Reigning Cats & Dogs

Good grief. It was already a rough week. And now I owe my cat two million bucks.

Don't laugh! And don't think it can't happen to you! Thanks to some of society's far-point fringe elements, pets can now sue their "owners." My cat lawyered up, bought a stylish but modest business ensemble, sued me, and won.

I'm not sure exactly when animals managed to gain more human rights than humans, but it's nearly a done thing. Prodded by "progressive" policies from PETA, the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Rights Militia, Oz's winged monkeys, and other seriously under-medicated entities, domestic pets and their more feral cousins are very close to flipping the Garden of Eden gig and taking dominion over man (if we can still say "man").

According to my exhaustive research, performed while watching my cat's lawyer swim by in a Shark Week documentary, Americans collectively spend some 200 conskillion dollars each year on pet care, over ten times more than we spend on books, and if you rule out books that don't discuss diets, the total drops to about a dollar-fifty. Animal nurturers can buy gourmet pet food, invest in memory-foam beds, send their pets off to summer camp, look into kennel career counseling and donate to causes like "Winged Monkeys Are People, Too."

Political correctness now applies to the animal kingdom, too. You mustn't say "black sheep" or "white whale" or "red herring" or "dark horse." You can't call someone "crazy as a loon" or "blind as a bat" or "fat as a pig." You can still lead a horse to water, but you shouldn't want to be making the horse drink in the first place, you vile biped, you. You snake in the grass. You cold duck.

And I won't even bring up "Whack-A-Mole." Or "bitch."

Now, these anthropomorphic activists may have a point. Last Christmas (if we can still say "Christmas"), I was given a bird feeder, and it's become a huge hit, bird-wise. A bright red Cardinal flew by and blessed the food, and an excommunicated squirrel blessed out the Cardinal. But I've been monitoring all the avian activity, and apparently I'm infested with Congressional birds. They strut and preen, bicker amongst themselves, complain about a seemingly endless supply of food that they didn't pay for (but act like they deserve), leave a huge mess, all with nary a nod of thanks.

They also freely decorate my deck with ... well, let's call them "mementos." You know, the airborne version of rabbit pellets. The animal kingdom's equivalent of Congressional sound bites.

Of course, it could be worse. They could be Progressive birds. They could spend the day handing out little bird manifestos, snidely looking down their beaks at the rest of us, demanding we put bird seed in our neighbors' feeders.

All over America, protected species have gotten so over-protected that they're over-procreating, and eating up other species, who were just running around minding their own business, procreating, and occasionally morphing into Darwinian finches. As a result, these innocent animals are now the new endangered species, taking their own turn at guest-starring on stamps, billboards, and celebrity outrage-a-thons.

By the way: speaking of procreation - and it's about time somebody did - thanks to dedicated (albeit misguided) scientific research, we now know that timing can be really critical to ensure the successful mating of pandas.

Whew. As a satirist, I live for news like this.

First, the human bad news. Somewhere out there is a zoo intern nursing a stopwatch, a biorhythms chart, and a foul attitude about his career decision. And then there's poor Andy Panda, rehearsing his best panda pick-up lines while bitterly staring at the sulking undergrad, who's looming there with a clipboard at the foot of the conjugal panda memory-foam bed. "Hey, Stopwatch Boy! Buzz off! I'm trying to bust a move over here!"

In other science news, studies claim to prove that coffee can control Alzheimer's in mice, and I'd pay good money to learn how they test that. Maybe they give out little Starbucks discount cards for Christmice, then administer a TSA security guard exam and see if the mice pass or fail (if we can still say "fail").

Other scientists have discovered that dogs are not only smart; as a defense mechanism, dogs will sometimes actively hide their intelligence from nearby humans. I've often suspected the same thing of network executives, and government workers (if, in that context, we can still say "work"). And unlike some high-level government employees, most dogs can at least handle TurboTax.

And now the winged monkeys have formed a political action committee, hired a spokes-simian, and moved to Nebraska. As a result, the other 49 states will be forced to pay for their anger management therapy.

But anyway, my cat and her lawyer, a junior partner at the law firm of Spawn, Spawn & Legion, sued me for irreconcilable differences, or, as the cat spelled it, x.

Don't blame the cat. Remember, to err is animal.

Maybe I was convicted for not garnishing her cat food with a sprig of parsley. And maybe you think I'll gracefully accept the verdict and simply write the brat cat a big check.

In a pig's eye.