EMPLOYMENT FOR CATS.
IN last week's number of the British, Medical Journal Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Buchanan, M.D., insists on the importance of keeping cats in India as a defence against the plague. The plague is spread by the fleas carried by rats, and if cats were widely kept the rats would soon be reduced to an insignificant number. The Indian rat is not of the same formidable family as the present English brown rat, which drove out the original weaker black rat of these islands. The Indian rat is a small creature easily overcome by a cat. Colonel Buchanan tells us how he put eight cats and seventeen Indian rats in a room. Within a few minutes all the rats were killed, and one cat was holding four dead rats in her mouth at the same time. Colonel Buchanan has already tried experiments in preventing plague by cat-keeping in certain districts, and has met with very striking results. It may be said that many Indians would not kill animals, even to prevent plague ; but, as Colonel Buchanan points out, the religious scruple does not extend to preventing one animal from killing another. They "shall not kill, but need not strive Officiously to keep alive." Colonel Buchanan therefore considers that the keeping of cats in the servants' quarters of Indian houses should be systematically encouraged by the Government.
We hope that this suggestion will be acted on. What might not the prestige of cats become if they stayed the Indian plague ? Colonel Buchanan suggests that the worship of cats among the ancient Egyptians was probably a recognition of their sanitary uses. The Mosaic Code, which was partly of Egyptian inspiration, shows how much the thoughts of the Egyptians were bent on perfect sanitary laws, but we question whether the Egyptians understood the sanitary uses of cats unless they employed them as pariahs. It seems more likely that the cat was regarded, not in her service to others but in her own habits, as the model and emblem of cleanliness. It is sad how much the cat has sunk in esteem since those days. Then Kings might look at cats ; to-day a cat may look at a King. But perhaps the Egyptian cat was not the cat we know. It is hard to judge from the mummied cats which are from time to time landed in England. Some people believe that the Egyptian cat was a kind of cheetah. It would be difficult to say whether the head of the goddess Bast was drawn from a true eat. The present writer has seen an old Egyptian picture of a cat acting as a retriever, and doubts whether our familiar cat was ever trained to any such performance. For the domestic cat is above all things an anarchist. It submits to no rule ; it acknowledges no obligations. The dog may lick the hand that beats it, but the cat says : "You have brought me into your scheme of civilisation; I did not ask to come, and I do not ask to stay." Some people are so misguided as to think that the cat is less intelligent than the dog. The cat could tell you where lies the lack of intelligence. She knows what we want her to do, but, having heard all that we have to say, she declines to do it. This is good for us all. It prevents us from becoming too arrogant, or from thinking that our voice is the voice of a god because the dog supposes it to be so. Proudhon rightly placed a cat at the feet of his figure of Liberty. The cat is scarcely within the pale of respectability. She is not mentioned in the Bible. She defies even the laws of language,—Grimm's and all others. No one knows from what the name is derived.
A distinguished scholar at Cambridge used to pretend that men admired cats or dogs according as they were Platonists or Aristotelians. The visionary chooses a eat; the man of concrete plans a dog. Hamlet must have kept a cat. Platonists, or cat-lovers, the scholar used to say, include sailors, painters, poets, and pickpockets. Aristotelians, or dog-lovers, include soldiers, football-players, and burglars. The liking of sailors for cats is at all events established. There is a story that after the battle of Trafalgar, when English sailors were bringing the Frenchmen and Spaniards away from their burning ships, one boat's crew had just pushed off from the side of a burning ship when a piteous mew was heard from a cat which had been left on board. The boat returned to the ship's side, and an English sailor tried again and again to rescue the cat through the port-hole at which its head had been thrust. When he tried to seize her the cat retreated, and all this time the whole boat's company
was in danger of being sacrificed to the cat by the sinking or blowing up of the ship. The cat was rescued just before the ship disappeared, and no doubt every sailor (and Platonist) superstitiously believed that he had averted some calamity from himself by the kindly deed.
Men of the highest discrimination have felt the appalling impropriety of treating cats with any want of respect.
Mohammed cut off his sleeve rather than wake his sleeping cat, and Montaigne was depressed because he felt that his cat regarded him with a disparaging air. Heine, on the other hand, as a man of levity, compared his most heartless lover with cats. Matthew Arnold was near the right feeling, but not quite in possession of it :— "Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable, and grand. So Tiberius might have sat Had Tiberius been a eat."
Probably it was impossible for the owner of ' Geist ' to say
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What is needed for the rehabilitation of cats in esteem—the Aristotelian view having in our day considerably outrun the Platonist—is the assignment to them of some useful function. The intermittent killing of mice is not impressive enough. The " leal true cat" which flies "precipitately home" is not even credited with domestic virtues. In the ancient law of England the cat was given a very different role from that attributed to her to-day by housemaids and others as the principal in all acts of breakage. "Among our elder ancestors the Antient Britons," says Blackstone (" Corn.," II., 4), "cats were looked upon as creatures of intrinsic value, and the killing or stealing of one was a grievous crime, and subjected the offender to a fine, especially if it belonged to the King's household, and was the custos horrei regii, for which there was a peculiar forfeiture." The fortunate cat that held the office of Warden of the Royal Barn was thus protected by the law,—" If any one shall kill or bear away by theft the cat which is Warden of the Royal Barn, it shall be hung up by the tip of its tail, its head touching the floor, and over it shall be poured out grains of wheat until the last hairs of its tail shall be covered by the grain." This curious a,mercement is the same as that which, in "The Case of Swans," was still held to be by law the proper punishment for any one who stole a swan. This custom goes very far back indeed ; perhaps it is a primitive Aryan custom. In the Volsung Saga the whole story of the doom of the gold turns upon this custom. The cat is no longer the subject of larceny at common law. But this it has left to it :—" The master of a ship freighted with goods which are the subject of depredation by rats is bound to have cats on board, or be cannot charge the insurer." That is worth remembering, but it is an employment for cats of no import- ance beside the prospect of their becoming the grand extermi- nators of Indian plague. If they accomplish that magnificent work we trust that a statue of a cat will be set up in every great city of India, and underneath in Sanscrit, in English, in Persian, and in the tongue of the province a suitable inscription to the cleanest and most self-respecting, if the least demonstrative, of domestic beasts.
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