COUNTRY HUMOR
Playing cat and mouse
By Jack S. Bray

When my cousin and I were still young enough to imagine we might one day become obscenely wealthy, we sat around and tried to think up low-cost ways to get filthy rich.

One day, we dreamed up a dandy. We would build two "Bacon Bin-type" metal structures. In one, we'd raise cats. In the other, rats.

We'd feed the rats to the cats, skin the cats and sell the pelts, and feed the cat carcasses back to the rats. It was a closed-loop, perpetual production system, and we were pretty proud of ourselves for thinking of it. But our merchandising savvy was tackled a yard or two short of remarkable--there wasn't much of a market for cat skins.

It's probably just as well that our rats-and-cats scheme didn't hit pay dirt. I could probably have learned to tolerate rats, but I have never been fond of cats. It's hard for me to warm up to anything that licks its feet.

I am moderately fond of some dogs, but I intensely dislike cats. For one thing, a cat's idea of a good time is to kill something. To me, a cat is a mobile hairball with an oversized ego.

Cats get a lot of credit for being independent, but the truth is, cats aren't interested in anything that doesn't provide immediate benefit to the cat itself. Did you ever hear of a cat that jumped into the water to save a drowning child? Of course not. A cat would size up that situation as being full of risk with very little personal gain, and he'd stay on the bank.

You cannot teach a cat to fetch anything, not even its supper dish. A Seeing Eye cat? Forget it. A cat that can be taught to guard your property? Not likely.

Cat people either learn to put up with feline self-centeredness or incorrectly identify it as something else. "Oh, look how she loves me," a cat person will say when her cat rubs on the person's ankles with what might be mistaken for affection. The cat doesn't love you. You are just something handy on which the cat can scratch itself.

In fact, it's hard to believe that cats even love other cats. If you've ever listened to what passes for lovemaking in catdom, you know it sounds more like gang warfare.

In hindsight, I'm not disappointed that our cat-skin enterprise didn't take off. If it had, I'm pretty sure I would have been the rat herdsman. My cousin could have the cats, and welcome to them.

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