h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of mine eats cheese. Surely something's wrong there?

Not at all... cheese are a milk by-product you know.
What's weird is that cats actually can't digest milk, but cream is ok.

That's OK, my cat is much weirder. Although its food habits aren't too weird except for the fact that it eats WAY too much, it is, well....neurotic. It gets constipated whenever I have visitors. And it likes to sit in the weirdest places. But other than that, it isn't too weird...

All cats are neurotic

THERE ARE NO NORMAL CATS (except possibly Brian, who was pretty normal when he still had control of his saliva glands...).

Nearly all cats seem to like cheese. I've known some of my families cats to fight more over cheese than over meat.

My ginger cat has a fetish for cucumber however, which is slightly stranger...

my cat zara is defiently wierd she likes potato peelings (and other vegatable peelings), coffee flavoured chocolates and mars bars. She even enjoys licking freshly washed wet hair. She like your cat, also enjoys a bit of mature chedder

It is all very well to mess with ourselves, but when we mess with nature we get problems.

For example, my mate Pat's got a radioactive cat. The beast developed a growth in its thyroid so the vet injected it with a substance that makes it glow in the dark. I should feel sympathy for the mog, but as with most misfortune I find it funny and besides, it's one of those cats that expresses affection by biting.

The vet isolated the thrumming cat for a few days in a lead-lined cage but now that it's back at home it has to be locked out at night so it doesn't sneak on to Pat's pillow and make him grow a second head. So instead, it wanders luminously over the neighbour's roof, warping the corrugated iron and alarming the passing drunks.

Each morning Pat scans the yellowing vegetation of his garden with a Geiger counter, finds the beast and lets it into the house. But if he falls asleep on the sofa and wakes with the thing on his lap he has to lake a two-hour shower and cheek his sperm count. One million and one, one million and two ...

Now luminosity hinders hunting, so I doubt if Pat's cat is much good at catching birds at present, but I expect it gives them a fright.

My own cat, however, which to my knowledge has never been radioactive, is in mid-season hunting form. Only yesterday afternoon I found it torturing a sparrow with the sort of glee that I find hard to like. Had there been any point in doing so I would have rescued the sparrow but it was already too late by a matter of several organs. The sparrow still tried to flutter away but aerodynamically it was a gone possum.

Five minutes later the cat brought me the tubular remains and rubbed against me in search of praise which I refused to give. Indeed, right now if my cat developed a dicky thyroid I don't think I'd fork out for even one syringe of plutonium.

On the day I acquired three chickens the cat stalked them. Ten metres from the coop it slunk down into that low-bellied crawl which it learnt from David Attenborough, and then spent the best part of an hour sneaking up on the unwitting chooks across the lawn. On my lawn, that's no great feat. In a recent gale my dustbin blew away - not much to my regret because its lid had always stuck and now I had the excuse to buy a green deluxe model - but as soon as I'd replaced it I stumbled on the old bin which had been hiding in the depths of the lawn.

So the cat in the lawn was like a pedestrian in Manhattan, but still it stole toward the chickens with extraordinary caution, moving each limb separately with a rapt and sinuous malice. Eventually it parted the grass at the edge of the coop, beheld the chooks clearly for the first time, saw that each bird was twice its size, stared at them in wild surmise and lost interest.

Since then two chickens have gone broody which means they spend their days trying to hatch the eggs they haven't got. If the one active chook lays an egg the broodies fight over it until I take it away. Broody chooks don't lay and since they've nothing to rear I am keen to snap them from their broodiness. Pat of the luminous cat told me one way to do it was to toss the chickens into the air.

So every day for the past two weeks I've tossed my chickens. As I reach into the nesting boxes the broodies swell like puffer fish, cluck weakly in protest and peck at my hands, but once they've been tossed and have fluttered back to earth and stood for a while to reorder brains the size of paper-clips, they suddenly remember that they are chickens and peck madly at grain and grass and swig beaksful of water. Then they go back to their brooding until it's tossing time again.

Confronted finally with the failure of the tossing gambit I consulted the Internet. In 10 minutes I had found a Website called Fowlnews where I joined the hugely popular 'Poultry Information Exchange' and posted my problem on its virtual bulletin board. I expect you saw it. Anyway, within the hour I had received several bits of virtual advice. Among them came an e-mail from a chicken-fancier known as Buzz from Wisconsin.

Buzz told me it is sometimes possible to snap chickens out of broodiness by scaring them. I'm going to borrow Pat's cat.

My cat actually gets up on his hind legs and begs for green beans, pasta, any various things containing jalepenos. It's the green beans that scare me, though.

Our latest cat acquisition - although she acquired us rather than the other way round - appears to love yogurt, and pickled onions. Our older cat loves cheese, like most other moggies, and dotes on tuna. We used to have a cat who loved cheese and beetroot sandwiches - but only if made with homemade bread.

Cats aren't supposed to be able to taste sweetness, but we used to have a cat who insisted on having sugar in her Milo.

BTW About the hunting: cats hunt (and present the dead animals to their owners) because they believe we can't hunt. If the cat observes you killing an animal, it will probably stop. This happened to us when my father killed a mouse.

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My mate's cat used to eat bread. I'm sure that's not normal.

Hooray! I'm going home next week and get to see Stinky again, my cat.

I have three cats who eat melon. If they don't get it in the morning, they get desperate.

Lance.

Mine loved pickled onion monster munch (no other flavour) but refused to eat any kind of fish. He was very worrying and then he ran away when we moved. God knows what happened to him if he was that choosey.

My old cat used to love cheesy cracker-type biscuits. And popcorn.

Did it die of malnutricient or however you spell it?

Me is a cat and me loves doughnuts...

From reading the Discworld books, I thought you liked small furry animals?

Lance.

WEll me does... some of my bestest chums are small furry creatures...

"Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never
forgotten this." --Anonymous

As far as me knows... ~grin~... me is STILL worshipped as a God...