the same one that came through the cat door at 3.00am, jumped onto my bed and carried on fighting?”
“Well,” replied a somewhat mollified Ellis, “you can’t do much about cats.”
Or can we? Given the anguish, legislation, zero tolerance and capital punishment for similarly behaving mutts, surely there must be a way for New Zealand to deal with Dangerous Cats?
The Dog Control Act has banned whole breeds and designates dogs that are a threat to people, domestic animals or poultry as “menacing” and requiring a muzzle when outdoors. For cats, a muzzle would not be enough. Little boxing gloves can surely be manufactured to cover their claws.
Although dogs can jump, a two-metre fence is an impenetrable barrier. But cats climb like Spider-man, so more extreme measures are needed. Enormous steel cages would do the trick, but turning properties into aviaries might not be positive for property values.
Retired Detective Inspector Graham Bell, host of Police Ten 7, once confided to me his favourite dangerous dog story. After being bitten on the posterior while on duty, the straight-up cop returned to the station, checked himself out a Smith & Wesson pistol and returned to the gang property to extract legitimate justice.
Any politician authorising such action would use up more than nine lives. Televised scenes of flak-vested policemen gunning down domestic cats would do more damage to government credibility than any Ian Wishart investigation.
Humans’ love affair with the cat goes back 9500 years, but somewhere along the line recessive breeding has resulted in the loss of the two genes necessary for cats to taste sweetness. Now bitterness and flesh is all they crave: a hard-wired quest to kill. If they didn’t sleep for 16 hours a day, they would probably have wiped out all rodents and birds and moved further up the food chain.
But even the act of asking questions about Felis catus is enough to land you in hot water. In 2001, a Listener cover story on the dangers of cats to flightless native birds was headlined: “Ban the cat!” Writing in response, the SPCA’s Bob Kerridge complained about “an obscene portrayal of our beloved cats” and “an attack on the country’s most popular companion animal”.
(Love of animals, however, is hardly a prerequisite for sainthood: Joseph Stalin had one – Samson – as did the crones in Macbeth – Grimalkin. In Roald Dahl’s The Witches, the cat was Lipshen.)
The flow of outraged correspondence continued for three months, drying up only when planes simultaneously crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania and people began to worry about international terrorism.
My neighbourhood is hardly Ground Zero or downtown Baghdad, and violence hasn’t solved either of those problems, but I’m arming myself. With a water pistol.
