Now That's What I Call Pointless...

There is a cat that lives a few doors down from us. He is rather unusual and thus I have been unable to provide an accurate supporting illustration: suffice to say he looks somewhat like the feline on the left, but is not stuffed with kapok. His fur is sleek, thick, lustrous and a rich silver with black stripes: a miniature snow tiger pacing the streets of suburban London.

My father, always keen on anything that appears to be expensive or exclusive, immediately developed a fondness for this new creature, and can often be spotted engaging in lengthy monologues with him outside our house, monologues mostly consisting of my dad crooning "Aren't you beautiful?" to a mutely adoring audience of one. What the cat lacks in verbosity, however, he makes up for in gung ho confidence. He bounds up to greet total strangers with a fickle friendliness better suited to an under-fed labrador; he jumps over the fence into our garden and sits on the shed roof, looking into our house as if wondering what these strange people are doing on his land; he runs in through the front door if we hold it open too long and - my mother suspects - comes in through our cat door at night to snoop around.

So while my father - further won over by the cat's perceived 'gusto' and/or 'oomph' - continues to speak out in support of the striped cat, my mother and I have decided that he is a cocky nuisance who may, we hypothesize, even be terrorizing our own cats so that they are unable to feel rulers of their own roost.

Consequently, when I was walking down my road this morning and spotted the beast sitting squarely in the middle of the pavement waiting to be admired, I purposefully strode past without giving him a second glance. As I looked back at him (a fatal error in my attempt to persuade the cat that I hadn't noticed him, I now realise), I even allowed myself to think that he appeared somewhat put out and confused that a passer-by had failed to acknowledge his perfection.

However, as I let myself back in to the house, I had to concede that, in reality, my snub was perhaps a little pointless. At base, I was bullying a cat, employing juvenile psychological tactics usually only engaged in a primary school playground. Much as we might anthropomorphosise our pets, freezing them out through emotional warfare probably won't have much of an impact. Although my mother and I have persuaded ourselves otherwise, the cat in question probably doesn't have an ego any more than my own cats understand our logic when we tell them off for sharpening their claws on the sofa, but laugh when they sit in cardboard boxes. I grew out of dressing up our family pets in my dolls' bonnets and cardigans when I was four and my cat, George, wet the bed while 'sleeping' in my toy cot - but it seems that, even aged 29, valuable lessons about domestic animals are still mine for the taking.