A Cat in the Commons

Noted over at Tim Worstall’s place a story about a cat in the commons…

The Commons is infested with mice. Fair enough, old, Victorian, building, a thousand or two people wandering around, lots of cafeterias and dining rooms, lots of people using take away trays to eat at their desks and so on: sure, there will be mice around. It’s even rumoured that the mice have become immune to poison and the pest control people doubt that they’ll be able to eradicate them.

I’m not sure where Tim got this story from as he doesn’t quote a source on this occasion. I notice trawling the web, that there were a couple of references in June of 2002. Anyway according to Tim’s piece, the idea of natural predation to control the vermin is not an acceptable solution:

The work appears to have forced the mice out into the open. Requests for a House of Commons cat to do its traditional job of catching vermin have been rejected by the “authorities” on health and safety grounds.

Anne McIntosh, Conservative MP for Vale of York, asked for a cat to be introduced after seeing mice in the Commons Tea Room. “I was told it could not because it would get too near the food. So it’s all right for the mice to get near the food, but not the cat.”

There are times when I wonder at the state of the world. Mrs Longrider and I share a home with eleven cats. Oddly enough, we have managed the past twenty years (and longer prior to our relationship) in the company of a motley selection of felines without succumbing to some horrible, terminal disease. Man is an animal. Man has lived alongside other species perfectly safely for millennia. It is the modern obsession with absolute cleanliness to the point of being unnatural that has led to this fixation that animals are unclean. How, I wonder, did the ancient Egyptians manage? How, too, I wonder, do the country yokels Tim refers to survive? Is it because we have antibodies in our biology that protects us from disease? Antibodies that allow us to live perfectly safely alongside other mammals?

Once more we see the “itselfansafetyinnit?” argument being trotted out by imbeciles to disguise their inability to think critically or to make rational decisions. If you have a mouse problem, a cat is an obvious, simple and cost effective solution. Coupled with this is the therapeutic effect created by the company of an animal that accepts you as you are. Sure, cats are self-obsessed creatures and are constantly on the lookout for the main chance and if that main chance is a gravy train provided by people, then so be it. The relationship is, though, symbiotic. A few cats around the House of Commons can only be a good thing. It’ll double the average IQ for a start…