POLITICAL ANIMALS AND OTHER CATASTROPHES

Jun 24, 2013 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as Gods. They have never forgotten this and up to today, as every cat lover knows, nobody owns a cat. As one wise man said, “There are many intelligent species in the universe.
They are all owned by cats.” Cats are smarter than dogs – you will never get eight of them to pull a heavy sled through deep snow. They have also infiltrated the English Language.
There are five hundred and sixteen words beginning with “cat’ including catalogue, cataclysm, catafalque, catastrophe and catnap. There are even abbreviations like the one in this joke. A woman brought a very limp parrot into a veterinary hospital. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest.
After a moment or two, the Vet shook his head sadly and said, “I’m so sorry, Polly has passed away.” The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure? I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”
The vet rolled his eyes, shrugged, turned and left the room returning a few moments later with beautiful black Labrador. As the bird’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the dead parrot from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.
The vet led the dog out but returned a few moments later with a cat. The cat jumped up and also sniffed delicately at the ex-bird.
The cat sat back, shook its head, meowed and ran out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry; but like I said, your parrot is most definitely, 100% certifiably …dead.”
He then turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill which he handed to the woman. The parrot’s owner, still in shock, took the bill. “$150!” she cried. “$150 just to tell me my bird is dead?!” The vet shrugged. “If you’d taken my word for it, the bill would only have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, what did you expect?”
If you think that CAT scan was costly consider the price some Mexican politicians are paying for their insistence on ignoring the needs of their constituents. Last week the BBC asked the question, “Could a black and white cat be the purrfect candidate for mayor of a town in eastern Mexico?”
The story is that Morris the cat has been nominated for mayor of Xalapa by a group of people unhappy with their local politicians. Since he was nominated with the slogan “Tired of Voting for Rats? Vote for a Cat”, more than 100,000 people have taken to the internet to support him. Morris’ campaign group is asking supporters to write his name or draw a cat’s face on the ballot.
The campaign seems to have inspired other people across Mexico as well, who have nominated other animal candidates in the country’s July elections. Chon the Donkey has been nominated in Ciudad Juarez, Tina the Chicken in Tepic, Tintan the dog in Oaxaca City and Maya the Cat in Puebla.”
Morris has his own Facebook page and has already got almost 200,000 “likes” while his nearest human rival, Americo Zunega, has only 35,000. In describing the rationale for nominating Morris, Sergio Chamorro who adopted the 10-month old cat last year explained, “He sleeps almost all day and does nothing, and that fits the profile of a politician.”
According to media reports, politicians repeatedly rank at the bottom of polls about citizens’ trust in institutions. A survey last year ranking the extent that Mexicans trust 15 selected institutions put politicians and government officials among the bottom five. Universities and the Catholic Church were the top two, respectively.
Animals and other non-human candidates are not new to elections and are nominated when the ordinary people lose trust in their politicians and rebel against the system. In fact, Stubbs, a cat that has been the honorary mayor for more than 15 years of the small Alaska town of Talkeetna, has endorsed Morris.
In 1938, Boston Curtis, a brown mule, won a precinct seat in Milton, Washington in 1938, winning 52 to zero. Cacareco, a rhinoceros at the São Paulo zoo, was a candidate for the 1958 city council elections with the intention of protesting against political corruption. He got 100,000 votes, more than any other party in that election.
The mayor of Sunol, California was, for ten years (1981–1990), a black Labrador-Rottweiler named Bosco. Another Morris, also a cat, ran as a candidate in the U.S. presidential election, 1988 and the U.S. presidential election, 1992. Hank the Cat, a racoon from Northern Virginia, ran against Tim Kaine and George Allen for Virginia’s Senate seat in 2012. He earned third place in the state, with nearly 7,000 votes.
Tuxedo Stan, a cat from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, was a mayoral candidate in the 2012 municipal elections and was endorsed by celebrities including Anderson Cooper.
I was thinking of this when I saw the disenchantment of people in Trinidad with the present ruling party and the fact that Jack Warner, who was the MP for the Chaguanas West Constituency and resigned after having to give up his Ministerial portfolio and his Party Chairmanship, is now the preferred candidate to contest the by-election caused by his resignation.
Many people see it as a colossal waste of time and money as well as the trivialization of politics especially when the Opposition party has already identified a candidate to fight Warner for the seat. The problem is that Opposition politics in Trinidad is dog-dominated. The Leader of the Opposition Party, Dr. Keith Rowley, is known as the Rottweiler and another leader of the party, Colm Imbert is the “Pompek” – a word coined for the lapdog produced by breeding a Pomeranian with a Pekingese.
The top members of the lead party in the Governing coalition are supposedly into goat in a big way, curried or otherwise. A poll among my friends about what would make a good candidate to show discontent with the political process came up with either a vulture (or corbeau as it is known in Trinidad) or a snake.
The argument is that these are creatures are honest and don’t pretend to be what they’re not. In fact, this fits with something that Jared Kintz (eMails From a Madman) wrote about Washington D.C. but I believe it is as relevant in the Caribbean, “I once saw a snake having sex with a vulture, and I thought, it’s just business as usual in Washington DC.”

*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that the best non-human to fight Warner and other politicians would be a used-diaper because even though they have lots of Luvs and Huggies around election time, and Pamper their friends, they need to be changed regularly.