What if your cat won’t dance with you? Well, as with people, you just have to take the bad with the good, don’t you? Not all cats like to dance; and some are just rotten dancers, let’s face it.

But don’t give up all hope – you might be able to coax your pussy into the occasional rumba thanks to the “experts” at the Museum of Non-Primate Art, who are not only coaxing out foxtrots but fine art, and have a website that’s just begging for inclusion on anyone’s list of Internet insanity.

Now, I would submit that if you’re going to have a website to share the joys of cat love, you should keep it pretty straightforward specifically to avoid ridicule.
Not so the Museum of Non-Primate Art (MONPA), whose founder, art historian and “animal philanthropist” Dr Peter Husard, became so enthusiastic about the movements, marks and sounds of cats and some elephants back in the mid-1970s that he set up an internationally funded “research organisation” with “branches throughout the world”.

Husard noticed that, when it came to studying animals’ “aesthetic communication in the hope of gaining new insights into our world”, chimpanzees were getting all the attention. So he “invested several million pounds” to set up the museum in a mansion near Chichester, England, assembled zoologists, art critics and biologists and just went at ‘er.
They watched moles tunnelling in artistic directions, stallions pooping in pyramids and birds flying in formation, and realised it was all performance art, if not graphic creativity at its most wondrous.
Within a few years, “Arthur Mann’s groundbreaking work” on the way domestic cats mark their turf had seized their imaginations, and currently they spend half their time on that. The rest of the hours go to horses, dogs and elephants.

You used to be able to visit the Chichester facility, but they’ve closed it up now because people started making off with the “animal artefacts”. “However, thanks to generous donations from the Philip Wood Gallery in Berkeley, the British Council for Feline Aesthetic Advancement and Internet provider Netlink,” they are proudly online.

What’s proudly online?

The Poetry and Prose of Pachyderm Prints. Termites: Their Art & Architecture. Hanks & Coils – The Shaping and Placement of Canine Defecatory Structures …

This last business – attaching aesthetic significance to animal droppings – isn’t necessarily the weirdest/funniest thing about MONPA, but it’s a damn good place to start. Here the term is “splay”, or if you prefer, the charming “dejectum” and “dejecta”, and you can view a lot of samples of bird splatter in particular, collected using special windscreens, which the authors suppose isn’t so much different from your average Jackson Pollock effort.
That nasty great, view-impeding road-accident-inducing splotch of guano on your windshield, if you’d just bother to look carefully, has a nucleus, outer and inner envelope, lobes and all manner of sub–nuclear particles, making each and every one as unique as a fingerprint, so much so that analysts have to subdivide splays into schplerters, schplutzes, sklops, splerds and sploods.

And they are not trying to be funny. And there is, apparently, money to be made in this shit.

“Mounted splays both real and artificial, while admittedly still a controversial element of the art scene, are beginning to command high prices. A dual splay of the Blue Winged Teal, dated 1983, was sold recently in a leading Dallas gallery for $6,000.”

MONPA reckons that with 8,350 species of flying birds in the skies, each with around 600 different dietary combinations, plus the new synthetic foods and insecticides they gobble down, the “excremental variations” number somewhere around five million.
So, you get one of those basic crap-collecting nets on your windscreen. At just 60mph, MONPA says, “the average windshield sweeps a volume of air equal to 594 cubic feet per second. On a 60-mile journey, that’s the same as spreading a net of some 396,817 square feet. Or, to put it another way, 100 hours of driving equates with a gigantic windshield nearly 1.5 square miles in area, held aloft for one 16th of a second.
“With such an effective gathering device positioned in front of our eyes, it is easy to see why the growing store of fascinating information about dejecta has led to splay collection becoming a major global pastime.”

“Splay enthusiasts” – they really say that – make sure the bird poop has formed a crust, or “skak” before using an oil like witch hazel to ease it off the windshield and into the art gallery.
Doesn’t it seem like only yesterday we were all having a good laugh at the expense of trainspotters? Those were simpler times, I suppose.

Everyone knows that cats have been humans’ reasonably good buddies since pharoahs walked sideways, but MONPA stops just short of claiming they also built the pyramids for us. It says “Why Cats Paint” by Burton Silver and Heather Busch was an international bestseller in 1994, and I have no reason to doubt this, but it’s a bit of a stretch imagining how the 5,000-year-old kitties Etak and Tikk, shown here, buffaloed the ancient Egyptians with their paw paintings.

Dogs evidently reigned the studios in the Middle Ages, which were the Dark Ages for cat artists, who were considered agents of the devil, along with just about everything else.
Today, cat fanciers submit their pets’ paintings to MONPA. You can see the work of Ragamuffin, for example, a Persian longhair who delivers no fewer than four paintings and several litter-tray sculptures every day, “is unafraid of experimenting with new media and has completed works using milk, jelly meat and peanut butter”.

This is a Persian in California named Fleebag putting the finishing touches on “Frequent Feathers”. (I think. They all look alike. Sorry!) Fleebag graduated from dirt and milk to work in sheets (as cats will), and judges at the 1995 Detroit Cat Art Fair were stunned.
“Fleebag’s multi-coloured works evoke strong images of light flickering between moving forms,” gushed one, “rivulets of wind-blown fur or grass parting in rythmic waves as the cat leaps forward towards its prey. There is an energy here, a fluidity of line that is at once composed, determined, precise and deadly.”

Estimated Value: $7,750.

Come on, though, wouldn’t you really rather have an elephant? Thailand, which is full of jobless elephants because all of the trees have already been cut down and hauled off to Japan to build elephant compounds in zoos, finds plenty of things for its national symbols to do in their spare time. These include roaming city streets selling bunches of bananas to people to feed them with, threatening to step on the groins of male tourists persuaded to lie down in front of them, and sitting on jumbo toilets to have their picture taken for the world’s media.

They also paint up a storm. This one’s by a pachyderm named Japatee and it costs only $350 at ElephantArt.com, but in this case at least, the money is genuinely needed for his food and lodging. And no one’s hanging his poop on the wall. Not yet, at least.

Anyway, let’s dance!

MONPA flogs a book by artist and cat-dancing instructor Heather Busch, pictured here (co-author of “Why Cats Paint”), that addresses the main issues. Foxes trot, so why can’t cats dance?

Question: What should I look for in a cat-dancing tutor?
Answer: Obviously you want a dance instructor who has a cat, has spent time dancing with it and knows how to help others interact with their cats through the dance.

Q: Do I have to take my cat to cat dancing class?
A: As most cats do not take kindly to a sudden change in environment, especially one where other cats may be present, along with loud music and dancing, people do not bring their cats to class. Instead they use stuffed (toy) cats.

Q: I should really have asked this first, but why would anyone want to dance with their cat?
A: It’s become a way for cat owners to enter into a more interesting and meaningful relationship with their cats. Once they’ve danced with their cat, some say they’ve entered into a kind of spiritual partnership with it.
Secondly, whenever we do something in unison with another being we raise our levels of awareness and feel stimulated, but there seems to be something quite profound that happens to these people. They talk of feeling alive for the first time and claim they become more out going, assertive and generous.

Warren Leckie, New York: “I find 10 minutes of deep purring completely stops sceptical thoughts by connecting me with my feline spirit within.”

Q: How exactly does one go about dancing with one’s cat?
A: Well, they don’t jig up and down with them. Some of the photographs in the book can give that impression.

Q: What if my cat won’t dance with me?
A: A lot of the time people think they can stroke their cat a bit, then put on the music and puss cat will be boogeying with them in no time. It’s not that easy. You have to put hours of time in to the pre-dance energy alignment exercises, like mirroring, remote stroking, mutual purring and so on, before most cats will dain to join you in the dance.

And you can try playing an album by David Parsons, MONPA says, who “worked with Tibetan cat charmers”.
Tibetan cat charmers? If you Google “Tibetan cat charmers”, the only websites that come up are MONPA’s and other sites talking about it.

@ @ @ @ @

FOOTNOTE: Just I was about to publish this, I noticed three things:

* The rather grim “western” movie “The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing” from 1973, starring Burt Reynolds and Sara Miles (as “Cat”), has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

* Nor does “The Kitty Cat Dance”, a humorous enough video I received a couple of months ago in my email, and which I discover is “a minor Internet phenomenon”, to use Wikipedia’s words. Some 19-year-old journalism student in Seattle made it with his cat Kayla for their website, G-shack.com.

* A genuine shock: Fans of the Museum of Hoaxes believe the whole MONPA thing is a hoax! One reader even points out that Burton Silver, who wrote those silly books about cats painting and dancing, has a website elsewhere about the sport he invented in 1989, golfcross, which is played with an oval ball that always goes where you want it to go.
It never even occurred to me that this could be a scam!
The neighbour’s cat will never forgive me.