There was a fascinating story in the Province on Tuesday — even more fascinating than the fact that it qualified as the front page story with no mention of the province-wide teacher’s strike until five pages in.
Apparently a B.C. cat shelter is offering a first-of-its-kind program that pairs up felines with kids who struggle with reading. According to the story, children who are uncomfortable reading out loud because of shyness or embarrassment tend to be more comfortable reading to “a patient cat.” Or as the print story’s headline states: “Felines get to spend time with children, who aren’t judged on how they read their books.”
We’re not so sure of that.
It’s been our experience that cats do nothing but judge. Often from afar — aloof and passively aggressively ignoring you, yet always watching, thinking their silent, disapproving thoughts before rolling on their back and inviting you to rub their irresistible belly of fur and then in an instant clawing the crap out of your hand when you fall for their trap. Oh, cute and cuddly cats, why do you mock us so?
If anything, kids would be better served by reading to an iguana. Speaking from personal experience, those things are truly accepting — never judging or ridiculing you for skimming the last 300 pages of The Brothers Karamazov, never looking at you in disappointment while transmitting secret messages to Bastet, the ancient Egyptian cat-goddess of war, barely moving, in fact, to the point that you think they might be dead until you discover they’re merely transfixed by the sound of your voice reading to them the latest Dean Koontz novel about danger and intrigue or something like that.
