The short clip shows just about everything wrong with cat shows.
Amid the subdued noise of the show, in which hundreds of people collectively try not to freak out the felines who definitely don’t want to be there, Beethoven — number 176 — was called up.
Anyone who knows anything about cats could tell little dude was not gonna do well.
“Beautiful coat, shiny, nice green eyes,” said a judge, a woman wearing cat ears.
Having exhausted her supply of superlatives, she ran a hand down Beethoven’s tail, then grabbed both his front legs from behind in a way I’ve never seen anyone try to move a cat and tried to spin him around.
Beethoven wasn’t having it.
The void unleashed a symphony of hisses, feints and dodges while trying to get away, but the judge — seriously, has she ever dealt with a cat before? — shoved him, then tried to grab him again as if the pointless evaluation could be saved.
That’s when The Conductor lunged in for a hard right paw-slap, leaving #177– a white chonkster on deck — with a look that said “Oh no he didn’t!”
“I need the owner here now,” the judge said, like a doctor snapping at a nurse for a scalpel as a patient’s blood pressure plummets on an operating table.
Beethoven was disqualified, but he should have gotten points. He should have gotten all the points.
Oh, people who participate in “cat fancy” will tell you their ridiculous soirees are really just social events for the feline-inclined, as if they don’t privately rage when their cats lose like Patrick Bateman stewing over the fact that Bryce prefers Van Patten’s business card to his own.
But seriously, what the hell is going on at these shows?
Most of them are celebrations of the cat world’s worst excesses, with people lugging their terrified $10,000 Savannahs, $4,000 Bengals, currently out-of-fashion Persians and other breed cats to gymnasiums or hotel ballrooms where they’re mishandled, judged like collector’s items and measured against absurd arbitrary standards written by God-knows-who.
The breed standards read like wine descriptions in obnoxious catalogues: “The tail should be long and sturdy, powerful yet restrained like a rhinoceros in a steel cage. The coat should be of moderate length and silky, yet not so shiny as to invite comparisons to the Arkenstone of Thráin, that wondrous jewel. The head should be angular, recalling the good old days of colonial occupation in Siam when elegant men and women would lounge in opulent royal palaces enjoying stiff cocktails as the locals fanned them. The paws should leave tigerian pug marks, but the toes should not be arranged so close together as to appear inartful…”
The insanity of it makes me want to pose as a judge, grabbing a cat and taking a deep huff from its behind as horrified cat fanciers look on.
“I get notes of summer in New York, rotting garbage and the perpetual smell of urine on the 6 line. Hints of jasmine, cinnamon and Temptations Seafood Medley filtered through the miraculous feline intestinal system! The flavor profile is ecstatic. Oh! The aftertaste! Bitter yet triumphant!”
Except for the non-breed portion of the show, which you get the impression is treated like a non-televised undercard fight at a UFC event, the participants are basically big-upping cats who come from breeders, holding them up as the feline ideal while allowing a few scraps to fall off the table for those dirty little moggies who were the result of two cats voluntarily copulating, not some breeder putting Big Tom and Queen #7 in a cage together until BT puts one in the bun.
Ew, a shelter cat!
You know what I say to these cat shows and their judges? Look at this dude! Look at him! Behold his handsomeness:
Not only is he charming and ridiculously good looking, his office has many leather-bound books and smells of rich mahogany. Cat judges, eat your hearts out!
Pain In The Bud 