Dogs are useful, but cats are really only interested in sabotage
In ancient Egypt they mummified cats; in Britain, we give them jobs. Tewkesbury town council has put itself ahead of the curve on inter-species cooperation by employing a cat, Missy, as a “morale officer” to cheer up its staff. Now Missy may have to work from home because the mayor, Karen Brennan, fears that they are wasting too much time playing with the cat instead of working.
We all know cats are freeloaders. As one of the few domestic species to allegedly have domesticated themselves, there is a reasonable case to be made that we are their pets – or perhaps their equivalent of a basic income scheme. They have organised their affairs so that we provide food and shelter in return for little tangible value.
But the true situation is much graver. To mock Mrs Brennan as a joyless prig would be to underestimate the danger cats pose to our economy. Innocuous as they may seem, they are one of the oldest and greatest enemies of progress.
Maybe you’ve been there: sitting at home on your PC, just about to really get down to some work – when, with exquisite timing, your cat sits on the keyboard. It’s unclear why they do this: one theory is that cats enjoy warm things and glittering lights, and so naturally nestle against the warm-running body of a laptop. But they do the same thing with newspapers, so perhaps it is actually about attention. Cats perceive that we are raptly engrossed by these weird devices, and make it their task to disrupt our relationship with any potential competitor. Natural divas, they calculate that even being shooed off the keyboard is a win. They have successfully set the agenda.
Yet this is just the start of their sabotage. In the classic film Bringing Up Baby, a smitten Katherine Hepburn entangles Cary Grant’s uptight paleontologist in her screwball life by obliging him to look after a leopard. And for the next 80 minutes “Baby” creeps through the film, a sinuous presence in the stiff world of the East Coast upper crust. It embodies the spontaneity, freedom, chaos and lunacy to which she eventually forces Grant to surrender. Our old superstition about black cats, and their association with witches, testify to the same truth: that cats are against order, against reason, against the presumption that we can ever completely know or control this world.
Just consider the contrast with dogs. Dogs are useful. They serve a purpose; they work. Their domestication was crucial to the rise of civilisation and they can be fully integrated into its apparatus: as border guards, drug sniffers, agricultural machines, guardians of property rights and therapists reintegrating traumatised people into the workforce. They are part of a regime which aspires for everything to serve a productive goal. But cats are not useful. Sure, they can be monetised (as in the “cat cafés” of Japan, or on YouTube), but you’d never trust them to pull a sled. They are what cannot be assimilated into the civilised project. Dogs are Apollonian and cats are Dionysan. Dogs serve the sun and cats serve the moon.
It’s clear as daylight why an Apollonian jobsworth would want to banish them from the workplace. As a fan of progress (on balance), I sympathise. But I must now unmask myself as an agent of the cats. I don’t want to live in dog world, not completely, so I back the cats in order to maintain a balance. I want them to waste more of our time, and I hope this article helps. All hail cats, chaos, daydreams, and the night. FOLLOW Laurence Dodds on Twitter @LFDodds; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion