![]() ![]() It’s astonishing how difficult it is to tell the difference between a pair of testes and a vulva when they’re jiggling swiftly across grass, partially obscured by a swishing, stripy tail. For the next five days, from our usual exclusion range of between two and five metres, my wife and I would follow the cat around, exhorting it to lift its tail and give us a peek at its genitals. If an impartial observer had been around to witness what followed, we might have been taken in for questioning. Were we now “going steady” with this animal? Should we name it? But wouldn’t naming it mean we were committing ourselves to feeding it for ever? How could we name it without knowing its sex? Why does sex even matter when naming a cat? Should we get it sterilised? Did we even have that right? At this distance, and after scores more bowls of cat food and leftovers, we started to feel a little proprietorial. Over the following four weeks, the process continued, until we were permitted to approach as close as two metres. Did this make us pet owners? Of a cat that never came within 20 metres of us? Of an animal that – for all we knew – could also be getting fed and watered by half a dozen other people? We didn’t notice at the time that the distance had halved, that the cat was gradually drawing us in. ![]()
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