Some Facts About My Cat, Russell

Published: 27 Mar 2026

Tag: Miscellaneous

  1. He is named after Bertrand Russell. However, despite his auspicious namesake, who was a great philosopher and writer who won the nobel prize in literature, he has proven thus far to be a singularly unphilosophical cat. Not only has he failed to write even a single philosophical, logical, or mathematical treatise; he shows an astounding lack of capacity for self-reflection, or indeed reflection of any kind.
  2. An example of his lack of self-reflection is in his refusal to wear a collar for more than three days. Although required by our cat sitter (of whom he is very fond) when we are away – and indeed in case he gets lost on one of his longer-ranging trips – he insists on removing it.
  3. He enjoys playing fetch with us, or, as Montaigne suggests, we enjoy playing fetch with him. He will run to collect a toy that has just been thrown and bring it back to us. On some occasions, when he is feeling particularly generous, he will soak the toy in his water bowl for us, before dropping it on us.
  4. Despite being, as far as we are aware, unable to read a clock or tell the time – due largely to his lack of self-application in his studies – he nonetheless shows an astounding capacity for understanding when to ask for his breakfast, dinner, and biscuits. He always begins asking, by repeatedly and loudly miaowing, and always just before time.
  5. One benefit and one problem of this is that he serves as a very effective alarm clock in the morning, meaning I am always awake before my alarm goes off. This remains true even when I have gone to bed late and turned off my alarm in the vain hope of obtaining sufficient sleep. This includes, for instance, when I have come home late from a work trip and need nothing more than eight hours of sleep. He will nonetheless kindly see to it that I am awake at my usual time regardless.
  6. In addition to loud miaows, he has a number of additional tricks for obtaining our attention when he desires it. This includes but is not limited to: jumping from the window sill onto my stomach, dropping a wet toy on me in the pretense he wishes to play fetch (see 3), sticking a single claw in my wife’s face so she will force me to get up, making biscuits on me while purring and being generally affectionate (he is only affectionate when he desires something), and attacking his sister Eden because he has realised we will try to stop him if he does so and this is sufficient to get us out of bed.
  7. He has at least one stash of collectibles in the house of which we do not know the location. We know this because one of the wet “toys” he occasionally brings to us to throw will turn out to be one of his old collars.
  8. He is gluttony personified. We have had to provision him with a slow feeder instead of a food bowl, because he would normally finish his food at sufficient pace to then steal his sister’s food. This is true to the extent that we have also had to come up with a series of doorstops for the cupboard containing the cat food, because otherwise he has worked out a way to enter and steal a sachet, before running away from us with said sachet in his mouth.
  9. Despite being a fairly small cat, he has surprised our vets by being a very capable hunter of pigeons. There has been to date two dead pigeons inside the house and one live. Due to the latter, I have since learned that pigeons do not possess much sense of object permanence, and the best way to catch them to bring them to the vet is to place throw a towel over the heads so they cannot see you and therefore cannot fear you. I am no longer sure these birds can be accused of possessing consciousness.