Curiosa: The Cat as Experimental Draught Animal

[nebroadwe]

An off-LJ friend recently reminded me of an incident from my days as a professional medievalist-wannabee, when Usenet was still a going concern and I lurked on the fringes of soc.history.medieval. The group was witty, collegial and learned, so of course it attracted a resident troll, who took up station under its bridge and emerged regularly to make faces and scream oddly capitalized, faux-Latinate abuse at persons whom he took in dislike. This led, on one occasion, to a long, acrimonious and needlessly tendentious argument about the development of draught harness for horses from late antiquity into the Middle Ages. That argument is best forgotten, trust me -- except for the contributions of the late Ellen Pinegar, who conducted the now-famous Cat Hitched to Vacuum Cleaner experiment in order to bring a little evidence-based rigor to what had become a war of assertion. As she reported to the group:

I performed a reconstructive experiment this morning with the comparative pulling ability of the old horse harnesses and the padded collar. I found a wooden doohickey on the kitchen floor this morning, shaped like a Cheerio but about eight inches in diameter. In my pre-caffeinated state, it looked like a horse collar. So, after digging out the illustrations of Roman horse harnesses (the old type), I formed one out of a belt. I used this harness to harness our large cat (26 pounds, 27 inch waistline) to the vacuum cleaner (36 pounds). I turned on the vacuum cleaner, in order to motivate the cat to move, but despite mighty strains and gacks, they did not move.

While Grendel and the vacuum cleaner were busy not moving, I padded the collar with a dishtowel. I unharnessed Grendel from the vacuum cleaner and rehitched him using the collar. When I turned the vacuum on again, he and his vacuum cleaner launched into next week, finally coming to a stop at the living room wall, eighty feet away.

Possible conclusions:

1. It is easier to pull a bulky trailer with a collar than it is with the Roman harness; and/or:
2. Feline and equine anatomy, motivations, and thought processes may or may not vary; and/or
3. Grendel could have pulled the vacuum cleaner the first time but was not sufficiently motivated/terrified; and/or
4. Grendel was being a cat and *chose* not to move the vacuum cleaner the first time: and/or
5. Roman transportation could REALLY have been more efficient if they had had vacuum cleaners.

Irrefuteable conclusion:

Grendel does not vacuum well.

Grendel survived to feature in another argument over the effectiveness of cavalry at delivering "shock" on the battlefield. Sadly, Ellen Pinegar passed away later in the year these experiments were carried out, much missed by her colleagues and friends. But her legacy lives on in everyone who remembers her glorious reductio ad absurdum.