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junio 2004

     Society has an ambivalent attitude towards cats, they are either loved or hated with few people being truly indifferent to them. While cats are often glorified in paint and prose, the darker side of our relationship with them is often reflected in Urban Mythology, those sting-in-the-tail tales. So many urban myths concern cats, and all too often cats which meet a nasty end, that American urban legends researcher Jan Brunvand calls the genre 'dead-catters'.

     Though primarily interested in what myths tell us about our relationship with cats, I have debunked a few myths at the end of this piece so click on the links if you want to go straight to my comments on bonsai kittens, cabbits, giant mutant kitties or humans catching cat flu.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO URBAN MYTHS

     Most urban myths are pure fiction though they may be reported as true in newspapers. Over time they are exaggerated, distorted and reinvented. Some contain a grain of truth e.g. the "machine-washed kitten" and "car-engine cat" though these hopefully occur less often than the press would have us believe. Some are based on misconceptions: Ragdolls getting their placid disposition due to a car accident (breeders' hype), Maine Coons being a cross between cats and raccoons (because of their raccoon-like tail), and Bengals liking to eat day old chicks (a reporter's invention). Some reflect attitudes towards "freakish" breeds e.g. the animal welfare worker who euthanased a "mangy stray", only to discover it was someone's pedigree Devon Rex/Sphynx (a tale maliciously told to discredit certain welfare groups) - how long before the cat becomes a "poor deformed stray" which is found to be a recently imported Munchkin? The chick-eating Bengal tale reflects a deep-rooted suspicion of anything new, in this case a cat breed with wild-cat genes.

     Although many of the myths seem inhererently anti-cat, they are often enjoyed by cat-lovers. They are recounted for the same reason that we tell scary stories - we enjoy being scared by something we know is fiction, but which has the ring of truth about it. Many myths are based on feline attributes which we can identify in our own cats. "It could happen to Tiddles" we say, knowing that it couldn't possibly happen to dear old Tiddles, but we take extra precautions anyway. Have you stopped to consider what these tales tell us about ourselves, our cats and our relationship with cats?

     According to myth all cats can navigate across whole continents to rejoin their owners. While there are authenticated cases, there are many more cats which remain lost. Yet folklore suggests that ALL cats have an unerring homing instinct - a comforting belief, but one which fuels false hopes.

     A common myth ingredient is the "dotty female owner", partly because a disproportionate number of cat lovers are female. The image of elderly women owning cats (often as their sole companion) has been popular through the ages; the witches of old were usually old crones with feline familiars. Some myths are old wives tales revisited. A pregnant woman allowed her cat to sleep on her lap despite her mother-in-law's frantic exhortations that the baby would be born with a cat's face (an old superstition). When the baby was born - it was perfectly normal, but don't ask me 'ow!

     There is an old chestnut about a cat rescued from a tree by the Fire Brigade. As the heroic firemen drove off they ran over the cat. Suddenly our heroes are reduced to mere fallible humans. During a firemen's strike it was told at the expense of the Army in their Green Goddesses, implying that the Army was less competent than the "real" Fire Brigade. Cats can get stuck in trees and a currently popular tale is that of the vicar's cat stuck up a tree. Unable to reach it, the vicar lassooed the tree branch, tied the rope to his car bumper and reversed the car up the driveway to drag the branch down to arm's reach. Sadly the rope snapped, catapulting kitty across the rooftops, never to be seen again. Weeks later, the vicar saw a parishoner buying cat food and remarked that he didn't know she had a cat. "We were having a barbecue and my little lad was saying how much he'd like a cat when one dropped out of nowhere into his lap," she replied. "It's a really dopey creature - has a sort of phobia about trees. It must have been an act of God."

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HOW DO SUCH URBAN MYTHS GET STARTED?

     Some urban myths may begin as half-remembered events while others are pure imagination. Kitty Goodwin wrote to me that she knows exactly how the latter type of tale begins. A bus driver who knew Kitty loves cats, maliciously spread the rumor that she owned 50 cats and that her house smelled bad. The driver kept on asking Kitty how many cats she had. Kitty got fed up with being asked the same question and kept changing the number, growing more and more ridiculous each journey. When she got to 100 cats, the bus driver finally gave up.

     Then for reasons known only to herself, the bus driver began to regale the other local bus drivers with a malicious tale along these lines:

     When Kitty got married, her husband owned a parrot and she owned a cat. Her husband hated cats, but said he would try to tolerate his wife's pet. Then one night, the cat sneaked into the room where the parrot was perched. He caught the parrot and ate him. Kitty's husband came in and found only the feathers. He grabbed the cat, put him up on the kitchen counter, took a big knife and slit the cat open from one end to the other. Then he removed the parrot, laid it next to the cat on the counter, and said to his wife "Now take them both out to the trash can" and walked out of the room.

     The other bus drivers listened to this story with exclamations of horror and disgust each time it was told. A lot of passengers got to hear it too. The driver who told the story always fixed Kitty with a stare to see if she was upset. In fact Kitty never let on to the fact that she could barely keep from laughing. Other drivers and passengers looked horrified, but no-one ever thought to ask her the question that prompted her humor: "How did the cat swallow the parrot whole, so that the husband could remove the parrot from the cat and lay it out on the counter beside him?"

     Kitty told me that it took even more of a mental stretch to imagine the cat allowing itself to be vivisected on a kitchen countertop - it would result in about a hundred stitches for the husband and an escaped cat. Despite the number of people who heard, and passed on, this tale Kitty never got a visit from the SPCA who obviously recognize a proto-myth when they hear one. Personally I'm just amazed that Kitty put up with this verbal victimization for so long.

     As for how an existing myth gets kicked into renewed life, imagine this scenario: A disgruntled employee of a Chinese takeaway starts malicious rumours about his employer having a freezer full of cat which is being passed off as rabbit.

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A CAT EAT DOG WORLD?

     Many folktales include our cats' arch-enemies, dogs. Such as the couple who smuggle a sick Chihuahua home from Mexico and their cat attacks it. The distraught pair take their new pet to the vets only to discover it is a giant, rabid rat! In this case the cat is a hero, but in similar myths the cat mistakes a Chihuahua puppy for a rat, which reflects a common attitude towards tiny dogs as much as any view of cats as bloodthirsty predators.

     In another dog/cat myth, a dog-owning woman is feeding a neighbour's cats while the neighbour is on holiday. She is horrified to discover that her dog has apparently killed one of the cats shortly before the owner is due back. She rushes the poor animal, which is matted with mud, to her vet who pronounces it dead so in desperation, she shampoos and blow-dries the deceased and places it on the sofa so it appears to have died in its sleep. When the owner returns, there are hysterical screams. Poor Fluffy had died and been buried just before the holiday; but some sick prankster has placed his mortal remains on the sofa.

     Occasionally, the dog owner buys a replacement cat and the shocked owner finds a bewildered cat on the sofa. Sometimes the owner "dies of shock" thinking Fluffy had been buried alive or has returned from the grave. Sometimes the bewildered replacement cat panics and acts "like some demonic undead creature". This tale also falls in the "substitute cat" section further on.

     Although there are genuine reports of antipathy between neighbours who own conflicting pets, the dog in the tale is more a victim of circumstance than a real villain and any vet would recognise a several-days dead cat, surely? This tale appears in many forms, sometimes the deceased is a rabbit or racing pigeon "killed" by the neighbour's cat. Urban myths are constantly updated and this tale received a new lease of life following the "hurricane" - the feline victim had been renowned for teasing the dog from the top of a tall fence and the less-than-miraculous resurrection took place after the fence blew down.

     The most common form is the "hare-drier" or "resurrected rabbit" myth where a night-prowling cat brings home the neighbour's rabbit all matted with mud and blood. The panicking owner gives bunny a wash and blow dry and puts it back into the hutch before daybreak. The rabbit's owner cannot believe that some sicko has resurrected the bunny who died a day or so earlier and put him back into the hutch like some returned from the grave undead creature. Sometimes the cat's owner rushes bunny to the emergency vet clinic where it is pronounced dead; this leaves the owner to find a dead-ringer for the rabbit in time for daybreak.

     The "resurrected rabbit" and its feline variants is a simple farce and comedy of errors, timing and misunderstanding.

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THE FOOT-LICKING CAT

     This alarmist ailurophobic myth received publicity on Saturday 15th July 2000 on the BBC Radio 4 morning show 'Home Truths'. Listeners had written in about cats which enjoyed licking feet. One listener left a phone message telling them to get rid of the cats - someone once had a cat which licked her feet and one day it bit her and she died! Unfortunately the radio show chose to air this myth, causing consternation among cat owners and cat charity workers whose shelters are already overwhelmed with unwanted cats and kittens. The last thing shelters needed was a revival of a killer-cat urban myth. 'The Foot-Licking Cat' or 'Vampire Cat' urban myth runs like this:

     A friend's mother-in-law had a very affectionate cat which loved to lick her feet. It licked and groomed her feet just like it would groom another cat. Sometimes when she was dozing by the fire, the cat would knock her slippers off and lick the soles of her feet. The rasping of its rough little tongue soon woke her up - especially at pussy-cat feeding times when it gently nibbled her toes to remind her of the time.

     One evening, she was slow to wake and the cat became impatient. Having licked the soles of her feet and nibbled her toes to no avail, it bit her ankle hard enough to draw blood. Unfortunately it punctured a major blood vessel and the owner bled to death right there in front of the fire. And the real scary thing about it, when my friend's husband found the body, the cat was still licking the blood from the mother-in-law's feet!

     In some versions, in case the thought of a Cat Dracula is too far-fetched, the woman gets an infection from the cat bite and dies of blood poisoning. As everyone knows, cats' carry all sorts of diseases.

     Although the infection scenario is more plausible it is still unlikely. The tale is set in England which is rabies-free hence the horror-value of being killed by a cat bite. Cats do have more bacteria in their mouths than do dogs, but cat bites and scratches rarely cause anything worse than localised infections. A few people are susceptible to 'cat scratch disease', have serious allergies or compromised immune systems, but the tale doesn't mention any underlying causes - the cause of death is the cat.

     Regardless of ending used, this myth suggests that cats can't be trusted. Even when being affectionate, they have ulterior motives - cupboard love. In this case, not only did the cat have an ulterior motive for its affection, it showed its untrustworthiness by biting the owner and causing her death. The fact that the cat didn't intend to kill her is, of course, immaterial; the untrustworthy nature of felines is the 'moral' of the tale.

     In the UK there is only one documented case of a cat causing its owner to bleed to death and there were contributory factors such as an elderly owner, weak blood vessels and failure of blood to clot (our ability to heal ourselves deteriorates with age). A cat greeted its elderly owner by standing and patting her leg, as cats often do. One of its claws caught in her nylons and caused a scratch deep enough to open a weak blood vessel. The owner lost a considerable amount of blood and died, but the cat was not wholly to blame as, in this isolated case, any serious scratch might have had the same result.

     One response to the cat-licks-feet myth is to suggest that owners get rid of their cats if they develop a foot-licking habit since sooner or later the cat will bite the appendage and the owner will die a horrible death from either blood poisoning or loss of blood. In reality, cats lick feet (and skin in general) because of the salt taste of sweat. It is also a mutual grooming activity; the cat grooms its owner as though grooming another cat or kittens. Sometimes the cat nibbles very gently at the skin as though tackling knotted fur. Certain skin creams can trigger licking because of the taste. I had one cat who loved Body Shop Peppermint Foot Lotion and Body Shop Cocoa Butter. I had to stop using these as there was a danger of the cat ingesting them and of my feet being licked raw!

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MATRIMONIAL MOGGIES AND CAT FOOD FOLKLORE

     Cats have been known to cause marital stress due to jealousy and sometimes only the intervention of a pet shrink has restored normal relations in a cat-centric household. Some owners are devoted to their pet to the exclusion of their family, a situation reflected in the tale of a wife who reached breaking point because her husband paid more attention to the cat than to her. In an attempt to get his attention, she cooked him a delicious casserole. "That was delicious," her husband commented, before commenting that he hadn't seen Tiddles all evening. In reply, the wife pointed silently at the bones on the side of his plate. This tale of revenge is a comment on the English taboo regarding the eating of cats (and dogs). Our pets are often child-substitutes and to eat them is tantamount to cannibalism. It would receive a "so what" reaction in countries where cats form a normal part of the human diet.

     In a tale of matrimonial disharmony, a woman fed up with her beer-swilling husband falling asleep on the sofa every Saturday night waited for him to start snoring then tucked a chicken neck into his flies. The poor man awoke to find the family cat chewing on his wedding tackle - and he hadn't felt a thing. Naturally he never touched another drop. Here the opportunist cat isn't victim, villain or hero, but an instrument of revenge (much as in the casserole tale) and the drunken husband is the real victim.

     Elsewhere, the cat is merely a device which precipitates chaos, as in the tale of the poor chap dragged out of the shower to unblock the kitchen sink. As he lay starkers under the sink, the family cat decided to investigate the open cupboard - typical feline curiosity. As Puss walked across the poor chap, its claws snagged a delicate part of male anatomy and the man shot bolt upright, banging his head on the pipework and causing the cat to hang on even tighter. The embarrassed wife is left to explain to paramedics (who suspect matrimonial violence) why her unconscious husband is bleeding in two such diverse places! In the best tradition of farce, the tale relies on bad timing, human embarrassment at nudity, and misunderstanding for its humour.

     If a poorly trained cat can wreck a relationship, what about the over-trained cat in the cautionary myth about a lonely bachelor who had trained his Siamese cat to leap affectionately onto his shoulders as he walked in the door? One day he invited a girlfriend home. He ushered her through the door in gentlemanly fashion, but forgot to tell her of his cat's welcoming trick. The poor woman screamed and bolted as the apparently rabidly jealous cat leapt at her throat. Is this to do with a cat's supposed jealousy or is there something sinister about the intelligent Siamese cat? Maybe it's just a warning to those of us who try to train our cats.

     A more recent addition to the matrimonial section of feline folktales appears to be based on real events. The man of the house informed his wife that the new breakfast cereal was a bit crunchy, though okay with milk, and maybe she could buy something different next time. When he indicated the tub from which he had served the offending meal she informed him that he had just eaten dry cat food which was stored in an identical tub. Later that day she asked him if he was feeling any ill-effects from his breakfast. The poor chap just looked at her and pathetically said "meow". Most of us are repelled at the thought of eating cat food even if it looks and smells good enough for human consumption (Spillers adopted this theme in their "Purrfect" adverts).

     Interestingly, cat food varieties are designed to appeal to human taste preferences and to our own senses of sight and smell and are reputedly sampled by human tasters. There is a told-as-true tale of the would-be cat food salesman who demonstrates his sales technique at an interview by tucking into a foil tray of gourmet cat food and announcing "tastes good to me" as he finished his meal. Cat food manufacturers are welcome to enlighten me as to the veracity of this tale. Seriously though, at one of 1994's big cat shows, the "Max Cat" representative demonstrated Max Cat dry cat food by eating it himself and favourably comparing it to party snacks (actually it tasted okay) and a Hills rep admitted to eating a sachet of "Science Diet" when her lunchtime relief failed to show!

     In the earliest days of tinned cat food, many a person has apparently made sandwiches out of leftover "meat roll" they found on a saucer in the pantry and reported it to be quite tasty. However tales about people who have cooked and eaten cat food either by mistake or because it was cheap, invariably make us go "ugh" at the mere thought of eating pet food.

     Regardless of all the gourmet cat foods available, most cats will scavenge unattended human food if given a chance and you've surely about the hostess who found Puss nibbling the trout quiche (or salmon sarnies, prawn vol-au-vents etc) destined for that evening's party. She disguised the damage, but after the guests had gone she found Puss unconscious on the doorstep. She rang the guests telling them to get their stomachs pumped since Puss - who had sampled the quiche - appeared to have been poisoned. Next day her milkman called to say he had dropped a crate on Puss's head. He had rung the doorbell but no-one had heard him over the noise of a party in full swing so he'd placed the dazed cat by the back step to recover. On learning that they'd eaten cat-tainted food, her friends never visited again. However much we love our cats, we seem unwilling to eat from the same plate!

     A variation on this is the tale of the woman who cooks chicken for dinner party. Worried that the chicken breast might be "off" she gives the cat a piece and is relieved that the cat finds it acceptable. The dinner party proceeds without a hitch and the guests enjoy their meal. The woman goes to fetch dessert only to find her cat retching and choking in the kitchen. In a panic, she tells her guest that the cat - on whom she tested the chicken for freshness - has acute food poisoning and that they should make haste to hospital to have their stomachs pumped before they too become ill. Then, without a thought for her own wellbeing, she rushes the cat to the emergency vet who diagnoses a hairball!

     I have always classed this as a myth. In January 2001 I received a first hand account of the cat-and-milkman tale from our Computer Services area:

     When Paul from Computer Services was a lad, his dad was the village milkman and Paul often helped out on Saturdays. One day Paul was catching up with him and he was chatting to a lady on her step. Paul's dad asked "How is your cat" The woman answered that the vet couldn't find anything wrong with it but the cat continued to vomit. The lady then went on to say that she assumed it was food poisoning and the only possible cause of this was the left-over Fish pie that she had made for dinner the previous night. To prevent a possible illness she had herself and her husband force-vomit and this made him so ill he ended up in hospital with a stomach muscle problem. She finished off with "The cat seems OK to-day". To which Paul's dad said "I only asked because yesterday morning he rubbed against my ankles and I accidentally dropped a pint of Red Top on his head."

     In the following tale, the cat's scavenging habits make it the ideal scapegoat for a human crime. A friend's mother was renowned for her heavenly apple and bramble pies. One day, her husband and son arrived home from the game to find an apple and bramble pie cooling on the kitchen counter. The note next it said 'Don't touch! This is for the school bake sale.' However, they couldn't resist it and before they knew it, they'd eaten the whole pie. Just as they were wondering what to say to the cook, they heard her key in the front door. Thinking quickly, the son grabbed the family cat and smeared its face in apple and bramble leftovers. The bewildered cat trotted up to meet mother who took one look at its pie covered face and booted the perplexed creature out the front door ... straight under a passing bus.

     There are a plethora of nasty tales, all in very poor taste, about cats (or cat food) being served up by unscrupulous restauranteurs. However, this tale combines coincidence with our reservations about unfamiliar cuisine. Unknown to its employers, a factory cat led a double life, alternating between industrial ratter and pampered pet at a house nearby. Eventually, Fang opted for the good life. His absence from work was noticed on the same day the factory canteen became very adventurous with its cuisine and offered a 'meat curry' on the menu. The staff searched the curry for signs of ginger fur, fearing that their skinflint bosses had recycled the ageing ratter. Some time later, the ex-ratter visited his old haunts, fit and fat and sporting a natty cat-collar. He was immediately dismissed on grounds of dereliction of duty and staff were informed that Fang had been 'retired'. Unfortunately that was the very day the canteen offered its latest gourmet dish - chilli con carne - and once again set the worried staff to looking for ginger fur in the suspect meal.

     The following is only loosely "cat food" and is perhaps a tale of cats getting their revenge and of a bad-tempered miser getting his comeuppance. An elderly miser "Old Fred" was well known for hating the stray cats which frequented his garden. Far from putting out food, he did everything he could to scare the scrawny scavengers away including calling the police out at various hours of the day and night. One spring, the neighbours realised that they had not seen Old Fred for some time. Finding his door locked and the milk deliveries accumulating on his doorstep, they called the police. The first thing the police found was about 15 fat and happy cats lounging about the place. This intrigued them - had Old Fred finally made peace with the visiting strays? In the bedroom they discovered the horrible truth - the cats had gained entrance through a broken window which Old Fred had been too miserly to repair. Looking at the well-nibbled remains of the elderly miser they reported that Old Fred may not have fed any cats in his lifetime, but right now he was feeding 15 strays!

     In reality, some cats have resorted to dining on their dead owners. Distasteful as this sounds, a cat trapped in a locked house or apartment with a dead owner soon runs out of food and must resort to eating whatever is available - other pets which have already died of starvation or dehydration or the corpse of the owner. For the cat, it is simply a matter of survival.

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CATS AND CARS

     It is a sad fact of life that many cats fall foul of traffic. While many motorists are considered callous people who enjoy running down cats, there are a good many who have been devastated following an accident involving a cat. One such devastated person was the the lorry driver who hit an animal which had dashed across the road. He got out to see if he could aid the unfortunate animal and to his distress found a cat writhing about on the verge. Knowing it would never survive a trip to the vet he did the most humane thing he could think of and dispatched it with a single blow from a shovel. Halfway up the M1 he was pulled over by the police. An old lady had let Tiddles out to roll about in the grass when a nasty cat-hating lorry driver stopped and attacked Tiddles with a shovel then drove off. When the driver checked his wheel arches he found the sorry remains of the real accident victim. On the face of it this seems to be a sick tale at the expense of the cat, but the compassionate driver is the real victim.

     I have always dismissed the sleeping cat/lorry driver tale as a myth. In January 2001 I finally received a first hand account of a similar tale from colleagues at our Brough, UK site. Nick was driving home when he heard a terrific bang. Looking back, he saw a cat laying outstretched at the side of the road. Walking back to it he noticed that though it wasn't moving it was still breathing. Being a kind considerate animal lover and without a sadistic side to his nature, he looked around for a large brick with which to humanely finish it off. Hoisting the rock above his head to smash down with great force he was startled to hear a woman screaming at him. Amid a tirade of words he had never heard in the bible, he was left dumbly holding the rock aloft as the lady, gently stroking her just awoken pussy, ran back into the house.

     A blackly humourous and completely impossible tale is told of a haulage firm which kept a colony of ratters. The cats liked to snuggle up against the warm tyres of the returning lorries and frequently sustained crushed paws or tails if the vehicles moved. An arrangement with the local vet meant that drivers could whisk an injured cat to the vets. When one driver duly reported an accident, the boss asked if he had taken "Fang" to the vets. "Oh yes, but the vet wasn't in," the driver replied "So I slipped him under the door with a note." Whether this implausible tale is an extension of the compassionate driver motif or a comment on human stupidity I haven't yet worked out.

     Akin to the above is that of the woman who unfortunately runs over a cat late at night despite all attempts to avoid it. She thoughtfully checked the corpse for a collar and finds the cat has a tag with a phone number on. Using her mobile phone, she calls the number and tells the voice at the end that she has sadly run over "Tiddles". "Are you sure it was my cat?" asked the shocked voice at the other end, "What did he look like?" Showing either literal-mindedness or exasperation (or perhaps not being too quick on the uptake), the driver says "mottled brown, very bloody and flat as a pancake." The voice at the other end simply said, "Oh no, you must be mistaken, my cat doesn't look like that at all," and the person hung up.

     There is also the tale about the woman whose pet meets an untimely end on a busy road nearby. A kindly neighbour puts the sorry remains into a carrier bag so it can be taken home for burial, but the owner cannot resist a last peek at Tiddles. She faints at the sight and an ambulance is called. Before it whisks her away, a passer-by hands the paramedics a carrier bag, saying "I think this belongs to her; she was looking at it before she collapsed." Curiosity may have killed the cat, but we humans have a morbid curiosity which can prove to be our own downfall. When a beloved cat dies, very few of us can resist a last look in the vain hope that we are mistaken about its state, even though we may regret that last look.

     The following is a cat-and-car tale with a difference. The joke is on the good samaritan who tries to rescue a cat apparently in distress. This illustrates the other side of our relationship with cats - the nurturing side.

     A woman walking through a shopping mall car park saw a cat shut in a car on a sunny day. The poor creature was prostrate through heat so she used her mobile phone to call the SPCA who contacted the mall's Chief Security Officer. The Mall's security department broke into the car to save the cat's life ... only to discover a life-like, life-size cat toy. I heard that they gave the car driver free parking for life and $500 of shopping vouchers for use in the mall.

     In some versions the cat is a ceramic cat which the driver has put on the back seat so she doesn't have to carry it around. In British versions, the car is sometimes parked in the street outside a shop or house or the ceramic cat is released from a locked porch (British porches are generally glass fronted as protection against the weather; in summer they become stiflingly hot) by a 'well-meaning passer-by'. Most shopping malls offer free parking to mall customers so 'free parking for life' would not have been much compensation for damage to the car. Would-be good samaritans sometimes fall foul of their own desire to help. I have come across one real-life instance where a woman threw food onto a neighbour's garage roof for a trapped cat seen 'cowering' under overhanging branches. The neighbour eventually pointed out that the cat was a law ornament placed there to deter birds from nesting in the branches. Far from being deterred, the birds were enjoying daily cat food banquets.

     The moral of these tales is clear - unless faced with an obviously genuine emergency, check your facts before damaging property. Mercifully for the cats which do get trapped, there are still good samaritans willing to take the risk in a crisis situation. Cats bring out the best in us as well as the worst. The cat in the following tale could have done with a good samaritan to rescue it.

     A friend of a friend was in the habit of leaving his company car sunroof slid open a wee bit to let the fresh air in. Since he had high-grade security fencing and electronically operated gates, it was quite safe for him to leave the car like this during weekends while he was off in his VW camper van. One Friday during a baking hot summer, he arranged for the neighbours to feed his cat, locked the place up and set off for a week's vacation by the sea. Shortly afterwards, he dopey cat decided to sunbathe on the top of the car. It trotted across the roof, failed to notice the open sunroof and fell in. Unable to jump back up through the sunroof, the poor creature's fate was sealed.

     The cat-lover's version tells that poor Fluffy was stuck in the car overnight or for a weekend and the executive, who was driver of a carpool, found a very pungent car and a very hungry cat the next morning. One of my own cats, Motley, spent a night shut in our car in the garage. She is in the habit of spending warm summer nights on the garage roof so her absence wasn't too alarming. Luckily we get up early and when we opened the car door, a very desperate cat made a dash for the flower-bed for a pee. And if you don't believe that cats accidentally fall through open sunroofs - well neither did I until my parents watched our Affy trot across the top of their car and fell through the open sunroof onto the driver's seat. Affy was used to cars which didn't have gaping holes in the roof and wasn't paying attention to where she put her feet.

     Finally, what of those cats which travel long distances under a car bonnet? If all the myths are to be believed, this is a favourite mode of travel for cats, though I've only encountered three genuine cases in mid-Essex over the last 5 years which goes to show the amount of exaggeration involved in modern folklore.

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CLUMSY CATS

     Cats are generally considered to be agile creatures and not particularly accident-prone, facts which can cause a certain amount of jealousy in their human companions. Perhaps this is why there are tales based on accident-prone moggies. For example there is the dotty cat which climbed curtains, but had the unfortunate to fall off. The vet was well used repairing minor wounds, but one day Puss fell off the bathroom blind onto the toothbrush holder and arrived at the surgery with a toothbrush stuck somewhere very uncomfortable. The astonished vet could only exclaim "I know that cats are fastidiously clean, but this is ridiculous!" Pride comes before a fall and it seems that even cat-lovers are secretly amused to hear of a smug cat tripping over its own paws.

     Another less-than-agile cat was in the doghouse for walking along a shelf and accidentally smashing a vase. The owners were secretly delighted, but the relative who'd given them the vase bought them a replacement. Clumsy Puss contrived to smash that one as well. The suspicious relative bought yet a third vase and threatened to visit a few weeks later as she was sure the couple were disposing of her gifts and blaming the cat. While she was there, she watched the cat walk along the shelf and very deliberately paw at the vase, knocking it onto the floor where it smashed. Unfortunately the base of the vase landed at her feet and she noticed a piece of kipper which had been carefully blu-tacked to the underside to persuade Puss to demonstrate his 'accident-prone' tendencies in her presence.

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TECHNO-CATS

     Another ingredient in many urban myths is modern technology. Everybody uses modern gadgets, but no-one seems to trust them; myths rely on the misconception that new-fangled gadgets always malfunction in some way. In this instance the poor cats suffer the consequences of such a malfunction.

     An affluent couple who had recently adopted two fluffy kittens also invested in a state-of-the-art magnetically operated cat flap so that their darlings could come and go as they wished while marauding neighbourhood cats were denied entry. One night the couple were awoken by a great commotion and rushed downstairs to see what was wrong. The collar-mounted magnets were evidently too strong for the kittens since both were firmly stuck to the fridge door, looking for all the world like fluffy animated fridge magnets.

     Of course the weight of a kitten, the strength of the magnet and the elasticated safety insert of the collar makes this an extremely unlikely tale. Only slightly less unlikely are the tales of cats returning home trailing cutlery and scrap iron from their magnetic collars. Here the cat is once again a storytelling device used to highlight the technophobes distrust of such gadgets.

     Another technophobic cat myth (which came to me from Australia) is told of the man who was enjoying the sunshine when his neighbour's cat popped over the fence carrying something flesh-coloured in its mouth. Concerned that the cat was about to maul a helpless baby bird the man ran to the rescue only to discover that the plaything was a severed finger; the result of his neighbour's attempts to use a hedge-trimmer.

     I have known one actual instance of a cat eating a severed digit. A friend (and fellow cat rescuer) accidentally severed his thumb while cutting wood with a powerful circular saw. He tried to find the severed digit to wrap in ice (a bag of frozen peas) for reattachment. Unfortunately his tomcat had reached the severed thumb first. Ironically, my friend had been cutting wood to build a cat run to make his garden safer for the cat.

     There are many tales of the cat owner who is used to popping her Persian into an open oven for a few minutes just to dry its fur after it has been outdoors in the rain. The woman is given a new-fangled microwave by her daughter and not understanding how the device works, she puts a bedraggled Fluffy in there to dry off. luffy is cooked rather than dried. All recorded instances of microwaved pets have been acts of cruelty such as the horrific incident in 2001 when a British woman deliberately microwaved her cat to death after being bitten by a cat flea.

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THE CALAMITYVILLE HORROR CAT

     Another myth which may well be rooted in reality is that of the family whose dream home resembled something from the Amityville horror, complete with strange footsteps, scratching sounds under the floorboards, noxious smells, banshee-like night-time wailing and liquid trickling down the walls, none of which had been mentioned by the previous occupant. Finally a letter arrived from the former occupant asking if they had seen her Siamese cat which had gone missing before the move. When the floorboards were lifted a thin and miserable Siamese emerged from inside the structure of the house where it had been living on mice and 'going about its business' between floors after getting into the loft when the owner was fetching packing boxes. From there it had worked its way around the various cavities trying to escape. Woven into this myth is the cat's natural curiosity and its ability to get itself into tight places, but not necessarily out again. A friend of mine swears that her Siamese cat crossed from her loft into her neighbour's loft where it scared the living daylights out of them with its eerie wailing. This myth usually concerns a Siamese cat, probably due to that unearthly wail.

     Also relying on the cat's love of investigating nooks and crannies, and its supposed love of fish dinners, is the tale of the lady who rewired her home by attaching the cable to her cat's collar and popping it under the floorboards. A plate of coley by a lifted floorboard elsewhere in the house brought the cat - and cable - to its destination. Of course, the electricity board cannot understand how she managed to do the job without damaging any carpets.

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THE CAT AND THE CHICKEN-CANNON

     This is another tale of feline curiosity being the cat's downfall. A chicken cannon fires an oven-ready chicken into a stationary airplane engine, cockpit window or train windshield, giving the same effect and damage pattern as a bird flying into the speeding aircraft or train. This helps designers build more damage resistant engines etc. The chickens are delivered in frozen form, usually as rejects from the food chain and there's a widespread tale of busted engines due to novice testers forgetting to defrost the chickens beforehand. There is also this tale from aerospace engineer David Gillon:

     The guys from Rolls are setting up the chicken cannon for a birdstrike test on their latest airplane engine. The guys load the chicken into the barrel, even remembering to thaw the bird first. By the time the cannon is set up, it's almost lunchtime so the team decide to go for lunch and run the test afterwards. An hour later they come back from the canteen, prime the gun, start the airplane engine and fire the chicken into it. That done, they start to examine the gunked-up engine and realise two things. Firstly, there are scraps of tabby fur amongst the feathers, minced chicken and secondly, no one has seen the works cat since before lunch ...

     Another aerospace worker, Robin Hill, first heard a version of this tale from BAe Hamble. According to the tale, they were doing birdstrike testing on Harrier windshields and a test that the windshield was expected to survive actually failed. The tests used oven-ready chickens from the local Sainsbury supermarket because they could get consistent sizes of bird for repeatability of test conditions. The frozen chickens were defrosted in a microwave, and the feral moggies on site were attracted to the smell of defrosted chicken. When the high-speed camera film of the failed windshield test was checked, a large, black and extremely surprised cat was seen to impact the windscreen. The gun in question was later moved to Brough.

     Though the scenario sounds plausible, according to Robin, the big problem with this story is that the chicken cannon has a long and very slender barrel. It would take a particularly skinny (not to mention incredibly stupid) cat to get down the barrel of the gun - and it's hard enough to get a cat to go into a reasonable spacious cat carrier with the promise of chicken at the far end. Also, there wouldn't be any feathers on the oven-ready chickens. There are still plenty of cats at the Brough site.

     These gruesome tale of curiosity killing the cat are circulated among former British Aerospace employees who have visited airplane test facilities. Quite probably, train windshield testers have their own chicken-gun cat versions involving the station cat.

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THE SUBSTITUTE CAT

     To their owners, cats are individuals with easily recognisable personality traits. To non-owners, cats tend to look very much the same and non-cat-people find it hard to distinguish individual cats by their personalities. The following tale uses this 'all cats are alike' premise as its plot.

     A friend of a friend of mine was asked to cat-sit for a neighbour's doddery old tabby cat while they were working abroad for three months. It wasn't hard work - just pop in twice a day to feed it, scoop the litter box and unlock the cat flap in the morning then lock it up at night. Two weeks into the cat-sitting the cat died peacefully in its sleep and the cat-sitter panicked about how to tell her neighbours that their dearly beloved old feline had died. They'd think she'd neglected it or something. So she quietly buried its body and went round some local cat shelters to see if they had any old tabby female cats. Finally she found a really friendly tabby cat that was several years younger, but otherwise a dead ringer for the deceased kitty so she installed it in her neighbour's home. By the time the neighbours returned home, the cat had settled in as though it had lived there all its life.

     Naturally it didn't recognise its 'owners' at first and they were a little upset by this. The cat-sitter reassured them that they'd been away for three months so the cat was bound to ignore them and sulk a little at first. The owners did remark on how lively it was. Last I heard they were planning to go to New Zealand for four months and my friend's friend was praying that the substitute cat wouldn't die in their absence!

     Sadly, some owners have returned from holiday and collected the wrong cat from the cattery (this cannot happen at well-organised catteries). For some reason they didn't notice that it was the wrong cat until they opened the back door and the cat vanished never to be seen again. In only a few cases the mistake was noticed before the cat vanished into alien territory and the cat was returned to the shelter. First-hand accounts of getting the wrong cats back have appeared in cat magazines.

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THE SAVIOUR CAT

     The following makes a regular appearance in magazines (told in the first person as ‘it happened to me’ or ‘my cat saved my baby’s life’). It has been retold in identical form by so many people in both the US and UK, and appeared in so many magazines, that it can now be considered an Urban Myth:

     When my friend had her first baby, she was concerned about the cat being jealous or sleeping on the baby’s face or whatever. She never left the cat and baby together unsupervised, even though the cat seemed to have accepted the baby as though it was its own kitten.

     One night, my friend was asleep in bed when her cat started pawing at her face. She told it to go away since it wasn’t breakfast-time but the cat was insistent and started scratching her gently, biting her nose and meowing loudly. Finally she decided something might be wrong so she got up. The cat started running between her and the baby’s room, meowing urgently. Still half-asleep she followed it into the baby’s room. Her baby was having trouble breathing and its lips were starting to go blue. If the cat hadn’t alerted her, the baby would have been another cot-death statistic. My friend says her cat is a special guardian angel who saved her baby’s life and she no longer supervises them when they play together.

     This is unusual among Urban Myths in that it is most usually told in the first person i.e. ‘When I had my first baby ….’ It appears to be the opposite of the 'cat suffocates baby' storyline and an attempt to illustrate the positive aspects of cat ownership and relationship between our human kids and our 'furry kids'.

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MORE DEAD CAT MYTHS

     A whole body of folklore seems to have grown up about the many ways in which a cat may meet its maker. The two presented below are also told of small dogs (e.g. Chihuahuas, Yorkshire Terriers) demonstrating that the myths are not anti-cat but simply tales of misfortune where a small pet is central to the tale.

     One day, a missionary decided to visit an elderly lady who was a regular at his church. The old dear made him a cup of tea and they sat down talking about his recent visits to under-privileged areas and all the good work he was doing there. Unfortunately the old lady's cat was making a nuisance of itself, clawing at the missionary's leg and playing with his tie. When the old lady went to fetch another cup of tea, the irritated missionary kicked the cat. Only then did he realise how old the cat was - his kick had killed it instantly. He grabbed the cat's body and lay it on his lap, stroking and petting it and remarking on how animals seemed to instinctively like him. Before he left, he gentle moved the "sleeping" cat onto the chair where he had been sitting. A few days later, the old lady approached him after Sunday service. With tears in her eyes she told him that her cat had passed away in its sleep shortly after his visit. She would not normally have bothered him, but seeing as he and the cat had gotten along so well ….

     A Paris woman decided that her cat had earned a luxurious retirement and since she was moving out of the city, she sought out a place suitable for an elderly cat to spend its last years. She finally found a farmhouse in an area free of hazards such as foxes or wild dogs and she and puss settled in well. The day came when puss was let out for the first time. The woman watched her beloved cat amble across the lawn to a sunny patch to sunbathe. She turned her attention elsewhere for a brief moment and heard her cat squeal in pain. Running to the door she was just in time to see poor puss being carried away by a large falcon.

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REST IN PEACE

     When a cat does die, hopefully of natural causes, there is often a problem of how to dispose of its mortal remains. Not everyone has access to a back garden so the deceased kitty must be transported to a suitable burial place, pet funeral parlour or animal crematorium. These days, many pet funeral parlours/crematoria will collect the body from a veterinary surgery. A number of vets also accept bodies which are disposed of on a weekly basis for mass incineration.

     The mistaken package is a standard formula for these tales and there are several variations. An owner might be taking dear, departed Tiddles across town by public transport or car to a pet cemetery or for burial in a friend's garden. Somehow the bag is accidentally switched on the bus or train, stolen from the car or snatched in the street or stolen by a good samaritan offering to help her with her suitcase. Sometimes she ends up with a cooked ham while someone else has ended up with dear departed Tiddles. Sometimes she sees the bag-snatcher further down the road where he has fainted after discovering what he has snatched. Despite the growing number of pet cemeteries and crematoria, it seems that the disposal of a pet's mortal remains is fraught with peril as this collection of myths suggests.

     Two elderly women leaving Bluewater Shopping Centre noticed a dead cat in the car park. Being cat lovers, they couldn't bear the thought of leaving the poor waif there and decided to take it home for burial. It may not have been loved in life, but at least it would be treated kindly in death. They rationalised their purchases to free up some Marks & Spencer carrier bags then double wrapped the demised kitty in the spare bags to contain any odours or seepage. Since it was lunchtime and a hot day, they decided to get a cool drink before setting off round the M25. Since it was hot, they didn't want to close the car windows and risk a smelly car so they left the car windows open just a crack. From where they sat, they could see their car … and they saw the woman who reached through the back window and snatched the M&S bag from the back seat. By a twist of fate, the woman is also headed for the restaurant and is seated at the next table to the cat lovers who are, by then, wondering how to exact revenge on the bag-snatcher. Fate comes to the rescue when the thief peers into her ill-gotten gains, jumps up in horror and faints clean away. As the paramedics are wheeling the shocked bag-thief away in a wheelchair, one of the cat lovers places the M&S bag on the woman's lap and says "Don't forget her shopping . . ."

     A woman whose beloved cat had died wanted it buried in peaceful undisturbed surroundings. A friend agreed to bury it in her large garden, if the owner could deliver the cat. Unwilling to be seen with a pet carrier because people always asked cutesy things about the pet and she wasn't in the mood to answer every cutesy question with "actually it's a dead cat". Unwilling to be seen with a dead cat, she put the cat in a large handbag and set off across town by bus. Walking to the bus stop, a bag-snatcher grabbed the large handbag. He must have had a surprise when he found out what it contained!

     In a very similar tale, the woman must walk through the park carrying an obviously heavy guitar case (the only suitably sized carrier for her over-sized Maine Coon which had died that morning). A young man politely asks if he can carry the case for he as he is headed in the same direction. Grateful for the show of chivalry, she accepts and hands the chap the guitar case. The thief legs it. Luckily he stops at the park exit to check his ill-gotten gains and abandons the unorthodox coffin and its contents. The distraught woman is reunited with her late-lamented cat by park officials.

     A man promised his family that he'd dispose of the deceased family cat's remains. They lived on an island off of Scotland and the nearest vet was on the mainland. They carefully wrapped kitty in newspaper and the man boarded the morning ferry. When he arrived on the mainland, he handed the package to the receptionist and got back on the returning ferry. A few days later, the vet phoned to thank him for the gift of a lovely home-cured ham. Someone must have had a surprise when they opened their own package and found not a lovely ham, but a dead cat.

     A woman whose twin Persian cats sadly died within hours of each other, one of old age and the other of a broken heart, decided to have them taxidermised.

     "Would you like them mounted?" asked the taxidermist, envisaging a wooden plinth and glass case.

     "Good grief no!" the woman said in shocked tones, "They were both neutered!"

     A couple sadly lost their beloved Puss to a speeding motorcar and not having anywhere to bury him, they sent him by registered parcel post to the crematorium. Several days later, a small sachet of ashes arrived in the morning post. Intending to put them in a small urn with engraved plaque, the husband put the sachet on top of the fridge and went off to work. Later in the day, his wife saw the sachet of grey powder and mistook it for the spices she'd ordered by mail order. Needless to say, the exotic dish she prepared for hubby that night didn't taste quite as she'd expected. Quite how hubby reacted to the knowledge that he'd eaten Puss's remains is unrecorded.

     One tale of dead cats and stolen packages has a nice moral twist. A woman goes to collect her deceased cat from the vets surgery. The vets had thoughtfully placed the deceased in a neatly wrapped box so she could carry it around without being stared at. On the way home, the woman has to buy something in Debenhams department store. While paying for her purchases, she leaves the cat box on a nearby counter. When she looks round for it, the box has gone. Store detectives try to locate the deceased cat and reunite it with the distraught owner. It doesn't take long. The opened box, the deceased cat spilling out of it, is found on the floor of a passport photo booth. Sprawled beside it, equally dead, is a well-known shoplifter whom detectives had failed to "catch in the act" for months. The shoplifter had taken the stolen goods to the photo booth, opened it and had suffered a serious heart attack when the dead cat dropped onto her lap.

     There are several flaws with this tale of course. Very few distraught owners would stop to do a spot of shopping while actually carrying the deceased Tiddles. The dead cat is a device which brings swift justice to a persistent offender who has so far evaded detectives. Though dead, the cat is the hero of the piece.

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THE CAT-RAT RANCH

     The following tale is apparently over 100 years old, but is still doing the rounds in various forms. It apparently began as a hoax business prospectus and has been revived in more recent times as an email hoax or is simply retold as a myth or wind-up.

     "Glorious Opportunity To Get Rich!!! We are starting a cat ranch in Lacon with 100,000 cats. Each cat will average 12 kittens a year. The cat skins will sell for 30 cents each. One hundred men can skin 5,000 cats a day. We figure a daily net profit of over $10,000. Now what shall we feed the cats? We will start a rat farm next door with 1,000,000 rats. The rats breed 12 times faster than the cats. So we will have four rats to feed each day to each cat. Now what shall we feed the rats? We will feed the rats the carcasses of the cats after they have been skinned. Now Get This! We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats and get the cat skins for nothing! "

     It sounds plausible until you sit down to work it out. For a start, breeding cats and growing kittens need more food than adult cats. And of course you are not guaranteed 12 kittens per year from each cat, especially as some of the cats will have to be males! It takes 5 - 6 months for the kittens to reach breeding age … and you have to house and feed the cats … and who worked out that rats breed 12 times faster than cats, and how big do the rats have to be to make a decent meal. Something doesn't quite add up ….

     On a serious note, cats are farmed for their fur in parts of China. The fur ends up in trinkets and furry figurines which are often sold to cat lovers. Gruesomely, many of the figurines are actually of cute kitties. The cats are tethered on wire leashes and fed on meat scraps, not rats, though it is not impossible that the cats get recycled back into the food chain.

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THE "RECYCLE YOUR UNWANTED CATS TO MALAYSIA" MYTH

     In the 1990s an email circulated about "recycling" unwanted pet cats to Malaysia where they could be used as food. This played on several fears - that of unidentifiable foreign food, fear of strangers (xenophobia) and the fact that while Westerners viewed cats as family members, there had been documentaries showing the cooking of live cats in China and Korea. Unfortunately many Westerners make little or distinction between the various countries and cultures in Asia and the Far East hence the email claimed to be from Malaysia. Although there is a large Chinese population in Malaysia, it is a cat-owning culture, not a cat eating culture and boasts a cat fancy, cat shows and its own indigenous breed(s) of cat.

     "To make use of the unwanted animal we can make pleasurable cuisine for the people. Please to arrange air shipment for cats which can be used in our culinary educations program. Will pay for no less than cats in 50 pound lots. Only alive please. Malaysia have many delicacy for eating the cat, only in the most humane way of course. I would like to share our culinary heritage with you in the overseas. In my honorary role with the martial arts, we gain great strength from the eating of the young cats."

     This myth also brings several other thoughts to mind - that euthanized cats (and dogs) may be rendered (processed) and the remains turned into fertilizer or even into animal feed and that rendering or consumption would be an economical method of disposing of the remains of a huge pet overpopulation problem, particularly in the USA.

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MOGGY ON THE MENU?

     There are frequent myths of British ethnic restaurants and takeaways using the local cat population as a raw material and of "such-and-such a restaurant was raided and the health inspectors found three dead cats and half an Alsatian in the freezer".  This genre of myth illustrates a distrust of foreign people and of foreign cuisine along with a general belief that all persons of Asian origin eat cat and/or dog. A related myth is that of the recent immigrant to Britain who buys tinned food with a depiction of a cat on it and complains either that it does not taste at all like the real thing or that he can readily buy tinned cat, but can never buy fresh or frozen cat and so has to resort to catching his own.

     One evening several friends went out to a local Chinese restaurant for a meal. Halfway through the meal, one girl suddenly started to cough and choke. She was rushed to hospital where a small bone was removed from her throat. Doctors did not recognise the type of bone found and sent it off for analysis. The report came back saying that it was a cat's collarbone. The public health department immediately visited the restaurant to inspect the kitchens and in the fridge they found numerous tins of cat food, half an Alsatian dog and several rats all waiting to be served up.

     Why is it always half an Alsatian (German Shepherd) dog? Presumably so that anyone who ate there has the uncomfortable thought that they may may have eaten the other half! It is like finding half a maggot in your apple being worse than finding a whole maggot. It adds a bit more yuck factor to the thought of eating animals which we consider to be family members.

     In some versions, the choking diner is given the Heimlich manouevre by a gentleman at a nearby table. She coughs up a bone and the gentleman, a zoologist, tells her "And that if I'm not mistaken my dear, that is the collarbone of a cat." Except that cats don't have collarbones, just a vestigial bit of floating bone - that is why they are so supple.

     A local Chinese restaurant was suddenly closed down. Everyone wondered why it was closed down since it was a really popular place and always served excellent food. According to a friend who knows a guy who works in the local Public Health Lab, when the health inspectors went to inspect the kitchens, they found cages and cages of cats. The restaurant owner claimed the cats were let out at night to keep the place free of rats. Well then the inspectors checked the freezer and they found it full of frozen cats.

     A really popular local Chinese restaurant suddenly closed down. It turns out that a disgruntled employee had started rumours that police had found half a dozen skinned cats, labelled as rabbit, in the restaurant's refrigerator. Just to show that good old British home cooking is not immune to the tale, cats masquerading as rabbits have apparently turned up in village butcher's shops. Due to cat thefts in Britain, some butchers have become worried enough that they only accept wild rabbit from local shooters if the head and feet are left in place to prove it really is bunny.

     Related ethnic meal tales suggest that diners at ethnic restaurants became ill after the local council attempted to poison either the stray cats or the rats the cats were living on.  Others suggest that the cats were being fattened on leftovers and then recycled into the following month's Special Set Menu!

     Though Chinese restaurants are the usual scene, the tale is sometimes set in Bangladeshi, Indian and Italian restaurants (are you really sure of what is in that lasagne?). Korean restaurants are prime candidates for this tale because of the practice of dog and cat eating in Korea. Versions of the tale have been traced to the earliest years of the British Empire in England (where colonials never quite trusted strange foreign cooking habits) and to the 1850s in the US. A few strong rumours and suddenly no-one wants to eat at that particular place any more - except that these days no-one really believes those tales, do they?

     The "foreign restaurants serve up cats" myth has led to a couple of student pranks which have themselves become part of urban mythology.  The following tales originate from northern England and fall into the "dead catter" genre of urban legend.

     In one, a student apparently picks up a dead and very stiff cat from the roadside, takes it into his local Indian restaurant and asks for a discount for providing his own meat.  In the other, the student takes the dead cat into a Chinese takeaway, marches to the front of the queue, plonks the cat down on the counter and announces "And that's the last one I'm getting you tonight!" before walking out, followed by the queuing customers.  The type of restaurant and the prank (discount or donation) are interchangeable. In August 2001 I received first hand accounts of these two pranks (from former students) and several "friend of a friend" urban legend versions which either inspired the prank or were inspired by it. 

     Actually, Cat Chow Mein is unlikely for plenty of reasons. Cats are expensive to raise and fatten because they eat meat and it is more economical to use that meat in the meal in the first place. Alley cats are far too scrawny to be useful and cats are carnivores so they don't fatten up very well on leftover rice. Supermarkets and butchers don't sell cat. Roadkill is likely to be too mangled and if not mangled it is likely to be reclaimed for burial or cremation by the bereaved owner. Catching cats leads to irate owners who would offer rewards for their pets and alert neighbourhood watch, the RSPCA and the police to the cat thefts. Pet shops charge outrageous prices, would notice if you checked to plumpness of the wares and you can hardly ask for a kilo of cat! Even the most brain-dead animal shelter worker will notice a request for "twenty cats a month for the Greasy Wok Restaurant" or the same person returning week after week to adopt yet another cat. It is theoretically possible to follow up every "Free to good homes" sign on the roadside, in newsagent windows or in the newspapers, but word would soon get around that a person of ethnic origin was snapping up entire litters of three, four or more kittens. It would not be long before the local RSPCA cottoned on to the fact even if it was only the sudden drop in overpopulation which alerted them!

     Granted, in parts of China, cats are an expensive delicacy eaten by rich diners. To serve cat in a pork dish would be like hiding caviar in fish fingers and selling it at fish finger prices! If any Chinese restaurant were to serve cat, it would be in secret, after hours to a private party of Chinese diners and at a very high price. The suspicion of cat meat may be based on that unidentifiable red-dyed meat used in some cheap dishes. If it doesn't taste of pork, lamb or beef then the diner assumes it must be cat!

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MATRIMONIAL DISHARMONY

     This is a more elaborate variant of the cat/sink/manhood tale (received by email) which appears to be set in the US since garbage disposal units are uncommon in the UK. The role of the cat - to precipitate chaos - remains the same, but the tale-spinner has added a greater level of detail which makes it even more plausible, plus (as a nice touch) a cat-related catchphrase at the end.

     Calling in sick to work makes my drinking buddy uncomfortable. No matter how legitimate his illness, he always senses his boss thinks he is lying or suffering a hangover. On one occasion, he had a valid reason, but lied anyway because the truth was far too humiliating. he simply mentioned that he had sustained a head injury and hoped he would feel up to coming in the next day. By then, he would have thought up a story to explain the bandage on his head. The accident occurred mainly because he and his wife had adopted a cute little kitty. Initially the kitty was no problem, but one morning my buddy was showering after breakfast when he heard his wife call out from the kitchen that the garbage disposal unit was dead and could he please go and reset it?

     My buddy protested that his wife knew where the reset button was and could press it herself. She protested that she was scared - what if it started going and sucked her in? besides, she reasoned at the top of her voice, it would only take a second. So out he got, dripping wet and stark b*ll*ck naked, making statements about her cowardly behaviour as he traipsed dripping into the kitchen. He crouched down and stuck his head under the sink to find the button. It was the last conscious action he remembered.

     It struck without warning, without respect to his circumstances. Not some cursed disposal unit drawing him into its gnashing metal teeth, but the new kitty, clawing playfully at the dangling objects she spied between his legs. She had been poised around the corner and stalked her unfamiliarly naked owner as he took the bait under the sink. At precisely the second he was most vulnerable, she leapt at the toys he unwittingly offered and snagged them with her needle-like claws. At that point, he lost all rational thought to control orderly bodily movements, while rising upwardly at a violent rate of speed, with the full weight of a kitten hanging from his masculine parts. Wild animals are sometimes faced with a "fight or flight" syndrome. Men, in this predicament, choose only the "flight" option. Fleeing straight up, the sink and cabinet bluntly impeded his ascent; the impact knocking my buddy out cold.

     When he awoke, his wife and the paramedics stood over him. At first the paramedics had regarded the lacerated pate and equally lacerated wedding tackle and suspected some form of matrimonial dispute. After being fully briefed by his wife (who was trying to suppress her laughter at my buddy's plight), the paramedics snorted as they tried to conduct their work while suppressing their own hysterical laughter. A few days later at the office, head bandaged and wearing loose-fitting trousers on account of "the others not being back from the dry cleaners", his colleagues tried to coax an explanation out of him. He kept silent, claiming it was too painful to talk about.

     "What's the matter," his boss asked, "Cat got your tongue?" If he had only known.

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THE HOMING CAT

     Cats are known to have incredible homing powers. Or do they? How many of the cats which turn up on an owner's doorstep tens of miles away, sometimes in a place the cat has never seen, are really homing cats and how many are freeloaders with a close enough resemblance to the owner's former cat that it manages to pass itself off as the original cat? Though a few cats do make their way some distance from a new home back to an old home (and I have encountered one or two such cats in the course of cat rescue work) many others get well and truly lost. The myth of the homing cat, however, persists. Sometimes someone gives it a bit of a twist in the tail as the following version shows.

     A friend of a friend of mine in Chelmsford, Essex was fed up with his cat spraying and messing in the house. He finally persuaded a friend on the other side of town to take the cat. All seemed to be well, with the cat behaving itself in its new home and its new owner besotted with her new pet. One winter evening, a few weeks later, the chap arrived home from work to see the cat shivering on his doorstep. Moved by the way the cat had made its way back to him across busy roads and also a river, he let it in and promised it that he would not "abandon" it again. A few days later, a friend dropped by to see him. "I see you found your cat then," the friend said, "Only I was visiting someone on the other side of town and saw it sitting on a garden wall looking lost. I recognised it immediately and though it was hissing and biting, I carried it back home to you."

     In the second tale, one wonders what the other owner was thinking about the cat suddenly going missing from its new home. Maybe s/he assumed it had simply decided to walk back to its old home.

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THE INCREDIBLE CABBIT

     There is a long-standing myth that cats and rabbits can produce offspring which are half-cat, half-rabbit and which are therefore called cabbits. The classic version of the myth goes thus:

     Anyone who owns rabbits will know that they are incredibly cute, but not exactly exciting or affectionate and their housetraining can leave much to be desired. A company in America has developed a hybrid animal which, they claim, combines the best qualities of both the rabbit and the cat: cute, affectionate, active and very, very clean. Male rabbits are famed for their willingness to attempt sex with any female animal of approximately the same size, regardless of whether it is a rabbit or not. By coincidence, cats and rabbits share the same number of chromosomes and a similar gestation period. In addition, female cats will happily raise the young of other species alongside their own kittens. All of these factors have combined to help animal breeders develop a brand new pet. Called a "racat" (although some breeders are pushing for the more attractive term of "cabbit") the animal can be ordered from almost any large pet store but may take some time to arrive in stock due to the almost legendary laid-back natures of both the cat and the rabbit.

     "If you spoke to my grandfather he would tell you his story about working at the local gasworks where he saw a cat that had the body of a rabbit. He swears to this day(in fact is quite passionate about his story) that he saw a half rabbit half cat. I have been hearing this since I was young and he was too(40's maybe?) so he wasn't senile and he's not a drinker."

     Most cabbits are misidentified Manx cats. Other supposed cabbits are the result of a deformity of the tail and the skin between the belly and haunches. I gathered together evidence and analyses about cabbits and published it. But the myth persists and I received the following..

     "In response to the VERY uninformed evaluation "Cabbits-What Are They?". In 1991,my own cat showed ALL the symptoms of pregnancy. She would eat only tomatoes, green beans and lettuce. Her belly grew larger as weeks went by and she sought out dark spaces for solitude. She exhibited all the signs of pregnancy, yet we could not figure out why. She was a COMPLETELY indoor cat and aside from our male bunny had NO sexual activity. However, she and Bruno had sex on a regular basis! We thought it was "Cute" and "Funny" at first. I mean, who would think a cat and a rabbit would go at it! I was in college at the time and I asked my bio professor about the likelihood of such a thing and he said however improbable it may be, the chromosomes are linked, and if they are not in a prey/predator environment, but domesticated together and there are no other sexual partners of the appropriate species available, propagation is possible. She had a baby. It was breech. We tried to help her with the delivery, however, unlike a "kitten", what she had was a good size larger and we had to actually pull it out. It suffocated, and the vet upon evaluating the situation, stated if any further pregnancies ensued, a caesarian would be required. For the record, the baby had folded lop ears like the father, a bunny nose, back legs like a rabbit and a tail that was very short (maybe half an inch) that curled up to it's back. So why don't you explain that know-it-all? I saw it. And better than that plenty of others did as well."

     Unfortunately, there were no photos and no DNA evidence. I contacted several vets and cat breeders for information. Any vet (or biology professor) encountering a genuine cat/rabbit offspring would have taken photographs, a blood sample (for DNA) and written articles for scientific journals. It would be worth a great deal of money. The dead offspring would have been examined, dissected and preserved for scientific study - no vet would miss an opportunity like that.

     The experts contacted pointed out that several factors show this to be a mistake or a hoax. It does sound far fetched and as far as genetics doesn't make sense at all. It is not possible. You can only breed between species if there is some degree of genetic compatibility. Rabbits and cats are not only different species they are different genera as well. Rabbits are lagomorphs (often mistakenly called rodents) and I think rabbit kittens are born without fur. The idea that eating only vegetables is a "normal cat pregnancy" is ridiculous since cats are obligatory carnivores. Cats fed on unsupplemented vegetables first go blind and later die.

     One breeder came up with a plausible explanation for the events witnessed by the writer. A family member may accidentally have let the cat out and she got pregnant. The resulting kitten was deformed. A vegetarian diet might led to any other foetuses being reabsorbed before birth and to the remaining kitten being deformed. The family member would have been in big trouble about letting the cat out so they kept quiet and blamed the male rabbit instead. I would call this a hoax. If it actually happened - you can bet the vet would have had the foetus on display with papers written, studies done and lots of publicity.

     And if the mythical cabbit isn't an odd enough myth, there are always "squittens" - squirrel-cat hybrids!

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THE GIANT MUTANT KITTY

     Tales of giant cats surface from time to time, sometimes accompanied by photographs. In the past, edited photographs or imaginative uses of angle were relatively easy to spot, but digital technology has made them far more convincing. The following legend was doing the rounds by email during April and May 2001, accompanied by a photograph. Although convincing, a current employee of the company named can find no record of this "former employee" at her company. The photo shows a cat approximately the size of a Rottweiler dog, but the relative size of the owner's hand in the photo indicates that a section of picture has been selectively enlarged (or added later) or that the cat was being held at arm's length and nearer to the lens than the owner's body. I'll include the tale intact:

     This is amazing! Rodger Degagne, a former employee with AECL in Chalk River, may be embarking on a new career as Feline Breeder. Relaxing in his spacious home on the shores of the Ottawa River, Mr. Degagne recalls how 15 years ago he befriended two stray young cats on the old AECL research facility at Chalk River. The kittens had appeared in late summer and apparently had gotten under a security fence around the old labs abandoned since the late 50's. With the help of his tuna sandwich, Mr.Degagne was able to coax the kitties close enough so that he could pick them up. A self described animal lover, he did not want to place the kittens in the local Human [sic] Society. In this largely rural area, cats of all stripes and ages largely go unwanted and are humanely disposed of after a few days. Later that evening his wife Louise and their two children, Nicole and Kelly came to a family decision to keep the kittens which they named Lost and Found. Lost turned out to be female and Found a male. When nature finally took it's course, a litter of kittens was born 6 years later. One of the litter was a big white female with a unique black markings on her side and tail. Something about the kitten captured the hearts of the family and while her siblings eventually found homes elsewhere, Snowball stayed with the Degagne's.

     While Lost and Found are no longer with us, their progeny live on. In her 9 years Snowball's size has seemed to snowball. Put simply, Snowball is no ordinary cat, she measures 69 inches from nose to tail and weighs in at 87 Ibs. She started out a big kitty and she just seemed to keep growing. She always meowed for more food and would climb up on the food which I forgot to cover. Chicken is her favorite.

     'Once I left a cooked chicken on the table that I was going to use for a boat picnic, an hour later the chicken was gone', Louise said. We knew that snowball wasn't your average cat when the neighbor's German Shepherd ran yelping away from his first encounter with her. She just isn't afraid of any animals. After we found a half eaten raccoon out by the garage, we decided that maybe Snowball should be kept fenced in. We soon discovered that while we can keep snowball in the yard, we couldn't keep raccoons from Snowball. At least it kept the food bills down Rodger laughed 'Like all female cats she is very territorial, but with us she is just a big ole kitten' he said.

     So what does a 87 pound cat eat? Snowball goes through about 3lbs of cat food a day, supplemented with deer and moose that Rodger hunts in the fall. She likes Pike a lot, so I don't throw them back any more. Snowball often accompanies Rodger fishing on the Ottawa, eagerly peering over the side of the boat as soon as his line goes tight.

     So what do the Degagne's attribute Snowball's size to? Rodger says 'Well, the vet thinks it could be her thyroid, but she isn't fat, she's just a real big cat. I think maybe her parents got into something at Chalk River that they shouldn't have'.

     The reality is very different. To amuse his daughter, Cordell Hauglie used Photoshop program to turn a picture of himself and his cat Jumper, into the illusion of a giant cat. He emailed the photo to friends as a joke and thought no more of it. He had no intention of creating a hoax and was amazed when the "Snowball" story began circulating with the picture a year after the picture was originally emailed. Hauglie has no idea where the Snowball story came from and has discovered that once a photo or email is let loose, it is no longer under your control. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, in March 2001, people were seeking the fictional Rodger Degagne and his giant cat.

     Chalk River, where the fictional Degagne and Snowball supposedly live, is the site of a nuclear research facility run by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) and Snowball was supposedly the giant mutant offspring of stray cats exposed to radiation from the facility. A current employee of AECL contacted me to say there was no record of "former employee" Degagne. In another inaccuracy, the "old labs" at Chalk River were never abandoned - in fact they are being expanded. Another clue showing it to be a hoax is that Degagne is lifting the cat easily despite its 80+ lbs weight; Snowball's legs are not drooping and the cat looks like a stuffed cat mounted in a "standing position". Detailed analysis revealed the image manipulation.

     For the record, the Guinness World Record holder giant cat is 98 lb (44 kg) Snowbie of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. In 1997, 4 year old Snowbie measured 103 cm (40.8 inches) from nose to tail-tip compared to Snowball's claimed 69 inches. He was 33 cm. (13 inches) tall with a 31 cm (12 inch) tail. See Feline Medical Curiosities for more details of giant and dwarf cats.

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THE MYTHICAL EGYPTIAN HAIRLESS CAT

     As all cat loving "Friends" fans know, allergy sufferers can go get a hypoallergenic Egyptian Hairless Cat just like one of the TV characters did. It was on TV so it must be true! I've had plenty of people asking me where to find one and most don't believe me when I tell them they can't. "But it was on TV, it must be true!" The Egyptian Hairless Cat is a TV fiction which was accepted as fact and is now part of feline urban myth. Everyone knows someone who has one or has heard where to find one, but it seems that no-one can get hold of one first hand. A few people have been looking for the now-garbled version of this myth - the equally non-existent Chinese Hairless Cat. The only way you're likely to find a hairless cat in China is a skinned one - either cooked in Cantonese cuisine or from a cat fur farm (which supplies the fur used in some of those novelty fur-covered figurines and trinkets).

     The fictional Egyptian Hairless was invented by the TV show Friends for one its episodes. It seems they didn't bother to announce that there was no such breed before or after the show. Maybe the writers just assumed that a cat called the "Sphynx" was an Egyptian cat. A fictional cat-allergy sufferer in the show gets a hypoallergenic Egyptian Hairless Cat. The TV show has high viewing figures so the idea of an Egyptian breed of hairless cat reached a lot of people. Most viewers would are not cat experts so they accepted it as fact. Some began looking for an Egyptian hairless for themselves or passed the "information" on to cat-allergic friends. It was quickly reported as fact by people (including vets) who did not bother to check facts, it has resulted in cat allergy sufferers searching in vain for a non-existent cat breed. Or two non-existent breeds thanks to the myth transmission errors which created the Chinese version!

     Though many people believe that hairless cats are hypoallergenic and some people advertise hypoallergenic hairless cats, this is also a myth. For the vast majority of cat allergy sufferers, it is the dander (dried saliva and/or skin flakes) which contains the allergen and causes the allergic reaction, not the actual hair. Hairless cats may produce less dander, but they still produce enough to trigger a reaction in many people.

     Anyone genuinely interested in a bald cat need not resort to the use of a shaver. The bald and wrinkly Sphynx (Canadian Hairless) is the best known and most common of the hairless cat breeds and was featured in the Austin Powers film. Two hairless Russian breeds can now be found in the USA; these are the Don Sphynx (Donsky) and Peterbald (St Petersburg Hairless). In case anyone thinks this is a recent novelty, there have been reports of hairless cats in the past. The oldest hairless breed was the Mexican Hairless Cat which finally became extinct early in the 20th Century.. The French Sphynx appeared as a chance mutation a little before the Canadian Sphynx, but was not developed as a breed.

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BRITISH WOMAN HAS CAT FLU
From our English Correspondent

     A woman from Berkshire, England has made medical and veterinary history by being the first human being to get cat flu. Maureen Pitcairn went to her doctor complaining of respiratory problems. When her illness didn't respond to medication she underwent some hospital tests. She was stunned when, instead of telling her to stay in bed for a few days, Dr Andreo Huntley referred her to a veterinarian because she had cat flu!

     "He told me I must have caught the cat flu from one of my five cats. But I knew that was impossible because my cats have had regular flu shots since they were kittens."

     Dr Huntley referred Ms Pitcairn to her regular vet, David Caspian, DVM. Dr Caspian was astounded to have his client visit the clinic on her own behalf. "At first I thought this was some kind of a joke. She has five cats of her own and brings them for their flu shots each year. It is possible that she caught the cat flu from a friend's unvaccinated cat which was harboring the virus. I guess she'll be coming in for her own booster next time she brings the cats for their shots."

     Ms Pitcairn is now recovering at home. As a precaution she is getting distemper shots as well.

     Several factors indicate that this is a hoax or a joke. Cat flu (feline upper respiratory disease) is caused by viruses which cannot be caught by humans. Cat flu is the common British term for these ailments and cats can be vaccinated against these viruses. The term 'distemper' is not used in Britain; this illness is called Feline Infectious Enteritis. Distemper is the name of a dog disease in the UK. The qualifications DVM are not used in Britain. DVM (and less commonly DMV) are American qualifications. British vets are not called 'Dr'.

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THE BONSAI KITTEN LEGEND

     I have to thank Folklorist Bill Ellis for his critique of this relatively new Internet legend about cats. It is a warning email which exists almost symbiotically with the target of its wrath. Paradoxically, the warning email may help keep the 'sick and obscene' website active. American readers will class it as a sick and cruel joke. British readers will recognise it as a "big wind-up" (a traditional form of deadpan humour involving satire, sarcasm and a vaguely plausible story). In Britain, there is an old joke list of "college courses" containing a course entitled "Bonsai Your Pet". I am British and can see the humorous content, but you have been warned. A chain email asks:

     "Do you think it is nice to have an innocent kitty in a flask as an ornament? The bonsai-kitten website promotes the "art" of putting a kitten inside a flask and selling it as an ornament! The method is to put a newborn cat inside the flask so that the growing kitten's bones adopt the flask's shape. Complain to the webmaster at <email snipped>.

     Write to protest against this degrading act of idiots and sick people. Help put an end to this savage act. Instead of wasting your time in chat rooms or forwarding chain emails, co-operate to stop this cruel and stupid thing and forward this message to all the people you know. If you can do it with stupid mails, why not to do it with the important ones?

     I translated this mail from a Spanish one, so correct any mistakes because I'm not really a good translator. I don't know if sending him a mail will make him stop this sick and obscene thing, but at least it could make him (and all the ones that support this kind of things) think about it."

     The United States Humane Society (USHS) website gives the result of an official investigation into the bonsai kitten story. The bonsai kitten website, though credited to a "Dr. Michael Wong Chang" of New York, was apparently an MIT student joke. The reference to a "Dr. Chang" (anti-Chinese slur) links this story to older ones that suggest that Orientals use cats (and dogs) for food. In fact the cats are eaten (and bred for their fur) in rural China, but not in Chinese restaurants in America or Britain, despite the regular scare stories about vanishing cats or finding half a German Shepherd Dog in the restaurant kitchen. Responding to many complaints, MIT shut the site down in December.

     Meanwhile, the warning email has been translated into other European languages e.g. Italian (Micini bonsai: ORRORE!) and French (Les chatons "bonsai"!) and the intensity of the protest actually helped keep the site in existence through copies of the original site in other places. The USHS asked its patrons NOT to send email complaints as "the negative attention [the site's originator] has received has fueled the posting of the site in three separate locations and the formation of a group of supporters."

     Although American in origin (comparable to the Scan Your Cat site which was received with great appreciation by British cat lovers with a good sense of humour) it is in the vein of a classic "British Wind-up". These are improbable tales delivered in a plausible manner to wind-up the listener like a key winding a watch-spring until; for example a parody documentary. Wind-ups rely on satire and sarcasm, two modes of humour not common in America. There seems to be no equivalent of the wind-up in American culture and many Americans have problems appreciating that there is normally nothing inherently malicious about wind-ups. What cynical Brits saw as a wind-up which no-one would actually believe, Americans saw as a sick joke.

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FOOTNOTE

     Most readers will know of other feline folktales and further variations on those mentioned here. Urban myths are more than just twisted tales. Next time someone regales you with a "friend-of-a-friend" cat story take a closer look. Even the most far-fetched tale contains a grain of truth about our relationship with cats. I will finish this article with a newspaper cutting from sometime in the 1980s. I have no details as to its authenticity - it certainly looks like a myth to me. It plays upon human gullibility and fear of catching diseases from our pets (as in 'The Foot-Licking Cat' and the tales about eating from the same plate as a cat). However, in this myth the owner's love for her cats overcomes any fear or disgust at contracting a cat-borne disease and she opts to suffer injections rather than give up her cats. In real life, there are many allergy sufferers who prefer to suffer shots or symptoms rather than live without their cat. That says a great deal for the cat-human relationship.

Copyright 1995, 2000, 2001 Sarah Hartwell