Nature Notes - Catquisition

‘Catnapping’ is such an ugly, emotive word, don’t you think?  That’s why what happened over the bank holiday weekend can much better be described as ‘catquisition’. 

Simply put, we seem to have acquired a cat.  Over the past few weeks we had noticed that the neighbour’s cat was asleep on the roof of our shed, then on the garden furniture.  How it crept steadily closer to the house like some sort of amazingly lazy stop-motion amble I’m not sure, because prior to this weekend I had never seen the thing awake, never mind moving.  Then at the weekend I was walking through the kitchen, stepped over the sleeping cat, got myself a drink and walked out again, once more stepping over the cat.  The cat, it would appear, had decided that the back door being open was an invitation to spend some time out of the hot sun sprawled on a cool kitchen floor.

The morality of this is quite straightforward, it is obviously wrong to steal somebody else’s’ cat.  But is it wrong to, well, offer them a bowl of water on a hot day?  The golden rule was that we would never ever feed the cat.  That evening, we were explaining to our guests round a crowded dinner table over the traditional blackened meat barbeque feast why there was a cat perched next to one of their children, being stroked and purring like an exceptionally contented outdoor motor.  Wine flowed and conversation progressed, the cat, as cats do, wandered around a bit, circulating.  We were explaining the golden rule when one of the guests, who had been bending over in his chair, straightened up with something of a guilty expression, and half a sausage in his hand.

I freely admit that until this point, most of my knowledge of cats came from Tom & Jerry cartoons so, sure, keep them away from frying-pan wielding mice, bulldogs and sassy black maids with brooms, but now that the cat had tasted free range pork sausage, I thought I had better learn a bit more, starting with are cats allergic to free range pork sausage. In case you are wondering, they are not, although they do get very agitated if you try and take their free range pork sausage away from them, but then so do I.