"WANTED: CATS"

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 103, 3 May 1919, Page 10

"WANTED: CATS"

PUSSY'S PART IN THE WAR.

There" is one thing a cat hates more than, she hates dogs, and that is—gas. One whiff of poison-gas, scented from the other side of No Man's Land before mere man has got an inkling that it is coming, and up goes her back, her fur stands on end, and she begins to whine her displeasure. Who it was who first discovered this aversion remains a mystery, but rumour has it that it was someone in the War Office.

The stray oats of England—and there are many of them, as •is shown by the fact that the R.S.P.C.A. painlessly destroy over 30,000 every year—received their first call-up notice a couple of years ago. • It appeared in the form of an advertisement: "Common cats wanted—any number," which was published in the newspapers. \ Thereafter was a search for cats of'all descriptions.

The contract for the supply of pussy to the Army was secured by Mr. Charles Harris, a bird; dealer, of Beth-nal-green-road, London, and cats of ail sorts soon began to pour into his establishment. Mr. Harris had no idea what the cats were wanted for. He was .only ordered to supply them. Every now and then a big "W.D." lorry would draw up outside his establishment and drive away with a cargo of cats for the front. In the last two years, he said, he had supplied about half a million cats to the Army. - From other sources it was learned of the cat's value as a gas detector; but that was not pussy's only sphere of usefulness in the trenches. Equally important was her work as a destroyer of rats and vermin—a work in which she excelled and took a lively ipterest. j She has also done her bit in-tao_Navy. She proved very useful in connection with submarine experiments, and frequently went under water in various contrivances in order to test the life- ( sustaining qualities of the air cham- i bers.