Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 30, 1994 TAG: 9403310280
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
No. These people know they have to be very careful when they're fooling around with the voters' cats. Voters will forget a tax increase, but they keep the memory of perceived injustice to their cats.
It's true, also, that the county will need some extraordinary people to enforce this law.
I guess there's a super race out there somewhere that can run fast enough to catch a cat to see if it's licensed.
And pretty good at climbing trees.
The law has required dog-licensing for years, so why is it I get this feeling that not all of them are wearing license tags?
In any case, America still senses something of her rural past - a calm time when country girls were pink-cheeked and blond and just as chaste as they could be.
(This was before television talks shows - one of which recently featured a mother and daughter, the mother bemoaning the fact that her dropout daughter had sex at home all the time.)
In that innocent time in America, the fields were green and the great barns held numbers of cats that faithfully caught mice and endeared themselves to the roughest rural types.
If you had sent somebody down to the barn in those days to tell Farmer Brown he had to license his cats, you'd have had a badly wounded animal control officer on your hands.
(That's another thing that troubles me about modern America: Why, in the name of Rin-Tin-Tin, did we ever allow the dogcatcher - a figure who looms large in the American memory and in politics - to become an "animal control officer"? Such things are ruinous to our heritage. It just doesn't work to say, "He couldn't get elected animal control officer." More Americana down the drain.)
But, getting back to cats, they have graced some of the greatest parlors in the country. They purr. They are cuddly. They are said to be smart. They wash themselves all the time. People pay big bucks when their cats need surgery.
They have brightened the lives of many, and politicians know the media would really go for an elderly lady who, at a protest rally, carries a sign that says:
HE WHO TAKES MY CAT AWAY FROM ME WILL HAVE TO PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD, ARTHRITIC FINGERS.
There's a cat in the White House, for Pete's sake. Some people think it's in charge of policy.
by CNB