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Chip Brown.

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 Cats NXS

Okay, here it goes I'm going to get in some real trouble this week. I just haven't been able to soundly anger my wife lately, so I thought I'd drop the atomic bomb of provocation. She has told me not to do this, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to mention her sister Pam in an article.

Why do you ask? Because I was thinking about the coming recession and the government budget crisis and trying to come up with ways to solve it. Pam is my inspiration.

I think we should start a Cat Tax. I was reading a thing this morning that said cats outnumber humans four to one in America today. Somebody has to be feeding these critters, so I think we should levy a cat tax. I think about $10 a head should balance the budget. A dog tax you ask?

Dogs perform a service to mankind. They hunt down criminals and lead the blind down city streets. That's a good use. Now if I were blind, my cat might lead me down the street, and we'd probably do pretty well until he saw a squirrel, then it would be all out as fast as we could go, out in traffic.

So what does this have to do with my wife's sister Pam? Pam could keep most of the third world up if we had a cat tax. Owning one cat is a cat lover, owning two is a thoughtful person, three brands one a near eccentric, and four just makes you plain loony. Pam owns like a gazillion cats. I don't even think she names them anymore, I think she just assigns them numbers.

Now, don't get me wrong, she takes care of her cats. She treats them better than most Union County kids. She loads them all up every year in the car and takes them for shots. Man, I'd like to pitch a mouse in the car that day and see how fast she'd wreck with all those cats swarming around her.

We'd have to elect a Cat Tax man. His job would be going to every house and counting cats. No doubt, people would try to hide their cats when they saw him coming, so he'd have to have an assistant. A mouse on a string might work. Every house he goes to that denies having a cat, would get the mouse treatment. With a string tied to his mouse the Cat Tax man would let him loose in the house. After five or ten minutes he would pull the string back. If there is a mouse still attached, this house is written up as having no cats. However if the end of his string is tied to a bloody mouse carcass they get fined for fibbing to the Cat Tax man. He'd probably need several mouse assistants come to think about it.

But honestly, what are cats good for? They don't work or anything. They won't come when you call them, why do we like the things? They won't pull a sled like a dog. I know, I tied five of them to the front of my wagon when I was a kid. We didn't go anywhere but there was one heck of a cat fight.

A friend of mine was over the other night and noticed my cat all sprawled out on the sofa asleep. He commented that, we as humans could learn a lot from cats. That got me to thinking, what if we were more like these animals? Well on the upside, we'd eat a lot more often and take more naps. I'm all for that. However, I'm not real wild about a cat's choice of toilet paper. We'd probably run as fast as we could through the house every morning. And before we could get in a car, we'd have to shake our rear-ends, like the jump into the seat was some sort of precise movement that required much thought.

There would be chaos on the highway too, as I'm certain cat's can't be good drivers. Oh, we'd do pretty good driving along until a bird flew by, then being like cat's we'd drive our car into the nearest tree.

No, I prefer to be more like a badger. Badgers just go through life hating everyone and just staying off by themselves at parties.

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