becomes a sort of Jack the Ripper at the opera. People tell us that we
should not blame cats for this sort of thing--that it is their nature
and so forth. They even suggest that a cat is no more cruel in eating
robin than we are cruel ourselves in eating chicken. This seems to me
to be quibbling. In the first place, there is an immense difference
between a robin and a chicken. In the second place, we are willing to
share our chicken with the cat--at least, we are willing to share the
skin and such of the bones as are not required for soup. Besides, a
cat has not the same need of delicacies as a human being. It can eat,
and even digest, anything. It can eat the black skin of filleted
plaice. It can eat the bits of gristle that people leave on the side
of their plates. It can eat boiled cod. It can eat New Zealand mutton.
There is no reason why an animal with so undiscriminating a palate
should demand song-birds for its food, when even human beings, who are
fairly unscrupulous eaters, have agreed in some measure to abstain
from them. On reflection, however, I doubt if it is his appetite for
birds that makes the cat with the yellow eyes feel guilty. If you were
able to talk to him in his own language, and formulate your
accusations against him as a bird-eater, he would probably be merely
puzzled and look on you as a crank. If you pursued the argument and
compelled him to moralise his position, he would, I fancy, explain
that the birds were very wicked creatures and that their cruelties to
the worms and the insects were more than flesh and blood could stand.
He would work himself up into a generous idealisation of himself as
the guardian of law and order amid the bloody strife of the
cabbage-patch--the preserver of the balance of nature. If cats were as
clever as we, they would compile an atrocities blue-book about worms.
Alas, poor thrush, with how bedraggled a reputation you would come
through such an exposure! With how Hunnish a tread you would be
depicted treading the lawn, sparing neither age nor sex, seizing the