Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [17]
We had a cat who got adopted by a bird. George the Second had once been chased and bitten by one of my sister’s white mice, and this may have shaken his confidence or confused his sense of his role in life, and he was one of the peaceable grays to begin with. When the baby blue jay started eating out of his bowl on the porch George just backed away into a corner, looking baffled, and waited till it was finished. It was a very young bird, probably fallen from its nest and abandoned, and certainly it was a very resourceful one. It stayed on the porch, waiting for George’s twice-daily bowl of cat food, and it ate first, and George twitched his tail and looked put-upon. It grew. It took to following George everywhere, on foot. Birds apparently learn their identities from their parents, and identify their parents as parents because they supply the food. George supplied the food, therefore he became father to a blue jay child, which presumably thought it was a cat.
What George thought was obvious. He was embarrassed, horribly embarrassed, to walk across the lawn with a yeeping, gaping baby bird trudging after him clamoring to be fed. He tried to be invisible, bending his knees and huddling his head down into his shoulders, and he lashed his tail with impotent disgust. In theory he could have turned around and atomized the cheeky little thing, but it wasn’t acting very much like prey, and besides, the white mouse had bitten him quite hard.
In time the jay grew up and went off to find its own food, but we always wondered what kind of life it had later, and whether it continued to think of itself as a cat, and how this would affect its chances for a sane and normal married life. George was enormously relieved when it left.
Every so often a state’s bird-lovers will band together and try to get legislation enacted that will keep cats under control, duly licensed, and on their own property. In vetoing such a bill in Illinois, then-governor Adlai Stevenson wrote, “It is the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming … Moreover, cats perform useful service, particularly in rural areas, in combating rodents—work they necessarily perform alone and without regard to property lines. The problem of cat versus bird is as old as time. If we attempt to resolve it by legislation, who knows but that we may be called upon to take sides as well in the age-old problems of dog versus cat, bird versus bird, or even bird versus worm.”
Cats give legislators a lot to worry about. It’s illegal in Natchez for a cat to drink beer, and illegal in Morrisburg, Louisiana, for a cat to chase a duck down the city streets.
Another common complaint is the cruelty of cats. They not only kill mice, they torture them first, apparently for the sheer pleasure of seeing them suffer.
Actually, the business of playing with the catch has to do with the education of kittens in mouse work, and however it may look from a distance, the cat isn’t mangling the mouse, except psychologically; if it were a robin’s egg it wouldn’t break. Killing, when the time comes, is swift and immediate, with a quick bite to the base of the neck that severs the spinal cord, and until then the game has the secondary effect of giving the mouse a sporting chance. I’ve seen quite a lot of them escape from the dallying cat to the safety of their holes. When, in our relentless pursuit of hamburgers, we herd the gentle steer in terror to the abattoir to knock it on the head, it doesn’t have the shadow of a chance, any more than the bull in the bullring after we’ve finished our game.
Not all cats play with their mice. Corvo the battling Siamese is the