Terry Pratchett - The unadulterated cat

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The Unadulterated Cat 1 IWE (IJVAPULTEM~ 4CAT A Campaign for Real

Cats FACE London Victor Gollancz Ltd 1989 First published in Great Britain

1989 1)~, Victor Gollanez Ltd 14 liciirietta Street, Londoii WC2E 8QJ A

Gollancz paperback Original Text (p Terry and Lyn Pratchett 1989 (',artoolis

(D Grayjoliiffe 1989 British Libran, Cataloguing in Publication

Data llratcliett, Terry, 1948The unadulterated cat. 1. Title 11. Jolliffe,

Gray 823'.914 [1~'I ISI3N 0-575-04628^7 Photoset in Great Britain by Rowland

Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and printed by St Edmundsbury

Press Ltd Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Designed by Peter Guy DEDICATION All

right, all right. Time to come clean. Despite the fact that this book clearly

states that cats should have short names you don't mind yelling to the

neighbourhood at midnight, The Unadulterated Cat is dedicated

to: Oedipuss They don't come much realer. Far too many people these days

have grown used to boring, mass-produced cats, which may bounce with health

and nourishing vitamins but aren't a patch on the good old cats you used to

get. The Campaign for Real Cats wants to change all that by helping

people recognise Real Cats when they see them. I lciice this book. The

Campaign for Real Cats is against fizzy keg cats. All right, How can I

recognise a Real cat? Simple. Nature has done a lot of the work for you. Many

Real cats are instantly recognisable. For example, all cats with faces that

look as though they had been put in a vice and hit repeatedly by a hammer with

a sock round it are Real cats. Cats with ears that look as though they have

been trimmed with pinking shears are Real cats. Almost every non-pedigree

unneutered tom is not only Real, but as it hangs around the house it gets

Realer and Realer until one of you is left in absolutely no doubt as to its

Realness. Fluffy cats are not necessarily unreal, but if they persist in

putting on expressions of affronted dignity for the camera while

advertising anything with the word 'purr-fect' in the associated copy they are

definitely bringing their Realness into question. Ab. So cats in adverts

aren't Real? Actually being in adverts doesn't make a cat unreal - it can't

help it if someone plonks it down in some weird pyramid made of carpet and

takes pictures of it peeping anxiously out of the hole - but its demeanour

once there For example, if you put an unreal cat down in front of a row of

bowls of catfood it will obediently choose the one made by the sponsors of the

ad even if all the others haven't got sump oil on them. A Real cat, on the

other hand, will head for the most expensive regardless, pull it out onto the

studio floor, eat it with great~' pleasure, try some of the others, trip

up the cameraman and then get stuck behind the newsreaders' podium. Where it

will be sick. And then, when its owners buy several large tins of the wretched

stuff, it'll refuse to touch it again. Real cats never wear bows (but

sometimes they do wear bow-ties; see 'Cartoon Cats'). Or appear on Christmas

cards. Or chase anything with a bell on it. Real cats don't wear collars.

But Real cats often do wear dolls' clothes, and sit there also wearing an

expression of furry imbecility while their brains do a complex radar scan of

their surroundings and then they take a special kind of ]cap that gets them

out of the mob cap, dress, apron and doll's pram all in one move. Real cats

are not simply self-possessed. Nor are they simply neurotic. They are both, at

the same time, just like real people. Real cats do eat quielic. And giblets.

And butter. And anything else left on the table, if they think they can get

away with it. real cats can hear a fridge door opening two rooms away. There

is some dispute about this, but some of the hardliners in the CRC say that

Real cats don't go to catteries when their owners go on holiday, but are fed

by a simple arrangement of bowls and neighbours. it is also held that

Real cats don't go anywhere in neat wicker Nissen huts with dinky little bars

on the front. Now look. Schism and debate are of course the lifeblood of

democracy, but I wouldjust like to remind some of our more enthusiastic

members of the great damage to the Campaign caused by the Flea Collar

Discussion (1985), the Proprietary Cat Litter Row (1986) and what became

rather disgracefully reported as the Great Bowl With Your Name On It

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Fracas (1987). As I said at the time, while of course the ideal Real cat eats

its meals off an elderly saucer with remnants of the last meal still crusting

the edge or, more typically, eats it off the floor just beside it, a Real cat

is what you are, not what is done to you. Some of us may very well feel

happier carting our cats around in a cardboard box with the name of a

breakfast food on the side, but Real cats have an inbuilt distrust of white

coats, can tell instantly when the vet is in prospect, and can erupt from

even the stoutest cardboard box like a ICBM. This generally happens in dense

traffic or crowded waiting rooms. 11 Despite the bad feeling caused by the

Great Bowl With Your Name On It Fracas mentioned above, we should make it

clear that Real cats do eat out of bowls with PUSSY written on the side.

They'd eat out of them if they had the word ARSENIC written on the side.

They eat out of anything. Real cats catch things. Real cats eat nearly all

of everything they catch. A Real cat's aim is to get through life

peacefully, with as little interference from human beings as possible. Very

much like real humans, in fact. Can I be pedigree and a Real cat too? Of

course you can't. You're a human. il~l, cat, I mean. Ah. A thorny one, this.

Logically, simply knowing your great-granddad's name should not be a bar to

enjoying the full rich life, but some of the Campaign's more committed members

believe that a true Real cat should be in some doubt as to its own existence,

let alone that of its parents. We feel that this is an extreme view. It is

true that many of us feel the quintessential Real cat looks like the survivor

of a bad mincer accident, but if people are really going to go around judging

a cat's Realness by looks and fur colour alone, then they must see that

what they are working towards is a Breed in its own right ('And this Year's

Supreme Champion is Sooty, by

"Thatdamngreythingfromnextdoorsonthebirdtableagain" out of "We just Call

Her Puss" of Bedwellty'). The point is that cats are different from dogs. A

certain amount of breeding was necessary to refine dogs from the rough, tough,

original stock to the smelly, fawning, dribbling morons* of uncertain temper

that we see today After considerable heated debate, the Committee wishes it to

be made clear that this statement should not be taken to include, in order,

small white terriers with an IQ of 150, faithful old mongrels who may be

smelly but apl)~irelitly we love him, and huge shaggy wheezing St Bernards who

consume more protein in a day than some humans see in a year) but understand

every word we say, no, really, and are like one of the family~,. The

committee, failing despite tremendous pressure to have this phrase removed,

haha, have asked it to be amended to'has a healthy appetite for a dog of his

age'. This refers to the way the huge snout drops like a bulldozer and pushes

a bowl the size of a washbasin clean across the kitchen, 1 sul)i)o,,,c. The

committee can say what they like, but the Chairman, who indeed fully admits

never to have experienced the joys and pleasures of dog ownership, intends

never to do so, and fully accepts that there are lioti,,cs k~lic.ic (1()gs

cits lik,e iii domestic harmony, has seen him ("11 . As they were turned

into anything that society felt at the time that it really wanted

self- powered earth-moving machines, for example, or sleeve ornaments - so the

basic dogness was gradually diluted. Thus, your Real dog is far more likely to

be a mongrel, except that the word is probably illegal these days, whereas all

cats are, well, cats. More or less the same size, various colours, some fat,

some thin, but still recognisably cats. Since the only thing they showed any

inclination to do was catch things and sleep, no one ever bothered to tinker

with them to make them do anything else. It's interesting to speculate on what

they might have become had history worked out differently, though (see 'The

Cats We Missed'). All that cats were bred for, in fact, was general catness.

All cats are potentially Real. it's a way of life ... What has the Campaign

for Real Cats got against dogs, then? Nothing. Oh, come on. No, there are

perfectly good, well-trained, well-behaved dogs who do not bark like a stuck

record, or crap in the middle of footpaths, sniff groins, act like everyone's

favourite on mere assumption, and generally whine, steal and grovel in a way

that would put a 14th century professional mendicant to shame. We recognise

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this. ("oo(l. There are also forgiving traffic wardens, tarts with hearts of

gold, and solicitors that do not go on holiday in the middle of your

complicated house purchase. You just don't meet them every day. 1

1, ................. Ante--c l~to .40C.Ors Getting started We got a cat

because we didn't like them much. Our garden was debated territory

between five local cats, and we'd heard that the best way to keep other cats

out of the garden was to have one yourself. A moment's rational thought here

will spot the slight flaw in this reasoning. However, if you're predisposed to

keep cats, rational thought has nothing to do with it. We've never met anyone

who recalls waking up one day and thinking:'This morning I will go shopping

and buy some sprouts, one of those blue things for the lavatory, some baking

foil - and, oh yes, a cat would be nice.' Cats have a way of always having

been there even if they've only just arrived. They, move in their own personal

time. They act as if the human world is one they just happened to have stopped

off in, on their way to somewhere that is possibly a whole lot more

interesting. And what, when you come right down to it, do we know about them?

Where did they come from? People say, well, evolution, it stands to reason.

Why? Look at dogs. Dogs descended from wolves. You can tell. Some dogs

are alsatians, which is just a wolf in a collar, biding its time. And then

there's all these smaller dogs, going down in size until you get the weird

little ones with lots of Zs in their name which squeak and can get into pint

mugs. The point is, you can see the evolution happening, all the way from

hairy semi-wolves to bald yappy things bred to go up Emperor's sleeves or

whatever. You know that if civilisation suddenly stopped, if great clanking

things from Alpha Centauri suddenly lurched out of the sky and spirited

mankind away, the dogs would be about two nicals away from becoming wolves Or

look at us. Some of the details might be a bit fiddly, but we - bright,

civilised us, who know all about mortgages and non-stick saucepans and Verdi -

can look back over our genetic shoulders and see a queue of

stumbling fi(ytit-es going all the way back to little crouching shapes with

hairy chests, no forehead and the intelligence of a gameshow audience. Cats

are different. On the one hand we have these great tawny brutes that sit

yawning under the hot veldt sun or burning bright in jungles, and on the other

there's these little things that know how to sleep on top of off-peak

heaters and use cat doors. Not much in between. is there? A whole species

divided, basically, between 500lbs of striped muscle that can bring down a

gnu, and ten pounds of purr. Nowhere do we find the Piltdown Cat, the missing

lynx. All right, there's the wild cat, but that just looks like your average

domestic tabby who's been hit on the head with a brick and got angry about it.

No, we must face it. Cats just turned up. One minute nothing, next minute

Egyptians worshipping them, mummifying them, building tombs for them. No

messing around with a spade in the sad bit of the garden behind the toolshed

for your Pharaohs, not when 20,000 men and a load of log rollers were standing

around idle. Scientists working for the Campaign for Real Cats believe that,

because of the Schrodinger experiments (qi)), the whole question of where cats

come from, and how, is now totally meaningless, since there appear to be

some cats that can travel quite painlessly across time and space, and

therefore this means that the only place time we can be sure cats come

from is How to get a cat 1. Adverts in the Post Office Five adorable tabby

kittens, Just ready to leave Mum, Free to Good Home, Please Phone ... Yes.

Please, Please Phone, because they're all big and fighting with one another

and some of the males are beginning to take a sophisticated interest in Mum.

Do not be fooled into believing that you will need to turn up bearing evidence

of regular church-going and sober habits; good home in this case means

anyone who doesn't actually arrive in a van marked J Torquemada and Sons,

Furriers. if you answer the ad you'll find there's one kitten left. There's

always one kitten left. You spend ages trying to figure out what it was that

made the previous four purchasers leave it behind. Eventually you will find

out. Nevertheless, Adverts in the Post Office are a good way of acquiring your

basic cat. 2. Adverts in posh cat magazines Pretty much like (1.) except

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that the word 'adorable' probably won't be used and the word 'free' certainly

won't be used. Not to be contemplated by anyone on a normal income. The cats

acquired in this way are often very decorative, but if that's all you want a

cat for then a trip to the nearest urban motorway with a paint scraper will do

the business. Pedigree cats talk a lot - catownerspeak for yowling softly -

and tend to rip curtains. Being so highly bred, some of them are

mentally unstable. A friend had an Arch-Villains' cat (qv) which thought it

was a saucepan. But, because it was very expensive and more highly bred than

Queen Victoria, it thought it was a saucepan with style. 3. Buying a house in

the Country A very reliable way of acquiring a cat. It'll normally turn up

within the first year, with a smug expression that suggests it is a

little surprised to see you here. it doesn't belong to the previous occupants,

none of the neighbours recognise it, but it seems perfectly at home. Why? It

is very probably a Scbrodinger Cat (qv). 4. The Cats'Home Another very

popular source, especially just after Christmas and the summer holiday period,

when their sales are on. Despite the fact that you can barely hear her on the

phone for the background of yowling, the harassed young lady will probably

take rather more pains than the average Post Office Advert cat seller to

ensure you haven't actually got skinning knives in your pocket. Often no

payment, just a voluntary donation - made at pistol point. You will be offered

a variety of furry kittens, but the cat for you is the one-year-old spayed

female lurking at the back of the cage with a worried expression who will show

her appreciation by piddling in the car all the way home. 5.

Inheritance These cats come with a selection of bowls, half a tin of the most

expensive cat food on the market, a basket and a small woolly thing with

a bell in it. They will then spend two weeks under the bed in the spare room.

Try to get it out and it could be you in the hospital having skin from your

buttocks grafted onto your arm. Cats are not always inherited from

dead people. if the previous owner is still alive, the Real cat will probably

be accompanied by a list of its likes and dislikes. Throw it away.

They're just fads anyway. Try to avoid inheriting cats unless they come with a

five figure legacy, or at least the expectation of one. 6. joint ownersb

* Do you know where your cat spends its time when it's not at home? it's

worth checking with more distant neighbours that they don't have a cat with

the same size and colouring. it can happen. We once knew two households

who for years both thought they owned the same cat, which spent its time

commuting between food bowls. A sort of menagerie,5~ trois. An interesting

fact about acquiring cats is that the things are, by and large, either

virtually free or very expensive. It's as if the motor industry had nothing

between the moped and the porsche. types of cat Forget all the business

about Blue Points and Persians. Real cats are likely to be: 1. Farm Cats A

dying breed. Once upon a time every decent barn supported a thriving,

incestuous colony of them, depositing small nests of mewling kittens amongst

the hay-bales, and there's still a few around. Worth getting if you can.

They often look like flat-headed maniacs, but they've generally got a bit of

sense. Not usually found on the kind of farms that are apparently made of

extruded aluminium, but still scratching a living here and there. 2. Black

Cats with White Paws There must be a breed of these. Most SupPost Office cats

(qv) are black cats with white paws. They are always called Sooty. 3.

Neighbours'Cats Usually grey, and often seen in the newlyseeded bit of the

garden with a strained expression on their faces. Normally

called Yaargeroffoutofityarbarstard (see 'Naming Cats'). 4. Boot-faced

Cats They have fangs, crossed eyes, enough scars to play a noughts and

crosses championship on, and ears like old bus tickets. They're

invariably male. Boot-faced cats aren't born but made, often because they've

tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired

by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where

there was room. Most Boot-faced cats are black. Strange but true. 5. Sort o

Tabby Cats with a Bit of Ginger, But Sometimes In the Right Light You Could

Swear There's a Hint of Siamese There Your basic Real cat. Backbone of the

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TheUnadulteratedCat1IWE(IJVAPULTEM~4CATACampaignforRealCatsFACELondonVictorGollanczLtd1989FirstpublishedinGreatBritain19891)~,VictorGollanezLtd14liciiriettaStreet,LondoiiWC2E8QJAGollanczpaperbackOriginalText(pTerryandLynPratchett1989(',artoolis(DGrayjoliiffe1989BritishLibran,CataloguinginPublication...

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Terry Pratchett - The unadulterated cat

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