Cat-on-a-walk

"Pretty please, can I go outside?"

In folklore and fairytales, cats between the realms of the domestic and the wild, the pet or the predator, the fashionable (Hello Kitty!) and the feral (yowling breeders), the natural (shedding fur) and the supernatural (the witch's companion). The Admirer of the Cat appreciates the independence of the beast and its ability to slide between household baby and outdoor terror. Neil Gaiman’s supernatural fantasy Coraline (and the film of that name) finds power and a clue to salvation in a feral cat's knack for sliding between the "real" and what's emotionally threatening and uncanny.
 What is fascinating in a story can be problematic in the backyard.
  If you're a bird watcher, like Jonathan Franzen, the author of Freedom, or a wildlife biologist, you're worried about how feral colonies and free-ranging pets can ravage threatened birds and the voles and micro-rodents that make up the ecosystem. If you're a vet or a shelter worker, you recommend that the pet cat stay inside to be kept free from disease, accident, or a lawsuit involving neighbors. Safe, but oh so boring!
Now cat companions (do you ever really own a cat?) can be responsible AND fun! Some of the options are relatively small-scale, like putting in a large bay window near bird feeders, so the indoor pet can enjoy daylong cat-theater. Others invest in screened areas or cat gazebos, so Fluffy can enjoy fresh air but not fresh robin. And, while this is not a brand new idea, some dare to borrow from the canines and not bell, but leash the cat.
Cat-on-a-leash is not a new Wii experience, but a growing trend as reported by the New York Times.
I guess you can't simply put a cat on a long string and watch it run around, though Tom Sawyer might try that, with a bit of nip thrown in. If you read the NYT, or write for it, you do thinks the proper way, the effective way. Supposedly. For cat-in-training, or more accurately owner-in-training, see the video included in the NYT article, which like a cat itself refuses to go where I want it to and has run away from YouTube.
The Inspirational Cat particularly touched a 16th century Italian poet, Torquato Tasso, so that he wrote in the unspayed feline's not-quite honor a not-quite sonnet:

          These cats have multiplied, and so much so
          That they are double the celestial Bears:
          Cats that disport themselves in all-white furs,
          Cats that are black and even calico,
          
          And cats with tails and cats quite disentailed.
          What I would gladly see (now wouldn't you?)
           Is one cat with a hump or curlicue
           Like some vain harridan discreetly veiled.


           Let laboring mountains cease from all their toil,
           For if a mouse were born, poor little brat,
           It could not hope to flee so many a cat.


           Good housewife, I admonish you to peel
           Your eyes and watch the pot about to boil:
            Run, look, a cat is carrying off the veal!


            Here I must add my bob and wheel.
            My sonnet will not have what praise entails
            Unless it's like those cats that come with tails.


(trans. Lowry Nelson, Jr., in Sonnets: From Dante to the Present, ed. John Hollander (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)