Notes on The Animal War

Based on a once recurring dream I had that has now re-recurred:

Notes on The Animal War.
Chapter 2: A bender in the making.

It didn't take long for the cats to work out thermonuclear weapons. It was guessed that way: Professor Cranberry, of the Bio-labs, set the idea down way back in the 70s.

'Y'see, there's something peculiar about the feline neurology. Something seems to be missing here. From the records. The computer's creaking, of course, but that doesn't cover all the blips. The records have been altered, I'm sure of it, and the only things I can think who would possibly have anything to gain are the cats themselves...'



Cranberry got called a crank and had to call it a day. The Bio-labs gave him a generous pension; told him it'd be better all round if he just turned a blind eye. He gave up on cats, went quite mad.

They Louis Wained him, cut him loose, hurled abuse at him in a rain of paws and catnip calls. By the end, the fruitcakes from the Ministry of Health got him carted and then pumped full of drugs. He claimed by the end of the first round of medication he 'could hardly breathe.' Paranoia, they said (they actually said it was furballs) and dumped him in the secure unit with people who thought they were Elvis.

And later, at Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea, some small glue-sniffed boys looked up at a sign that used to say:

No Dogs Allowed

But had been altered to read:

Only Dogs Allowed

Everyone thought it better not to mention it; to blame the kids from the Valleys. No one suspected that there was a militant band of canine maniacs already plotting against the dominant species...

And here we are now, with the cats getting the edge over the rest, as Professor Cranberry had perviously suggested. Anybody who's anybody has their nose in his book 'Feline Neuropsychology and the Garage Disease' trying to figure out a plan. The cats had taken several minor cities by Sunday the 19th and Chief of Staff McGovern was quoted yesterday as saying: 'The cats themselves, led we think by James Crawley, are increasingly looking like they will eventually use either bacterial warfare - possibly anthrax - or thermonuclear technology. Either way, we have two major decisions to make: do we attempt a swift counter-attack right now or do we send more of our, let's say it, fairly pitiful negotiators to their doom. Personally, I don't see how it makes anything any better to receive lungs through the mail. These cats are disturbed, there's no doubt. We should attack without further delay.'

James Crawley was a sly tabby, known since the very early days of the Doolittling because of a live TV appearance when he swore at Bamber Gasgoine. 'Bamber, you're a fuckanine,' he said on a day time TV show. James was thought to have an IQ 'somewhere in the mid 260s' - Govt. Animal Intelligence Dept. - and was also known to have something of a bad attitude to women in particular and humans in general. James ran for Feline Parliament initially and then dropped out to work behind the scenes as something of a political agitator. Commentators at the time suggested he was 'mid way between Abbie Hoffman and Hodgkinson's disease' - The Sunday Times. Despite thorough psychoanalysis during James' brief prison sentence (for aiding and abetting the abuse of alcohol by minors), the source of James's malcontent with regard to humans was as yet unmarked, though Dr. Carny suggested that perhaps 'there was a minor complex evolved from losing his right eye in a gardening accident'. To this day, James' thoughts on gardening have remained unclear.


Cat Stevens - Peace Train

Cat Stevens - Wild World

Which is obviously partly a ridiculous / obvious failure to make a conceptual link but also included because it was used in the final scenes of Skins which is coming back soon...