Pet Stilts

Don’t get me wrong. I love pets. I really do. In fact, I like some of my friends pet’s more than I actually like their owners - there’s even this one arsehole who I just pretend to be friends with so that I can drop in and visit his big snow-white husky-ish mongrel dog every once in a while.

Thing is, I tend to treat pets like people. I can’t stand people who either just ignore pets entirely or who grab them and start cuddling them as if they’re just some kind of mobile cushion – I think both these approaches show a sense of disrespect, if not ignorance. I always extend my hand to a pet first, let it sniff me at its leisure (kind of an animal handshake), and then let it bugger off or hang around as it sees fit.

But our pets tend to be smaller than we are, and so they find themselves constantly craning their necks in order to look up at us. I have a lot of respect for my cat as a proud and powerful hunter (even though he mostly just stalks empty plastic bags), but when he winds his way around my legs and turns his big moon face plaintively up to me when he wants fed in the morning: well, I find it hard to see him as the sleekly evolved stealthy uber-predator that he actually is.

So – Pet Stilts. Because I have a cat I’ll use one as my example. Start when it’s just a little fuzzy kitten. And begin with tiny kitten-sized platform shoes. As the cat grows, so do the inserts – by the time the puss is fully grown, it’s tottering about on huge (but very comfy) four-foot stilts. Actually it’s not tottering – even when in mad random scat-attack mode, because the cat has grown with the stilts as it has with its own legs, it’s still perfectly balanced and has all the graceful poise of a normal cat as it runs around the walls at 90 degree angles to the floor.

The advantages? Now your pet is at eye level. It doesn’t skulk around your feet anymore – you’re forced to relate to it in a more meaningful way. Forgot to buy cat food? You can’t just feed him double tomorrow. Now he’s right up in your face giving you that hard, hungry stare with a level-headed coldness. Of course, stilt-enhanced cats probably can’t stalk their prey quite as effectively as they might have, but they could easily pounce on low-flying pigeons. Maybe even swat the odd seagull out of the sky. It would do wonders for their self-image: not that I’ve ever met a cat with an inferiority complex, mind you.

The more I think about it (and as you can probably tell, that’s still not a lot), this is probably only an invention that would work with cats. Might be amusing to carry out experimental trials on hamsters, but it definitely wouldn’t work on snakes. Or fish, for that matter.