Curtains for kitty! How to care for cats — and how to kill them

The New Yorker has always had a peculiar affinity with cats, perhaps because they have a lot in common — an elegance, an abhorrence of sentimentality and an innate sense of superiority. The Big New Yorker Book of Cats is full of cats and owners, each holding one another at arm’s length and peering through invisible lorgnettes.

Pulitzer prizewinner Susan Sheehan writes about a tabby cat called Pynchon, owned by the proprietor of a Manhattan bookshop. Pynchon, who for unspecified reasons arrived in New York ‘with no front claws’, is fond of listening to classical music on the radio and regularly attends meetings of the James Joyce Society at the shop. However, he seems to have little in common with his namesake, being both unusually gregarious and enormously fat. Indeed at the annual cat show at Madison Square Garden, Pynchon was judged to be so overweight that he was in imminent danger of developing diabetes.

The whole question of what a cat will and won’t eat is explored in greater depth in Thomas Whiteside’s 1976 piece, ‘Din-Din’. Cat-food advertising — gourmet cat-food advertising in particular — turns out to be a very peculiar business. In the mid- 1960s a brand of cat food called 9-Lives was chugging along comfortably if unspectacularly with annual sales of around $15 million. Ten years later, these had soared to $100 million.

This was ascribed entirely to a cat called Morris which 9-Lives started using in their adverts. Morris was portrayed as being a tremendously fussy eater, forever turning up his nose at this and that before eagerly sinking his incisors into a plate of 9-Lives.

The thinking behind the ads ran as follows: cats often don’t eat for several days. Although this does them no harm at all, it plunges their owners into a state of deep anxiety.