Why Your Cat Hates Cold Toast

Say you just discovered an enormous bird on the dam you rely on to keep water in its place. For purposes of this discussion, the water's place is anywhere you don't want it to be, such as in your home, or your nose. Since very large birds are always connected to extraneous wings, the turbulence generated by their wing flaps often reroutes water along new and unfortunate trajectories. Exactly how unfortunate depends on where you live, and how many horses your powerboat can muster on short notice. Mustering horses is particularly difficult during molting season, when their feathers are more likely to be strewn about the floor than plugged in and ready for a quick escape.

"Well," you might be saying to the cat on your lap, "that certainly sounds like a predicament, doesn't it, Robert?" The cat, having grown accustomed to rhetorical questions, will likely open one eye in mock deliberation but won't have an opinion either way. While this may seem, at first, to be positive thinking or some similarly delusional effort to squeeze optimism from calamity, feline ambivalence becomes shockingly appropriate where large, turbulent birds are concerned. This is because cats and birds enjoy a longstanding enmity, the roots of which can be traced back to primitive agricultural communities located in flood-prone areas below large dams. If there's one thing cats hate, it's the idea of floating downstream on a pile of wet horse feathers. If there's one thing cats love, it's the preventable nature of birds, which is why eggs are in such short supply during the construction phase of every dam.

In other words, if you live below a dam and your cat avoids you at breakfast time, there's no use following him around the kitchen with a plate of cold toast.