Need a troublesome rodent rubbed out? Dial C for cat

The Internet website LiveScience recklessly reveals a dirty little secret about cats with no apparent realization that the information might put cats out of business if we all come to realize what we have been sponsoring all these years.

What we have been sponsoring is wholesale mayhem. We have been harboring fuzzy little murder machines that cut a merciless swath of daily death through millions of well-intentioned though filthy rodents.

LiveScience makes the brave and honest point, whether we want to hear it or not, that rodent populations would explode without cats – our cats – carrying out their constant savagery.

After all, cat violence minimizes rodent damage to the food supply and to the general health of human beings. However, I for one didn’t want to know what’s actually going on out there. I know it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it, but a hitman-style murder by your own hitcat is not something a person likes to dwell on.

Let me put it this way:

Do you know where your cats are?

Oh, we are not completely ignorant about what transpires in our home and outside in the bushes. We have had several cats over the years who were quite probably knocking off their fellow creatures. In fact, they had the disgusting habit of terminating a mouse and then proudly bringing it to us as a gift.

Unfortunately, a cat usually slobbers on its trophy for a few tasty moments before delivery. And the delivery usually involves leaving the wet little body on the carpet at the edge of the bed where Sharon steps on it with her bare feet as she gets up in the night.

You don’t know what fear is until you have been awakened in midsleep by a wife shrieking like a banshee.

But when I’m sitting on the couch watching a baseball game with Jack and Annie, our two hairy substitute children, spending some quality time with them, I don’t want to know what they’ve been doing out there in the night.

For that matter, if you have actual human teenagers rather than four-legged subs like ours, do you truly want to know what they’re doing?

And as if there weren’t already enough busybodies in the world giving us too much information, now we are being harassed by those hypocrites in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). They have gone to court trying to prove that animals have the same rights as humans to constitutional protection against slavery.

Specifically, PETA argues that killer whales are slaves because they are kept in huge tanks and compelled to perform daily for grubby tourists.

Let me give you another dirty little secret: Is there any doubt that members of PETA also keep slaves? Are we to believe that nobody in PETA has a cat or a dog that they imprison inside the home rather than let it go play in the street?

If whales have a right to freedom from compulsory containment, then so do dog and cats. So do guppies, who should be liberated from home aquariums and poured into the nearest creek or ocean.

And so I say to PETA people, open your doors along with your hearts. Let Bowser run and play wherever and whenever he wants. Sure, it’s dangerous out there. But even a substitute child is better off in the long run roaming free rather than being chained to the bed.

And speaking of rodents, it’s pretty ratty of PETA to trivialize the historic horror of human slavery by using it as a reckless metaphor for better treatment of animals.

Bill Hall may be contacted at wilberth@cableone.net or at 1012 Prospect Ave., Lewiston, ID 83501