Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Apologies if I seem to be rushing the season a bit but this fellow has been haunting the top of my desk and I guess I just thought he deserved his day. Such a precise little tabby – I said he but really if I had to guess looking at it, I would say this is actually a girl cat – something about the precision of her. She is sporting some bells, and we will assume that they are in the jingle bells sense, although they could also be worn in service of warning birds of her less than benign intent. For better or worse I am not sure she is catching any mice with it on.

The mousing question is a big one, especially in the context of bird catching and outdoor cat behavior in general. We silly humans would like our cats to draw a line between killing rodents and birds. All this led to mom making her cats indoor ones decades ago – although there were other factors like increase in car traffic, dogs and more. Betty loved birds though and I can only think of one or two occasions when her beloved cats brought her up short with this issue.

Our enormous orange tabby, Pumpkin, was guilty of it once – however the same cat caught water rats as well which seemed like a good thing. There was an almost endless stream of mole, vole and mouse bodies left strewn around as gifts. (My sister Loren had a cat, a tuxie named Milkbone, who left her just the heads and lined them up on the stairs. Their house had a serious mouse issue.)

I think we tried bells briefly, but our cats were Houdini’s in training and always slipped out of them virtually immediately. Subsequently the issue of the collars getting caught on things became a concern and the collar and bell was a brief venture indeed. (And as someone pointed out online recently, kitty doesn’t want bells ringing in their face constantly either.)

It is my belief that it is the girl cats who carry on the grand feline tradition of hunting, although boys certainly will – Pumpkin as an example. However as I have said before in a now oft told tale, when my friend Winsome discovered a murdered mouse in the house in New Jersey (silly, silly mouse to visit a house with five cats) without having any way to know, I put my money on Peaches, the feral female as the cat in question. (For a recent post about Peaches great escape into the outdoors and fetching her home go here.) If something unwanted showed up in the apartment I admit it would be Cookie not Blackie that I would fetch to the rescue. (Recent readers know that I encountered a mouse in my building’s gym the other day, mentioned in a post here. Evidently my chatter about it that morning gave my trainer mousie dreams that evening. I am guilty of sort of tossing a cat in the direction of an undesirable visitor such as a water bug and hoping for rescue.)

However, even for me I have digressed greatly. Today on this holiday postcard we have this chipper and fine-looking feline with a nice white bib and bright white feet tucked together. Her striped tail is wrapped around here, and the aforementioned jingle bells are in a string around her neck. She is focused on something off camera and perched on a patterned tablecloth of sorts. There is something subdued about the card – an enthusiastic holiday greeting it is not quite. The focus is sharp on her face and chest but then blurs a bit, bringing that part of her forward. It is an unusually good photograph of kitty.

This card was never mailed however, oddly, on the back someone has written, With love from Marjorie to Mary. This is my little pet cat. However, this is a professional card distributed by the E. A. Underwood, Gold St. Studio, Saffron Walden. Portrait & Landscape Photographer. So our writer is just kidding when she says it is her pet cat – an undemanding one at the very least.

Meanwhile, Underwood is a somewhat underwhelming postcard company of the early 20th century devoted primarily to people and places – many seem to be painted pictures of pretty girls (some with men), Yankee Stadium, Charles Lindburgh. The company was, as above, located in Saffron Walden in Essex, England. This card seems a bit different for them as those examples that are not illustrations as above are colored photos of locations.

So Pictorama kicks off the greater holiday cat season today with a soft jingle jangle. Let the cat celebrations begin.