THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, cats were worshipped as gods. They have never forgotten this and up to today, as every cat lover knows, nobody owns a cat. As one wise man said: “There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.”
Cats are smarter than dogs – you will never get eight of them to pull a heavy sled through deep snow. They have also infiltrated the English language. There are 516 words beginning with “cat”. There are even abbreviations like the one in this joke.
A woman brought a very limp parrot into a veterinary hospital. The vet listened to the bird’s chest, announcing afterwards, “Polly has passed away.” The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure?
I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything.”
The vet left the room, returning a few moments later with beautiful black Labrador. The dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the dead parrot from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.
The vet led the dog out but returned a few moments later with a cat. The cat jumped up and also sniffed delicately at the ex-bird. The cat sat back, shook its head, meowed and ran out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, “Your parrot is most definitely, 100 per cent certifiably . . . dead.”
He then produced a bill, which the parrot’s owner took. “$150!” she cried. “$150 just to tell me my bird is dead?!” The vet shrugged. “If you’d taken my word for it, the bill would only have been $20, but with the lab report and the CAT scan, what did you expect?”
If you think that CAT scan was costly, consider the price some politicians in eastern Mexican are paying for ignoring the needs of their constituents. The story is that Morris the cat has been nominated for mayor
of Xalapa with the slogan Tired Of Voting For Rats? Vote For A Cat, and more than 100 000 people have taken to the Internet to support him. The campaign seems to have inspired other people across Mexico, who have nominated other animal candidates in the country’s July elections.
Morris has his own Facebook page and has already got almost 200 000 “likes” while his nearest human rival, Americo Zunega, has only 35 000. In describing the rationale for nominating Morris, Sergio Chamorro, who adopted the ten-month old cat last year, explained, “He sleeps almost all day and does nothing, and that fits the profile of a politician.”
According to media reports, politicians repeatedly rank at the bottom of polls about citizens’ trust in institutions. A survey last year ranking the extent that Mexicans trust 15 selected institutions put politicians and government officials among the bottom five.
Rebel
Animals and other non-human candidates are not new to elections and are nominated when the ordinary people lose trust in their politicians and rebel against the system. In fact, Stubbs, a cat that has been the honorary mayor for more than 15 years of the small Alaska town of Talkeetna, has endorsed Morris.
In 1938, Boston Curtis, a brown mule, won a precinct seat in Milton, Washington, in 1938, winning 52 to zero.
Another Morris, also a cat, ran as a candidate in the 1988 and 1992 United States presidential elections.
I was thinking of this when I saw the disenchantment of people in Trinidad with the present ruling party and the fact that Jack Warner, who was the member of parliament for the Chaguanas West constituency and resigned after having to give up his ministerial portfolio and his party chairmanship, is now the preferred candidate to contest the by-election caused by his resignation. Many people see it as a colossal waste of time and money as well as the trivialization of politics, especially when the opposition party has already identified a candidate to fight Warner for the seat.
The problem is that opposition politics in Trinidad is dog-dominated. The leader of the opposition party, Dr Keith Rowley, is known as the Rottweiler and another leader of the party, Colm Imbert, is the “Pompek” – a word coined for the lapdog produced by breeding a Pomeranian with a Pekingese.
The top members of the lead party in the governing coalition are supposedly into goat in a big way, curried or otherwise. A poll among my friends about what would make a good candidate to show discontent with the political process came up with either a vulture (or corbeau as it is known in Trinidad) or a snake.
The argument is that these creatures are honest and don’t pretend to be what they’re not.
• Tony Deyal was last seen saying that the best non-human to fight Warner and other politicians would be a used diaper because even though they have lots of Luvs and Huggies around election time, and Pamper their friends, they need to be changed regularly.
