Why I Hate Cats

I used to love cats.

Before I had a cat I believed they started off as lovely fluffy balls of fun, who grew into sleek, elegant, and beautifully aloof adults with neat fur and a fantastic hygiene habit. I believed them to be natural French speakers of the animal world, who slept 20 hours a day and enhanced your life throughout.

I had heard the phrase 'you look like something the cat brought in' but never quite understood it. Perhaps it meant that you looked like a mouse, or a vole, or something equally cute.

Then we got a cat. My youngest daughter insisted, so, even though our garden is no more than 500 square feet of towerblock roof, with a couple of tired looking shrubs and a lot of water tanks and what have you, we went for it.

Mittens arrived in a cardboard box, and promptly disappeared behind the sofa for two days. When he was eventually brought out, starving, one thing rapidly became clear. He was ferocious. He scratched, and clawed, and bit anything that came near him. He was not averse to leaping out from hiding places at anyone who passed, delivering a grazing scratch, and then running off laughing catty laughs.

A bell was no good. They disappear within a day. He must rip them off their collar and drop them off the edge of the roof, as we've never found any of them.

Feeding him stupid is no good. He doesn't hunt to eat -- he hunts out of sadism.

We gave him the operation, hoping that with the lack of testosterone he might succumb to a quieter life. It just seemed to enrage him further. (Well, sorry, Mittens, I guess it would.) We tried keeping him in, but I'm not as stony hearted as Mittens, and in the last analysis I lack the iron resolve to forbid a living creature from ever seeing the sky.

We tried putting him on a long leash. A clothes line in fact. But that depended on a collar. And we know what he does with collars.

So we are the proud owners of the Charles Manson of the cat world, and the unhappy owners of Kitty Killing Ground.

Only younger daughter can stroke him, and even she is covered in scratches.

I never turn my back on him -- if he was any bigger, or I was any smaller, or showed weakness in any way, he would be on me.

And the daily carnage on the roof is monstrous. I've lost count of the number of dead birds. And, let's be frank here, not just dead -- dismembered. In the most grisly way. And they're not all left on the roof. Bits and pieces of what used to be beautiful feathered fluttering things regularly litter our hallway, drift up behind tables, start to stink under our bed.

Now I really do understand the true visceral horror of the phrase 'what the cat brought in.'

And I really, really do hate cats.

Lenny Johnson - Culture Warrior, General Groover, and Lover of the Peaceful Way.