Cat Astrophe

 I am a cat owner.

Please don't ask why. These things just happen. One day you're a confirmed, died-in-the-wool dog person and the next you're a cat owner. It is a little like the way I became a married person. Around the occasion of my thirtieth birthday, I was planning a gala celebration of my singleness. A died-in-the-wool bachelor, I was committing the rest of my life to myself and ready to face eternity as a single. 

That didn't stick, by the way. 

Sort of like the cat thing. As insistent as I was for all those years about the antipathy that I had engendered over the course of my life toward the feline of the species, the holes in that particular rampart are somewhat glaringly apparent now. When my wife was out of town for a few days, the cat and I spent quality time on the couch, watching television. He found me early most mornings, sitting on my chest until I acknowledged him and his need for kibble. 

It would be easy enough to excuse this behavior as "I'm just doing this for my wife who is out of town currently," but there was dare I say a hint of connection between the cat and myself. I am not embarrassed to say that there was some mutual affection detected there. You might have needed scientific devices to capture the emotion on precisely tuned instruments, but we got along. The cat and I. 

Which is what got me thinking about cat toys. The bottom line for most of these strings, balls, and pads upon which they can sharpen their talons, is that they are intended to stimulate the urge to hunt and kill. To entice these beasts who spend so very much of their time in a blasé state into a blind fury, it is important to create a ruse in which the most primal part of their tiny brains is engaged and for a moment, there is a life and death struggle between the cat and a strip of fabric dangling from a plastic rod. These moments of fury are generally brief, and the instant that the cat becomes aware that they have been duped, the fun ceases. That fabric strip lives to fight another day.

But all this life and death struggle is only an illusion, and I became concerned about one of the things that I had always heard about the feline species: Curiosity killed the cat. If this is any way true, then the entire cat toy industry has blood on its hands.

Which is why Fluffy and I preferred to sit on the couch watching The Big Bang Theory. No mystery there.