Ernie’s not the cat he used to be

I can’t believe that in the scope of great events, the one question that seems to be on the minds of a good many people out there is whether or not I had my cat neutered.

Even as President Bush was risking his life by going to Iraq, as fraud was discovered in FEMA’s bumbling assistance in post-Katrina New Orleans, as L.A.’s urban garden was being reverted by force to its previous owner, angry e-mailers were flooding me with invective over an animal’s sex change.

This all began when I expressed reluctance to having Ernie, which is our cat’s name, neutered for fear that emasculating him would alter his personality. Not exactly a sex change, I guess, but, I asked, what’s a male without his cojones?

It was a column intended, as one writer said, to be cute, not to challenge the apparently deep moral convictions of animal activists whose primary concern is whether or not America’s male cats have testicles.

Response to my comments came from across the country, leading me to believe there must exist some kind of national organization of militant cat watchers who are ever on the alert for those of us who appear to be anti-neutralites. I was right.

Members of various feral cat coalitions and alliances pounced on me like female leopards in the rutting season, pointing out that there were 70 million feral cats roaming about in the U.S. and their number was growing.

Not since the days of the John Birch Society have I been attacked in unison by those who felt I was a danger to the welfare of the republic for one reason or another, although for the Birchers it was my presumed lack of cojones, not my cat’s. I was soft on communism because I didn’t want to, well, neutralize them with H-bombs.

Several e-mailers claimed that we are being overrun with feral cats due to the aggressive sexual tendencies of unneutered males to impregnate the females wandering around luring them on with teasing whips of their tantalizing tails. A telephone caller, so angry she could hardly talk, said that a pair of breeding cats could produce 420,000 offspring over a seven-year period. When I passed the figures on to Ernie, he smiled.

The writers imply that if we allow this to continue, undomesticated felines, lacking the milder temperament of castrated house cats, will overrun our cities and our neighborhoods, threatening our children, killing our birds and keeping us awake all night with their incessant erotic yowling.

What finally persuaded me to geld Ernie was not the implied threats of the cat guerrillas but the fact that one morning, for no reason at all, he bit me. I was not the first victim of his mercurial nature, but I considered myself his special friend. He was sitting peacefully on my lap when, for reasons of his own, he dug his teeth into my arm.

I felt betrayed. Being bitten by one’s animal friend was the emotional equivalent of discovering that your wife was having an affair with a Republican. “No, no,” your mind screams, “it cannot be!” But it was. I dumped Ernie off my lap, treated my wound and called our vet. Two days later, Ernie was Ernestine. The word “neuter” is from the Latin meaning “neither,” which is what Ernie had become.

When I responded to one e-mailer telling her what I had done, word went out on the cat-neutering wire and messages of “Bravo!” flew toward me through cyberspace. But their affection was not what I had sought in having Ernie altered. I just wanted a cat that wasn’t going to go around biting every member of the family, which he was threatening to do. Our 4-year-old grandson, Joshua, carries the lid of a pan with him when he’s here as a shield against any possible attacks by Ernie.

When we brought the cat home from the vet, he slept a good deal and then he prowled silently through the house, pausing occasionally to flash me an accusatory scowl. The silence bothered me most. He had been a talkative cat, awakening us each morning by jumping up by our heads and yowling.

“We’ve robbed him of his meow,” I said.

“He’ll meow again,” Cinelli said. “You can’t keep a good man down or a good cat quiet.”

Sure enough, sooner than I expected, he was not only yowling again but was up to his old tricks of chewing up paper coming from my printer and leaping from a hiding place to grab my ankle as if to tackle me to the floor. He has also bitten once, but I think it’s just his way of saying hello. A cat’s form of belly-bumping.

I hope Ernie’s neutering placates those whose missionary quest is the emasculation of every cat in America. When that’s accomplished, I suggest that they turn their attention to a similar quest in Washington, D.C., where the abundance of testosterone is doing more damage in the world than Ernie could have ever done. Maybe they’d even stop biting.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.