Holy Cat-a-Moley

12/09/2026

In September 1868 a senior British Post Office official wrote to his boss asking for two shillings a week to feed three cats. He was given one shilling, and a threat.

Frederic Rowland Jackson, Controller of the Money Order Office in London, sent the letter on September 23. The building had mice. He wanted three cats and enough money to keep them.

The Secretary of the Post Office, John Tilley, cut the request in half. One shilling a week. Not one shilling each. One shilling a week total, for all three animals, paid to the resident porter, James Tye, to cover their keep.

The cats, Tilley wrote, "must depend on the mice for the remainder of their emoluments."

He attached a probation clause as well. If the mice be not reduced in number in six months, a further portion of the allowance must be stopped. Not cancelled. Docked.

On May 7, 1869, Jackson reported back. The cats "have done their duty very efficiently." In 1873 they got a raise of sixpence.

The allowance was last raised in July 1918. Then nothing happened to it for thirty-five years.

On March 18, 1953, it reached the floor of the House of Commons. Captain Orr asked the government when the allowance payable for the maintenance of cats in the Department was last raised, what the total amount involved was, what the present rate per cat in Northern Ireland was, and how that compared with the rate in London.

The job of answering fell to David Gammans, the Assistant Postmaster-General.

His reply, in Hansard, in the permanent record of the British Parliament, was this: "there is, I am afraid, a certain amount of industrial chaos in the Post Office cat world."

He explained the structure of the problem. Allowances were not uniform across the country. They varied, he said, "possibly according to the alleged efficiency of the animals and other factors," which is a minister of the Crown hedging twice in one sentence about cats.

He was also candid about the workforce. Post Office cats, he told the House, were "frequently unreliable, capricious in their duties and liable to prolonged absenteeism."

On Northern Ireland he had a clean answer. There were no Post Office cats there at all. "I presume," he said, "because there are no mice in post office buildings."

Then Captain Orr followed up. Will he say what happens if a cat has kittens. Is there a family allowance payment.

Gammans: "With regard to the children's allowances, I am afraid there is none. But the head postmasters have full discretion to give a maternity grant."

Mr Rankin then asked whether the Department provides an adequate maternity service.

Gammans said: "Very adequate."

So the British government, in 1953, running a postal service across an entire country, had an inconsistent regional pay structure for cats, a discretionary maternity grant for cats administered by local management, no central authority resolving any of it, and a minister willing to say all of that out loud on the record.

The word he used for their job performance was "alleged."

10/09/2026

10/09/2026

06/09/2026

The United States Department of Agriculture spent nine years arguing that the cats at Ernest Hemingway's old house were an exhibit.

Not pets. An exhibit, in the legal sense, the way a circus is an exhibit.

There are nearly sixty cats living on the grounds of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida. All of them carry the polydactyl gene and about half actually show it, which means extra toes on the paws and a permanent look of wearing mittens. They wander the garden. They sleep on the furniture. They are the reason a meaningful share of the visitors buy a ticket at all.

That last part is what made this a federal matter.

In October 2003, after a visitor complaint, USDA regional director Dr. Elizabeth Goldentyer took the position that the museum was operating an animal exhibit under the Animal Welfare Act, and that operating one requires a federal exhibitor's license. Inspectors came. Paperwork followed. The museum's position was that these were house cats living in a house, which is not a category the federal government regulates.

In August 2008 the two sides reached a deal. The museum agreed to a higher fence, upgraded shelters for the cats, and special bowls designed to drown bugs.

That sounds like an ending. It was the middle.

The agreement was explicitly temporary, granted, in the court's later words, "without prejudicing the Museum's right to contest the USDA's legal authority." Which is exactly what the museum did next. It sued in October 2009. It lost in August 2011. It appealed.

On December 7, 2012, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Dubina, Pryor and Hill, ruled unanimously for the government.

The reasoning was not narrow. It had two legs, and both of them are bigger than the cats.

First, the court held that the museum is an "exhibitor" under the Act, which turned on deferring to the USDA's expansive reading of a single word: "distribution." Second, and by choice rather than necessity, the court went straight at interstate commerce and held that "the Museum's exhibition of the cats substantially affects interstate commerce." For support it cited Wickard v. Filburn, the case about a farmer's own wheat, and Gonzales v. Raich, the case about ma*****na grown at home and never sold.

Those are the aggregate-effects cases. They are the outer edge of what Congress can reach.

So the ledger reads like this. A complaint from one visitor in 2003 produced a federal license requirement, a temporary settlement about bug bowls, a lawsuit, a loss, an appeal, and a published circuit opinion resting on the same doctrine that decided how much wheat an Ohio farmer could grow for his own chickens.

The cats went on doing exactly what they had been doing before the USDA arrived, during the litigation, and after the ruling came down, because none of them were parties to it.

Somewhere in the Eleventh Circuit's reasoning, a cat asleep in a Key West garden is doing the same constitutional work as a wartime wheat crop.

06/09/2026

😬😂

06/09/2026

I asked the cats whether we could try sleeping in this weekend. The Persian looked at me like I’d suggested paying the mortgage with feathers. ⏰

The Tuxedo began breakfast negotiations directly beside my ear. Ginger settled on my chest to prevent any irresponsible return to consciousness without supervision. Shadow investigated whether pushing my phone off the bedside table would improve the service.

It did not. But it did mean I was awake to hear their joke.

Apparently somewhere out there is a cat who allows its human a peaceful lie-in. A considerate little creature who sees closed eyes and thinks, “Let’s give them another hour.”

Mine would like its name and address.

They’re concerned it’s setting unrealistic expectations for the rest of the profession. 🐾

05/09/2026

Good Morning....

05/09/2026

Relax