Wild cougars are making a comeback, and victims have no say.

Feral cat activists are trying to protect domestic cats which have gone wild.

A cat fugitive was recently arrested in San Francisco. (I suppose cats are also a feminist issue of some sort.)

In the Middle Ages, cats were believed to be immoral and Satanic. People tortured them for religious reasons:

In Burgundy, the crowd incorporated cat torture into its rough music. While mocking a cuckold or some other victim, the youths passed around a cat, tearing its fur to make it howl.Faire le chat, they called it. The Germans called charivaris Katzenmusik, a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats.'s

Cats also figured in the cycle of Saint lohn the Baptist, which took place on June 24, at the time of the summer solstice. Crowds made bonfires, jumped over them, danced around them, and threw into them objects with magical power, hoping to avoid disaster and obtain good fortune during the rest of the year. A favorite object was cats—cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or cats burned at the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds (cour ŕ mioud or cat chasers) of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. In parts of Burgundy and Lorraine they danced around a kind of burning May pole with a cat tied to it. In the Metz region they burned a dozen cats at a time in a basket on top of a bonfire. The ceremony took place with great pomp in Metz itself, until it was abolished in 1765. The town dignitaries arrived in procession at the Place du Grand-Saulcy, lit the pyre, and a ring of riflemen from the garrison fired off volleys while the cats disappeared screaming in the flames. Although the practice varied from place to place, the ingredients were everywhere the same: afeu de joie (bonfire), cats, and an aura of hilarious witchhunting.

Ditto, Saddam Hussein:

Born into a humble Sunni family near the town of Tikrit, Saddam was raised by an abusive stepfather, Hassan Ibrahim, known locally as “Hassan the Liar.” The boy quickly earned a reputation as a brute who entertained himself by torturing cats and dogs with a hot poker. At 10, Saddam went to live with an uncle, Khayrallah Talfah, who was a former army officer.

In ancient times, cats were revered. The Egyptians worshiped them, and the Romans considered them symbols of liberty, and kept them as pets.

Deliberately introducing feral or predatory cats strikes me as going too far.

How far is too far?

Should we return to the good old days when men were men and cats were sport?

My question (as always) is: Which good old days?

(In the interest of full disclosure, I don't own cats. But my blogfather does. So don't ask me about pussies....or whether pussy power has gone too far....)

UPDATE: I found a website which maintains that the keeping of cats as pets is un-Christian, and against the Bible. (Honestly, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.)