Pussies make great pets. They make better pets than gorillas, anyway. Can you imagine a pussy eating a banana and swinging from the shower curtain and beating its little chest and making faces at strangers?

And Pussies certainly are better pets than hippopotamuses. Pussies don't spend all day in the bathtub with just their noses above water. And they don't have great, ugly mouths with only two great ugly teeth in them. They have cute little mouths with sharp little teeth in them, which they use only when provoked or when they just feel like biting you.

Who can argue that pussies are not better pets than turkeys? Pussies do not strut and look goofy and gobble. Pussies peep and they meow and they sing like old ladies, but they never gobble.

Pussies are better pets than porcupines, for example, and skunks and moles and raccoons and beavers and woodchucks and squirrels and chipmunks, all for reasons too obvious to mention.

Ditto for lions and tigers and elephants and three-toed sloths and polar bears and anteaters and snakes (especially snakes) and big things that go crunch in the night.

And don't forget coyotes and wolves and antelopes and buffalo and brown bears and pumas and zebras (only because what goes with stripes?) and donkeys and most horses and certain rabbits named Gus.

I think that only leaves scorpions and all bugs and birds and everything else we have not named. And dogs.

About dogs. I wouldn't give you an old box of Milkbones and six pieces of panda poop for the finest dog that ever lived. But I would kill for a little pussy.