Colin's a mini schnauzer jack russell cross. He's the best of us. There isn't a being in the country that can compete with Colin in terms of loyalty, love, cuteness, horrendous odour and the willingness to party at the drop of a hat. As you can see I clearly run a shocking pro-dog bias.
Which is worth keeping in mind as we outline recent anti-cat coverage in the media.
Let's start with the idea that your cat wants to eat you.
An article this month titled Compelling new evidence that your cat might eat your corpse outlined gruesome cat behaviour at Colorado Mesa University's Forensic Investigation Research Station.
They run a body farm where they keep cadavers. Surrounded by huge barbed fences that rise 10m above ground and 2m below. Built to keep large and digging animals out. But cats are sneaky. They can still get in.
A student checking CCTV footage spotted two cats one black, one striped tucking into the dead humans.
Over a period of weeks, the cats ate the bodies to the bone. Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviour researcher at the University of California wasn't surprised at all. He was aware of cases of cats eating the noses off their recently dead owners. The question is this: If you went down today are you confident your cat wouldn't eat you?
Last week cats were again in the news for all the wrong reasons. In an article headlined Single cat decimates banded dotterel colony, Parker Jones, co-ordinator of the Mainland Island Restoration Organisation outlined how a tabby cat was caught on camera terrorising the Eastbourne banded dotterel colony.
Wiping out nearly all the eggs and chicks. The same cat attacked the colony last year, leaving not a single bird born at the site alive.
This story will be familiar to fans of New Zealand history. In 1892 a lighthouse keeper's cat called Tibbles wiped out an entire species.
David Lyall took Tibbles over to the island for company while he ran the operation. Tibbles loved it. She found lots to hunt. The little bugger systematically killed every single member of the Stephens Island wren species. Rendered the cute little bird extinct.
There is an idea that cats are dumb.
Neurons do the thinking, planning and complex behaviours in a mammal's brain. They are in charge of most things associated with intelligence.
Last year neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel at Vanderbilt University Nashville caused an anti-cat media sensation.
Her research found that a dog's cerebral cortex contains 530 million cortical neurons. Cats have a mere 250 million. So dogs are roughly twice as smart as cats. It's a biological fact.
That's why man's best friend can perform complex tasks. Like helping blind people across the road, maiming bad guys, undressing the disabled, fetching sticks, skateboarding and sniffing out apples in people's luggage at the airport.
Cats don't do anything but sleep, eat and lick their groins. Of course, humans have 16 billion of these cortical neurons so both cats and dogs are really really thick compared to us. Not that sleeping, eating and licking your groin is necessarily a bad thing.
2020 isn't the year of the cat. It seems everyone is ragging on them. Throw in the failure of the movie Cats and it feels like the world is coming for your pussy. But are cats really murdering, corpse munching, idiots or is it all a mainstream media beat up? You be the judge. One thing's for sure, my dog Colin wouldn't eat my cold dead corpse. Not in my lifetime anyway.
