By and large, children are a nuisance, although I should say they come under the heading of a mixed blessing, and where children are concerned you will have to decide for yourselves whether the price is worth while. A great deal of course, will depend on the type of family you select, the age and sex of the offspring and the amount of discipline in the home. Small boys are worse than little girls. Where there is a child in the house you will be expected to put up with all kinds of inconveniences and indignities, which include having your tail pulled, being carried about suspended by your stomach, and being mauled unmercifully.On the other hand, you might find yourself growing quite fond of one or more of them, if decently brought up. It is only when they ebcome adults that they acquire those ridiculous characteristics that make all of them so inferior to us cats.

But the main point I shall bring out is that if the child or children love you, this is your insurance to be properly looked after as long as you like, and the stronger the ties you can forge with the child, the better, for you will find to your surprise that in our country, for instance, and I am speaking of Australia, it is not really the grownups who rule the household, but the children. You could not imagine this in the cat world, where, if you make one false move, your mothers knock you for a goal, and quite right too. But people hereabouts are apparently terrified of their children and spoil them inordinately, turning them into disgusting brats, yet if you can stomach them and become known as 'little Johnny's' or 'darling Mary's cat', you are safe from interference of any kind, beyond that which you will have to learn to put up with from Johnny or Mary.

A word if caution: never, under any circumstances, retaliate with tooth or claw for anything a child might do to you. For if you are so much as suspected of having scratched their Precious, even in play, you will find yourselves back in the alley before you can say felix domesticus. Remember at all times, when you are being squeezed, smothered, pulled, hauled, stretched and tugged at, that it is done because they think you are one of them. Anthropomorphism again. Of course, if you have the bad luck to select a child that is deliberately cruel and remain around one minute after the fact has been established, you don’t deserve to be a member of our species.