IMAGINE, you’re a cat in England, and it’s 1939. The war was about to break out, and food was about to be rationed. The government told people to have their dogs and cats destroyed. Then no one would be tempted to share their rationed food with their pets. And sure enough, war broke out, and in that first week alone, 400,000 dogs and cats were killed. In all, nearly a million pets were murdered. By order of the prime minister.
During the winter of 1944 when Dutch people were starving, people in Amsterdam ate tulip bulbs, potato skins and cat meat. At first, most thought they were actually being served rabbit meat, but soon they were not. That’s when the butcher could no longer find a live rabbit and he would slaughter a cat instead. Skin us cats, and we’ll look somewhat similar to a skinless rabbit. They’d chop our heads off, and you could hardly tell the difference.
There’s been an expression in Holland since then. The butcher would say he was handing you a skinned rabbit in a bag, but instead it was actually a cat. And so the buyer bought “a cat in the bag”, as in: he was duped.
Don’t get misled: you can taste the difference. We taste stringy and unpleasantly sweetish. You have more use for us when we are alive. My predecessor, President Roosevelt, understood this. He agreed to allow thousands of cats on Navy ships. The crew hunted U-boats. We hunted mice.
* VanderBus left home at the age of six weeks and went hunting for a city bus in Maine. He caught the bus. It cost him one eye, but he won a standing ovation from everyone who watched him do it. VanderBus, since then mayor of Bicker Hollow, is running for president of the United States.
