You just hold the tail!
Is anyone familiar with that phrase? The SO used it once, and she was surprised that I’d never heard it before. It did show up once in a thread from 2000. If you know the phrase, where are you from?
Wait… What? You think I used the first half of the phrase as Sequential Thread bait? Perish the thought! 
Currently “Greatest pranks of all time” is the next thread after this one.
I’ve heard “screwed the pooch”, but no one I know ever went after the cat. They’re small and have sharp edges.
Different meanings. ‘Screwing the pooch’ means messing up. ‘I’m screwing this cat! You just hold the tail!’ means ‘I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need your input.’
The funny thing is, when the SO introduced me to the saying, she just said, ‘I’m screwing this cat!’ I was like ‘Ar? 
You’re screwing the cat?’ It made sense when she added the last sentence. But she was incredulous I’d never heard it.
Never heard that one. I had a co-worker who used to say of a notoriously unselective acquaintance “He’d fuck a snake if he could get someone to hold its head,” but that’s the closest I’ve got.
A similar one, which I heard or read once and have remembered since, is “Who’s fucking this chicken, Frank?”
Sometimes truth is stranger than anything we can imagine.
Tangentially to 3trew’s phrase, a friend of mine use to declare, “You’re the one fucking this chicken–I’m just holding the wings.” The expression indicated that he wasn’t going to make any decisions or take any responsibility related to whatever effort someone had involved him in.
I actually thought this was what the thread would be about. “Everybody knows!!!”
I did a Google search… the one and only hit for this phrase is this thread.
So is that the source of the famous, “Keep fucking that chicken” quote? I’d never heard any of these sayings before.
This is why it’s worth getting up every morning. Even after half a century, you can still learn something new!
As Calvin said of Hobbes, “Five of his six ends are pointy.”
In regards to the OP, I’ve never heard the phrase, “I’m screwing this cat! You just hold the tail!” before.
Never heard that before.
I’ve heard “I’m so horny I’d fuck a snake if I could get its legs apart.”
Never heard it before.
Never heard it before but I have to say it’s pretty funny.
I’ve heard the snake comment as “He’s so horny he’d fuck a snake if someone’d hold it straight for him.”
It’s common around here and has zero to do with sex. It’s equivalent to “Here, hold my beer…” (while I do something crazy and risky that I take full responsibility for; you’re only complicit in that you stood by and watched me do it)
My cousin’s husband, who is a Professor of Cats,* once testified in court on behalf of a man actually accused of screwing a cat. Despite the Professor’s testimony that the alleged sex act was a practical impossibility, I believe the man was convicted.
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*Veterinary medicine, but his research was on cats. He has a disease of cats named after him.
You gotta be talkin about Donnie Hairball, right?