Alright, who said meow?

There's another old saying that's popular among veterinarians, "If you put a cat and a bunch of broken bones in the same room, the bones will heal."

How you catch a cat

Yes, three proper men out of five

will throw things at a cat, and every

proper dog will chase it up a tree.

Who can it trust?

No one normal ever had fun watching a dog suffer,

(How many ways are there to skin a dog?)

Who ever thought of hanging dogs over a clothes line by

their tails?

The cat is so light under all that

fur

The skeleton seems so delicate

It is the contraption

of the cat

that makes it suffer

here

Those claws, those teeth, those

eyes

they make it hard to

sympathize

with this

tiny predator

Some cats

have been tortured by

children,

with the devil in them,

those cute faces

mean nothing now

Cats don't walk on their paws

they walk on their claws

they're the only ones

If they want to feel something

they have to pause

and withdraw

the claw

This is how you catch a cat:

First, you have to have something the cat wants,

something that appeals to its instincts;

like its curiosity or

its need to pounce.

But you will never know for any single

cat

what it takes to get it

to cross that boundary

between its world and yours

Not in a million years

So, you have to troll

to catch a cat,

to get past all the claws

and teeth and fur

and smallness

underneath

and bad blood

between our species.

Set our a lure.

Make it unusual,

cats like things that are weird.
(I had four black kittens that would

pounce on a piece of black shag carpet;

each time, jumping straight into the air,

over and over again,

like a kitty fountain)

The lure should have a lot of unpredictable

motion, cats get bored easily, they are sceptical.

For some cats this will be enough,

rarer cats will take rarer lures.

Then wait.

Some cat will come, it will let you pet it,

be it's friend.

It will get past the claws

and teeth and fur
and smallness
underneath
and bad blood
between our species

and withdraw

it all