Judging cats

For most of my life, the two most frightening words in the English language have always been "cat show", summoning images of a stuffy arena filled with primped and powdered cats parading in front of a torpid audience that is clapping politely so as to not fall asleep.

So I was more than a little surprised recently to receive an email inviting me to be a judge at a cat show.

Huh! Me? I could imagine all those cat people standing around waiting for Sonia Gandhi or some other famous person to be judging their cats, and then I walk in.

I emailed back something to the effect of "Oh, you don’t really want me. I am not much of a cat person, must regretfully decline, blah blah blah …"

And they emailed back: Look we know you don’t like cats (ughh … how did they know that? Must have seen me sometimes throwing small stones at the neighbor’s cat), but come anyway. "Just think of the new experience and ideas you can get from this one", they said. Basically everyone refused, so poor me!
 
So that’s how I recently ended up as a cat judge.

A very nice woman named Rachel Fernandes – "like the crime family", she said cheerfully – was the cat show manager. She explained that I would be judging 44 cats and selecting 10 finalists in the "household pets" category. This means, they were not fancy show cats, but a mix of purebred cats, mixed breeds, whatever.

At this point I felt compelled to point out what seemed to be a major flaw in my resume as a cat judge. I knew nothing about cats, their breeds and had no idea what to judge them on.

"Its totally subjective," she said. "It’s just whether you like the looks of the cats"
Rachel also explained that she would be taking the cats out of their cages and bring them up to the viewing stand for me. "We don’t want you to get hurt," she said.

"Umm hurt?"

"You know," Rachel continued, "scratched or bitten." This, ofcourse confirmed my worst fear on cats, which is that, you never really know what they are thinking.

You can look at a cat sitting on a couch, looking fairly content and you think he is thinking, yep, life is beautiful. But what he is actually thinking maybe, pal, I am going to lunge at your and scratch your fat little eyes out. Just for something to do.

Quite a spooky thought!

Shorting after this the judging began. Rachel would bring each cat up and two of us would study the cat, with me pretending to know what I was looking for.
She told me that if I want to pet any of the cats, I had to wash my hands with disinfectant each time, since petting could spread a cold or a virus from one cat to another.

Naturally I had absolutely no desire to pet any of the cats.

After 75 minutes or so, with the help of Rachel and Tony, a very nice man who was helping me and who has judged cat shows for 10 years (and perhaps bored and hence passing the buck to young, poor me), we were down to 10 cats.

Then we studied the 10 finalists again and ranked them in reverse order. When we announced the winner, an orange and white tabby, there were squeals and shrieks of joy from four or five people in the audience, who turned out to be the cat’s owner – a girl named Sonya – her mom and sisters.

I wanted to talk to Sonya and see how this momentous event might change her life, and her cat’s too, but she quickly disappeared into the crowd.

So, instead I spent the next few minutes signing the ribbons of the other finalists, which is a cat show tradition.

I should have signed them: Ms. Sonia Gandhi

How important I feel today!