The cat that tamed Dom

I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke out from their bodies. I don’t like the constant showing off of their puckered bums, or their disregard for the normal rules of mammal eye contact.

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There are nearly 13 million cats in Britain – one in three of us owns them. There are roughly 74 million in the United States and until recently I found it inexplicable. Why would anyone choose to love and nurture a psycho that dismembers songbirds, often torturing them first in a casual, playful way? I’ve enjoyed in the past writing about the idiocy of ethical vegetarians who own cats. And I would, in different circumstances, be keen to stick it to cat owners again over the news that cat fur, treated with chemical flea-killer, could be partly responsible for the terrible decline of birds worldwide. The birds use the fur to line their nests and the baby birds are slowly poisoned by it before they ever even take flight.

But now George has arrived, and I’m hobbled by my own hypocrisy.

George is a large grey kitten with disproportionately big ears and I didn’t plan for him or want him. He appeared on my neighbour’s doorstep one morning, squashed into a shoebox with his tiny sister, both about three months old and dozy from lack of oxygen. While my neighbour worked out what to do with them, she invited my son and me in for a look, and if I had to pinpoint the moment that the cat started messing with my mind, it was probably right there and then.