Any conditioned cat-hater can be won over by any cat who chooses to make the effort. Only an unregenerate ailurophobe can't be reached. I'd say he's really sick.

Recently, Dr. Michael W. Fox, in his book, Understanding Your Cat, wrote: 'It is not anthropomorphic to say that the cat experiences emotions as we do. It is logical to conclude that they do since they have the same brain center for such feelings as we have.

I shall continue to quote Dr. Fox: 'But within the academic game of science it is all too easy for the researcher to lose himself in an irrelevant problem, in an intellectual mind-game that may give him the prestige of widespread scientific publication. And he may forget how many animals died for him on his ego trip. A man of science must also be a man of conscience and integrity, constantly assessing the purpose and ethics of his work, whether it involves animals or human subjects.

A cat probably doesn't say to himself, 'Where did I go wrong? Why wasn't I able to get my idea across?' More likely, Leo's brain reacted very much like the human brain in such a situation, and he thought, 'That damned stupid human. He's too dumb to understand what I was trying to say.

Behavioral scientists are not likely to agree, because such a performance can't be repeated with the true scientific method, under laboratory conditions. But the laboratory is a very limited place to learn anything but rudimentary facts about life and living.

Why did he pick me? There were five other laps present, all of them more friendly than mine. It's that sort of coincidental behavior of cats that upsets people. It raises the question: did he know I was the guy who had to be won over? But won over to what?

But you can reassure children; you can tell them what's happening or going to happen. Can you get such reassurance across to a cat? I suppose it is that sort of anthropomorphism that bugs the hell out of researchers whose job is to experiment on nonhuman animals. If they permit themselves such a comparison, they might not sleep well at night.

If anyone asked why we decided to start a family when we did, I said, 'Most couples get kittens for their kids to play with; we decided to get a baby for our cats to play with.' That wasn't true, of course, but it was good for a laugh.