Felis Domesticus, or the Habits of the Cat

One of the few failures of the Oxford English Dictionary is its inability to define a cat. It tries, certainly, but descriptions of mammalian characteristics, short snouts and retractile claws, which might be scientifically accurate, fall woefully short in other respects.

Every time I watch the clock with the firm conviction that some mad scientist has been fiddling with the space-time continuum and then been unable to make time go at its proper speed again, I find myself wishing I had the temperament of a cat. Not even the meanest alley-cat will consent to do something you want unless that coincides with what it wants.

Nor will a cat, if you are attempting to bribe it with food or drink, ever settle for anything other than precisely what it wants. If it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water, it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water; if you are thick enough not to comprehend this immediately, it will wait with growing impatience, rejecting bread, three different kinds of biscuits, and cake, until you finally hit on what it wants. Even then, and no matter how hungry it is because of your ineptitude, it will not accept a 55.5% solution.

And having taken the bribe, it will go back to doing what it was doing before you interrupted it, without doing what you wanted it to do in exchange for the milk.

Reproach it, though, point out its base perfidy, and it will regard you with an expression of injured innocence. Not even a newborn lamb can look as blameless as a cat that is guilty of enough sins for twenty cats.

The cat will then go on its way, no doubt feeling that it has done enough towards the maintenance of its relationship with you simply by consenting to be a part of it, and you will be left sweeping up the biscuit crumbs.