IT is time we spoke frankly about cats.
Specifically: cats - that's enough now.
The internet is a flick book of feline photographs; puss cats wearing floppy hats, kittens stalking shiny objects, grumpy faces and grand old dames staring disdainfully. The web is spun from strands of fur: tabby fur, coarse fur, short fur and long fur, tortoiseshell, Russian blue, Himalayan and marmalade.
I have a lot of nice cats in my social circle. I can see the appeal of a wee, silken kitten at home; it's always nice to have a second heartbeat around the place.
But, now, we're beginning to take all this fur a little far.
Celebrity cats. Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, for one. For two and three, Taylor Swift's cats - Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey - have personalised carry-on bags for flying by private jet. Celebrities are the hyperbole of humanity, yet they behave with their cats as the rest of the feline-owning populace would do, were they lush in time and money.
Karl Lagerfield's cat, Choupette, has her own twitter feed, Instagram account, two maids and an on-call vet. Lagerfield has expressed concern that more people will talk about Choupette than about him. He also once mentioned a desire to marry her but I'm hoping he was joking.
Celebrities, however, cannot have much more expected of them. Academics we'd hope would have more sense. But, no.
Miller, an 18-year-old tabby, had prowled the environs of Glasgow University since kittenhood. He died, as cats nearly in double digits are prone to do, and the university has said it may name a building after him. "If that doesn't happen," a spokeswoman, who I can only assume was drunk on gin, said,"then we might even erect a statue of him."
Man is obsessed with cat. However, cats loathe man. If you die at home, alone, and are not discovered for some days, a dog will go without eating. A cat whose bowl is not full will wait one to two days before chowing down on its, until recently, doting owner. This is called postmortem predation. It does not happen with goldfish.
A cat's kiss is its stare. One long, slow blink is a kitty kiss. They groom after being petted to rid themselves of human smell. They don't even like to touch us.
Cats, unlike the majority of mammals, do not have the necessary number of taste receptors to experience sweetness. Instead of the 247 base pairs of amino acids that make up the gene code for the protein needed to taste sweet, they can taste adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the compound that supplies the energy in every living cell. They can't taste sweetness but have a desire for meat.
In 2013 the Natural Communications Journal published a study by biologists from the University of Georgia that concluded domestic cats in the US kill 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion smaller animals each year. They do not go for newly introduced species but the native types, the ones that could really benefit from being left alone. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills.
They bring their foul kill indoors to their owner, as though you are the sun god Lamfhada in need of appeasement.
We let cats away with murder. Also, with foul toilet habits. Cats crap everywhere. With dogs the owner is legally obliged to pick up its poo. Cats, however, may roam and relieve themselves where they want and no one blinks an eye.
Other animals can be divided into three categories: love, hate and eat. Cats have their own special category and I'm not sure they deserve it.
Humanity's fondness for cats is a symptom of a wider problem - we're superficial. We don't care if a creature is carnivorous, dreadful for the environment, and utterly full of disdain for us as long as they're cute.
The Egyptians were a mighty civilization. Yet when historians open up pyramids or dusty sarcophagi, their legacy is undermined by an obsession with feline 'gods'.
We worship them too. When future humans, or alien species look back, open up the internet and deliver their verdict on our achievements and concerns, surely they too will wonder: they had all this potential, but why this obsession with cats?
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