So, what’s the most divisive subject just now? Trump? Pff. Harry’n’Megan? Nobody likes them. Amazon taking over James Bond? I think we’re agreed that it’s going to be awful.
Nope, the contentious issue of the day is cats. More specifically, whether we should be keeping cats indoors at all time, whether every cat should be a house cat. The Scottish government suggested this recently for some areas, and they would, frankly, have had a warmer reception if they’d suggested a Herodian cull of the first born.
Let me say where I stand. I have a cat, or rather, share a cat, since the creature belongs to my daughter, which never goes outside. Never ever.
He roams around the flat, which is on the top floor of a mansion block and quite often looks wistfully at the tree outside the window where he can see birds and squirrels which he knows, by some buried instinct, that he was born to chase.
Occasionally when I’m making the bed, we play cat and mouse, when I use a hand under the sheet to mimic a scurrying rodent, which he pounces on.
Whether you think this is pure evil, or the only responsible form of cat ownership is the divide. Once, I belonged to the former category. I spent years explaining to my children that they couldn’t have a pet of any description since we are, as mentioned earlier, at the top of a mansion block with no cat flap and no outside space.
But last year my daughter pushed back. It would be possible to have a cat, she maintained after surveying the evidence online, and for it to remain at home if it didn’t know any better. If you brought a kitten into the home early on and it had never had the chance to roam free, there would be no cruelty involved. Indeed, since cat intelligence is that of a small child, confinement is not a big deal.
And so it proved. The kitten arrived and took to the litter tray as if born to it (cats’ native hygiene is nothing short of miraculous). He sometimes runs furiously to catch a toy bird that’s thrown for him and then back again – and whenever the front door is opened, for the postman, say, he runs out the door and down the stairs like a whippet out of a trap.
But he will allow himself to be chased back. He is now over a year old and unlike outdoor cats, I never need to worry about him getting mauled by foxes or run over or stolen (there’s a lot of that about).
He doesn’t catch beastly infections from other cats. He will live longer than his free range brethren. He’s quite small, which helps.
Without mice cats will eat all the other creatures they can, including birds
So it is I can hold my head high among environmentalists, for whom cats are to birds what deer are to trees, viz, really bad news. They tell me that one cat can devastate birds in a three mile radius, but not mine, oh no.
I can unblushingly meet my old friend Stephen Moss, the bird writer, who called for the confinement of cats recently, for our cat has not killed a single bird. I used to have a copy of that compelling book published in 2016, Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences Of A Cuddly Killer, by the U.S. scientist Dr Peter Marra. He infuriated cat owners by proposing that, when outdoors, all domestic cats should be kept on a leash and for feral cats to be rehomed or killed.
The RSPB is more cautious, advising that cats should wear quick-release collars (to avoid choking) fitted with bells to give the birds advance warning. I am not at all sure that works.
But the organisation has the same problem as the environmental charities in promoting deer culling (the single most effective way of promoting reforestation), that is, its members are sentimental and reluctant to see their cat as part of the bird crisis.
And domestic cats apart, there are the feral cats, an estimated 250,000 of them, eating their way through our wildlife.
Leashes? I encountered a cat on a lead only last year, in Siena of all places, and I was as shocked by the spectacle as if the creature were walking on its hind legs. I can’t see this trend taking off.
Cats have a diabolic habit of wriggling out of anything they don’t like the feel of, and I fancy that mine would give a lead short shrift. But then I’m constrained anyway: once he gets ideas into his head about roaming freely, he will never again be content to stay at home.
Cats and humans have co-existed for about 10,000 years, according to the archeological evidence, and one reason is that it worked for both parties.
People grew and stored grain, grain attracts mice and mice attract cats. So the relationship was a win-win; the cats got a useful food source; the people got an agreeable companion and mouser.
That was pretty well the state of affairs until relatively recently. If you live with mice, you need a cat. But, sans mice, cats will eat all the other creatures they can, including birds.
So if you want a cat, I say, keep it indoors. What it doesn’t know it won’t miss. It’s cats versus birds, I’m afraid, and this is the only way to keep all parties happy.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
