Topic Battle

The domestic cat has achieved a distribution network that would make multinational corporations envious. Present on every continent except Antarctica, cats occupy an estimated 33% of households in the United Kingdom alone. One need not travel, queue, or plan ahead to experience a cat. They appear unbidden in gardens, lurk in neighbourhood streets, and populate social media feeds with such density that avoiding them requires active effort.

Acquisition is similarly straightforward. Cats are available through shelters, breeders, friends, and the simple expedient of leaving a door open. Many humans report that their cats acquired them, rather than the reverse. The barrier to cat access is so low that the greater challenge lies in maintaining catlessness.

The domestic cat operates on a remarkably economical basis. Annual costs in the United Kingdom average between 500 and 1,000 pounds, covering food, veterinary care, and the inevitable destruction of soft furnishings. A cat provides companionship, entertainment, and pest control services for a decade or more at this rate, representing exceptional value per pound spent.

For the financially constrained, cats can be acquired at no cost from shelters or neighbourhood strays. Feral cats provide services at zero expense, though with reduced predictability. The cat-to-satisfaction ratio remains favourable across all economic demographics.

The domestic cat has become the undisputed sovereign of internet entertainment. Cat videos accumulated over 26 billion views on YouTube by 2015, a figure that has since become incalculable. The species has generated memes of such cultural penetration that phrases like 'I Can Has Cheezburger' entered the linguistic mainstream. Grumpy Cat's estate was valued at approximately 100 million dollars at the time of her passing.

In domestic settings, cats provide endless unpredictable entertainment. They attack invisible enemies, insert themselves into boxes of inappropriate size, and conduct midnight sessions of inexplicable sprinting. A cat need do nothing to be entertaining; its mere existence in proximity to a cardboard box generates content.

The domestic cat retains the full arsenal of its wild ancestors whilst enjoying the benefits of human hospitality. Cats are obligate carnivores with hunting instincts intact, responsible for the estimated deaths of 1.3 to 4 billion birds annually in the United States alone. They can survive feral existence indefinitely, establishing colonies in environments from Arctic research stations to tropical islands.

The cat's survival strategy combines self-sufficiency with optional dependency. It can hunt if necessary, scavenge if convenient, and manipulate humans if optimal. This flexibility has enabled the species to colonise every environment humans have colonised, and several humans have not.

The cat's influence operates at the domestic and digital level. Cats have shaped human architecture (cat flaps), human language ('letting the cat out of the bag'), and human internet infrastructure (approximately 15% of all web traffic was estimated to be cat-related at the medium's peak cat saturation). Politicians pose with cats; authors acknowledge cats in their dedications; ancient Egyptians mummified cats for the afterlife.

However, cats have never brokered international agreements. No nation has deployed cats as instruments of foreign policy. The cat influences millions of individuals; it has never influenced the policies of nations.