Always a tricky one, this, for Real cat owners, who tend to be the types to whom parade-ground shouting and the legendary rolled-up newspaper does not come easily (if it did, they would then be one of those people with huge bounding dogs who do whatever they damn well please in a huge, jolly way to distant strains of “Prince! NO! I said NO! PUT IT DOWN! This minute! Prince! NO!” etc). What it really boils down to is the difference between Inside and Outside (cf. “Hygiene”). Most Real cats cotton on to the idea fairly quickly. Most Real cats, after all, are bright enough to know that a dry box in a corner of the kitchen is a better bet than a flower bed when the wind is blowing straight from Siberia. Their mothers apparently educate them, though much attention paid to this has been unable to fathom exactly how this is done, apart from persistently moving them around in a slightly neurotic game of kitten chess. Possibly the kittens are taken to some secret cat school where they are shown diagrams. (it's amazing how self-possessed and intelligent cats turn out to be when brought up by their mothers. We've been brought up by our mothers for millennia, and look at us. If Romulus and Remus had been reared by a cat instead of a wolf, Rome would be a different place today).

It'd have better lavatories, for a start.

Beyond that, you can't teach cats to do anything. No, not a thing. You might think you can, but that is because you've misunderstood what's going on. You think it's the cat turning up obediently at the back door at ten o'clock on the dot for its dinner. From the cat's point, a blob on legs has been trained to take a tin out of the fridge every night.

Discipline—once you get beyond all the blanco and school traditions—means, If You Don't Do What I Want I'll Hit You. One problem here, of course, is that a cat is a hard animal to hit. A dog is always amenable to the famous rolled-up newspaper, whereupon it can go into the sorrowful grovelling, whining and sighing routine that would get a human actor booed off the stage. Hitting a cat is like walloping a furry glove full of pins, and doesn't make a blind bit of difference anyway. A relative who will remain unidentified until the RSPCA Statute of Limitations runs out always reckoned that a half-brick thrown the length of a garden6 was necessary even to get a cat to pay attention. Distasteful though it may seem, however, there are times when even a Real cat owner feels it necessary to Take Action. Here are some options:

…which is the first thing to hand when you're digging7 and you see, out of the corner of your eye, the guilty crouching shape as it sits among the cabbages and peas.8 The GBCOE is the rubber bullet of garden preservation, designed to chastise without actual death. The approved method is to hit ground zero about eighteen inches from the culprit, the resultant short sharp shower of shrapnel causing it to leap two feet vertically and suffer acute intestinal distress for the rest of the day. The trouble is, though, that the cat soon works out that you are a typical Real cat owner, ie, a soft touch, and realises that if it calls your bluff, your ferocious stance will melt and you'll just run grumbling to the United Nations. The four cats that turn our garden into a vegetable Jonestown every Spring have realised this, and sit demurely among the whizzing clods visibly thinking “Why is the funny man jumping up and down like that? And why is his aim so bad?”

Don't think this hasn't been discussed.

Just occasionally Life gets It Right, like the time the sly alsatian from up the road decided to crap in the middle of Real cat owner's driveway just when Real cat owner was coming round the corner with a large onion in his hand.

Even better, though, was Real cat owner waking up from a doze on the lawn to find the current incumbent of the local Mad Feral Tom slot on the edge of the goldfish pond, staring intently at what remained of the inhabitants. Real cat owner quickly learns that it is, in fact, possible to go from a recumbent position into a full-length dive. But life's a strange thing. Cats can walk on water. I'll—that is, Real cat owner'll—swear MFT leapt off the surface.

Where was Real cat, obtained you will remember in order to keep other cats out of the garden, when this was going on? Asleep on chair in kitchen, as is always the case. Anyway, felt so bad about the way he wandered off, gave him free meal of sardines later.

Punishment has no effect on Real cats. This is because Real cats don't associate the punishment with the crime. As far as they're concerned, shouting, slippers on a low trajectory and being talked to in a loud, patient voice are all manifestations of the general weirdness of the blobs. All you have to do to survive it is cower a wee bit and look big-eyed, and then get on with your life.

You might as well challenge a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. You always start off ignoring the animal, and end up treating it with added kindness because it appears to be suffering from something.

Only in the worst case. It's beset with difficulties anyway, because:

1. They're not in the phone book.

2. It's expensive. Four small concrete boots still cost twice as much as two large ones, it's a bit like children's shoes.

3. It is almost impossible to get a horse's head into a cat basket.

No, this isn't all that stuff with the bells and catnip-filled calico mice. Cats only play with special cat toys for about two minutes, when you're around, in order that you don't get depressed and stop buying them food.

The thing to remember here is that cats only appear to be solitary animals, forever mooching around the place by themselves. In fact all cats are plugged into this sort of huge feline consciousness which transcends time and space and, in its own mind, a cat is constantly competing and measuring itself against all cats who have ever existed anywhere. It's as if Steve Davis wasn't simply competing against another man in a dicky bow, but against every snooker player throughout history, right back to the first proto-hominid who needed a really mindnumbing way of spending his evenings.

Cats have subtle, intellectual games.

This needs, as the playing area, something the size of a small village. Up to a dozen cats can take part. Each cat selects a vantage point—a roof, the coal house wall, a strategic corner or, in quiet villages, the middle of the road—and sits there. You think it's just found a nice spot to sun itself until you realise that each cat can see at least two other cats. Moves are made in a sort of high-speed slink with the belly almost touching the ground. The actual rules are a little unclear to humans, but it would seem that the object of the game is to see every other cat while remaining unseen yourself. This is just speculation, however, and it may well be that the real game is going on at some mystically higher level unobtainable by normal human minds, as in cricket.