The cat who worked at the Post Office

For decades, the British Post Office kept cats on the payroll. Officially. With a wage. It started in the 1860s, when the Money Order Office in London had a mouse problem so bad that letters and paperwork were being chewed. Rather than poison, the Post Office hired three cats and set aside a small weekly allowance for their food. The deal was deliberately stingy: pay them too well, the thinking went, and they'd stop hunting. The scheme stuck. Post Office cats worked in sorting offices around the country for more than a century, and the most famous of them, Tibs, was said to have kept the Post Office headquarters entirely clear of mice until his death in the 1960s. Later cats even got the occasional pay rise, debated in writing, as though they were staff. What I love about this is what it quietly admits: cats were valued for doing a job, on their own terms, in their own time. Nobody trained them. Nobody asked them to be affectionate about it. That instinct hasn't gone anywhere. The cat on your sofa still carries a working animal's brain inside a housemate's routine. So if yours goes strange at dusk, ambushes your ankles, or drags a toy mouse to your feet at 3am, it isn't misbehaviour. It's an unemployed professional. Give them something to hunt. Five minutes with a wand toy, ending in a catch and a meal, does more for a bored cat than a whole shelf of gadgets. cc the night shift ff