What badly behaved cats might teach us about excuses, responsibility and the people we sometimes forget
There is something rather wonderful about a cat.
You can watch one commit an offence in broad daylight, stare into its eyes while it does so, and still think:
Well… he’s a cat.
Fred Wunpound was a cat.
More precisely, he was a Royal Navy cat.
From 1966 until 1975, he served aboard HMS Hecate - black with white paws, bought from a shelter for one pound, hence the name, with two good-conduct badges to his name and a solid record as a ship’s mouser.
Then came Brixham fish market. And a mark for disgraceful conduct. The details are vague. There was fish. Fred was a cat.
We fill in the rest ourselves.
Rat Catcher Third Class Tom K. Fathoms was placed on the "Prisoner at Large" list of USS Maury in 1953 for repeatedly going AWOL. On three different occasions, RC3 Fathoms left the Maury and was caught raiding the galley of other ships. He also spent three weeks on unauthorised absence in Puerto Rico before being captured by the shore patrol and returned to his ship.
And nobody thinks, What a terrible creature. We think: Of course he stole the fish. Of course he raided the galley.
Years later, I knew another cat called Billy, a Cornish Rex with an adventurous approach to property. He swam a river, wandered into a restaurant and, on one memorable occasion, stole a Red Emperor, vanishing beneath a parked car to eat it.
Nobody commissioned a study into his socioeconomic background. Billy saw a fish. He took it. In fact, Billy came from a very good background. Stable family life. Excellent food. Love and cuddles in abundance. A very privileged cat in the scheme of things. Yet his instinct was still there.
So here we are: three naughty cats. Two fish. One raided galleys. The story could end there.
But the more I thought about them, the more I noticed something we do easily with cats and far less easily with people.
We understood their behaviour. We did not excuse it.
There is a difference.
We know why Fred and Billy stole fish: they were cats. We know why Tom K. Fathoms was absent without leave. Their nature explained the act without erasing it.
The fish was still stolen. The behaviour was still naughty. We simply understood the creature who had done it.
With human beings, we have grown remarkably skilled at explanation. Childhood. Abuse. Poverty. Trauma. Mental illness. Culture. Circumstances.
But somewhere along the way, explanation has acquired a habit of quietly becoming an excuse.
When we become fascinated by the offender’s story, the victim can begin to fade into the background.
"They " examine the offender’s childhood. "They " explore the offender’s circumstances. "They" analyse the offender’s psychology. " They " ask what made him become the person he or she became. But there is another question that must never disappear:
What happened to the person he or she hurt or murdered?
The murdered child is no less dead because the murderer had a difficult childhood. The person who was raped does not carry less trauma because the offender swears they were victims first. Their " pain " is not a footnote to someone else’s biography.
Cats cannot reason morally about what they do.
We can.
That is one of the burdens - and privileges - of being human.
We can look at temptation and refuse it.
We can inherit darkness without passing it on.
We can be hurt without deciding that our hurt gives us permission to hurt someone else.
And perhaps that is the question we should leave ourselves with.
Not whether we can find another explanation.
Not whether we can construct another sympathetic history.
But whether, in our determination to understand human beings, we have occasionally forgotten to hold them to the one thing that makes us human in the first place:
the capacity to choose.
