Belling the cat

Belling the cat is a fabulous song by Talis Kimberly. On the surface there’s a story about brave mice putting a bell on the cat so that every mouse knows. Protecting the mice from predation. Of course this is a song about people. It’s about not turning away when you see something happening that should not be happening. It’s about taking risks to keep your fellow mice safe rather than just covering your own furry bottom. It’s not an easy thing to do.

There are lots of fear based reasons not to go belling the cat. The cats are invariably bigger and more powerful than you, it’s what enables them to be as they are. They have status, money, lawyers, or they are government bodies or official in some way. You know if you step forward holding the bell, you are going to be bitten. Probably.

Quite often you know you’re seeing a cat because you’ve just watched it chew some other mouse’s head off. If you start running now, you may be safe. Running towards the cat, bell in paw, is dangerous. Suicidal. It will bring cat-attention you might otherwise have avoided. You just have to hope that next time the cat comes round that you’ll spot it in time, or that some other mouse bells it to give you a chance.

What stops us belling the cats is the fear that we cannot do it, and that we will be punished more for taking them on than we would otherwise have been. Self preservation comes first. Many of us will only try to put bells on cats in the handful of seconds before our cat is pretty much bound to destroy us. Mind you, that has been known to work and it’s never too late to try.

They rig the games so that we mice cannot win. They control systems and make those systems serve them. They get elected into governing bodies and they seek high status jobs that give them extra cat powers. They see it as their divine right to destroy mice, and we are all mice. The truth is that the ‘cats’ in this story are not a separate species, they are mice too, wearing cat suits and bighting heads off anyway.

It may not be enough to bell the cat so that everyone else can hear it coming. You may need to get in there and tear the cat suit off, revealing the evil mouse underneath. It is a high risk activity, but the alternative is a world in which any mouse willing to dress up in a cat suit and bite heads off, rules. I for one, am not going there.

I’ve got my bells. I’m going to use them. I also have a growing obsession with sinister mice as protagonists in fiction, but that, as they say, is another story…