The Unadulterated Cat

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Can you recognise a real, unadulterated cat when you see one? Or have you too grown used to the boring, mass-produced cats the advertising industry adores?

Real cats never eat from bowls (at least not the ones marked CAT).

Real cats never wear flea collars ... or appear on birthday cards ... or chase anything with a bell in it.

Real cats do eat quiche. And giblets. And butter. And anything else left on the table. They can hear a fridge door opening two rooms away.

Real cats don't need names. But they often get called them.

Quotes

Many Real cats are instantly recognizable. For example, all cats with faces that look as though they had been put in a vice and hit repeatedly by a hammer with a sock round it are Real Cats.

Almost every non-pedigree unneutered tom is not only Real, but as it hangs around the house it gets Realer and Realer until one of you is left in absolutely no doubt as to its Realness.

Real cats are not simply self-possessed. Nor are they simply neurotic. They are both, at the same time, just like real people.

...Real cats do eat out of bowls with PUSSY written on the side. They'd eat out of them if they had the word ARSENIC written on the side.

A Real cat's aim is to get through life peacefully, with as little interference from human beings as possible. Very much like real humans, in fact.

A certain amount of breeding was necessary to refine dogs from the rough, tough, original stock to the smelly, fawning, dribbling morons of uncertain temper we see today.

Since the only thing [cats] showed any inclination to do was catch things and sleep, no one bothered to tinker with them to make them do anything else.

No, there are perfectly good, well-trained, well-behaved dogs who do not bark like a stuck record, or crap in the middle of footpaths, sniff groins, act like everyone's favourite on mere assumption, and generally whine, steal, and grovel in a way that would put a 14th century professional medicant to shame. ... There are also forgiving traffic wardens, tarts with hearts of gold, and solicitors that do not go on holiday in the middle of your complicated house purchase.

Our garden was debated territory between five local cats, and we'd heard that the best way to keep other cats out of the garden was to have one yourself.

A moment's rational thought here will spot the slight flaw in this reasoning.

Some of the details might be a bit fiddly, but we [humans] ... can look back over our genetic shoulders and see a queue of stumbling figures going all the way back to little crouching shapes with hairy chests, no forehead and the intelligence of a gameshow audience.

Yes. Please, please phone, because they're all big and fighting with one another and some of the males are beginning to take a sophisticated interest in Mum.

Try to avoid inheriting cats unless they come with a five-figure legacy, or at least the expectation of one.

Boot-faced cats aren't born but made, often because they've tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where there was room.

Arch-villian's cats are not Real. This is obvious to anyone who cares to examine the facts. Next Christmas, when once again the TV reminds you that a saviour was born on Earth and his name is James Bond, look closely at the sets. You will find there are no:

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.

Cats don't hunt seals. They would if they knew what they were and where to find them. But they don't, so that's all right.

It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17% of Real cats end their lives with the same name they started with. Much family effort goes into selecting one at the start ("She looks like a Winnifred to me"), and the as the years roll by it suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or Ratbag.

Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top"). -- Getting Real cats to take medication can be a problem

You take the pill in one hand and the cat in the other...

Er...

You take the pill in one hand and in the other you take a large kitchen towel with one angry cat head poking out of the end. With your third hand you prise open the tiny jaws, insert the pill, clamp the jaws shut and, with your fourth hand, tickle the throat until a small gulping noise indicates that pill has gone down.

You wish.

Real cats don't hunt for food, but because they love you. And, because they love you, they realise that for some reason you have neglected to include in your house all the little personal touches that make it a home, and do their best to provide them. Headless shrews are always popular.

Beyond that, you can't teach cats to do anything. No, not a thing. You might think you can, but that is because you've misunderstood what is going on. You think it's the cat turning up obediently at the back door at ten o'clock for its dinner. From he cat's point, a blob on legs has been trained to take a tin out of the fridge every night.

Punishment has no effect on Real cats. This is because Real cats don't associate the punishment with the crime. As far as they're concerned, shouting, slippers on a low trajectory and being talked to in a loud, patient voice are all manifestations of the general weirdness of the blobs.

Offside is a cat game similar to Zen archery, in that it is not what is actually done but the style in which it is achieved that really matters. It consists simply of persistently being on the wrong side of a door, and goes on for as long as human tolerance will stand and then a bit longer.

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.

Who invents [perfume] 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?

Cats make ideal time travellers because they can't handle guns. This makes the major drawback of time travel -- that you might accidentally shoot your own grandfather -- very unlikely. Of course, you might try to become your own grandfather, but having watched a family of farm cats, we can tell you that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a cat.

Animals loose in a car are never a good idea. Goats are generally the worst, but until you realise there's a tortoise stuck under your brake pedal you've never known the meaning of fear, and possibly not the meaning of "old age" either.

In short, the Campaign for Real Cats believes that when you move house the kindest thing you can do to the cat is leave it behind, where it will grieve for .003 second before sucking up shamefully to the new owners.

In fact, as all Real cat owners know, cats get around most problems ... by pretending that they don't exist. Just like us, really.

Kittens and children get on like a house on fire -- and just think about what it's actually like in a house on fire...

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.

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?

You've got to hand it to Real cats.

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