What’s the origin of the expression “Let the cat out of the bag”?
Say that it is market day. Ine vendor has some nice piglets on display. You buy one already wrapped for travel in a nice poke.
If you peek at your purchase, you might let the cat out of the bag, then the jig would be up and the merchant would be hoist by his own petard.
It was the first recorded action of a militant animal rights activist. This is proof that they go back to medieval England.
The person was later identified as the brother of a mandolin performer, that hated having had to listen to him pratice all those years.
Zwiebel
I’ve always heard the same story that Dr. Fidelius relates - vendors of live lunches would stuff the piglet/duck/chicken/whatever in a bag so the buyer could carry it home easily. Of course you’re not going to open the bag until you get home in case your future lunch gets out and takes off down the road.
Unscrupulous vendors would stuff a cat into the bag instead of whatever livestock was for sale. When the buyer opened the bag, the cat, of course, leaped out, revealing the ‘secret’ - they had ‘let the cat out of the bag’.
I have no idea if this is true or not, but it seems to be the common explanation.
Some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the hydrant.
Dr. F – where do you (where does one) pick up all this knowledge?
I’ve read tons of history and historical fiction and can occasionally (okay, rarely, but often enough to be satisfying) venture an answer to a question like this.
But you (and several other posters) are truly awesome and never fail to impress and enlighten or cause a chuckle.
Gonna go and change my username to Sycophant or something similar now.
People used to, maybe still do, put unwanted kittens in a bag and toss them into the nearest river. Never seen it done so it could be pure UL. But if one were to escape? SGTM.
Peace,
mangeorge
I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000
In the early 1950s my dad took a nasty house cat, put it in a sack with a rock, went down to the bridge, twirled the bag over his head and heaved that sucker into the river. This was fairly common practice in the Canadian community I grew up in. Now, people would get six months in jail for this, plus get smeared all over the newspapers.
About ten years ago in Florida a Canadian Catholic priest on vacation drowned some kittens. I read in the newspaper that he fainted in court when he was given a jail sentence.
I oppose cruelty to animals but we’ve come a long way from our agricultural roots. Drowning a useless cat ain’t much of a crime. They sure as hell aren’t an endangered species. I guess the proper disposal is to pay a professional for a lethal injection. How capitalistic and bureaucratic!
Al Zheimers, perhaps the world would be a better place if your father had put YOU in a bag with a rock and threw YOU in the river.
I would say a lot more on this subject, but this ain’t the BBQ Pit and it occurs to me that you may just be trolling.
If you’re not and you truly believe what you are saying, you’re a sick SOB and should try jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge with a couple of concrete blocks tied to your feet. Better yet, I’ll help you.
Some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the hydrant.
Coosa, if you would throw a living human being off the Golden Gate Bridge for drowning a cat, perhaps the world would be a better place if you took the dive at the same time.
Coosa, I don’t think Al Zheimers is trolling.
Attitudes to animals are very much a product of your upbringing. Two stories:
A friend of mine did some volunteer work on a local farm as part of a school work experience placement. Part of her work was to bottle-feed a calf which had been rejected by its mother. Visiting the farm at a later time, the farmer told her he hadn’t bothered to feed the calf and it had starved. He didn’t understand her indignation, it was “just a calf.”
In one of Gerald Durrell’s biographical books about growing up in 1930’s Corfu (a Greek island), he documents saving a litter of puppies who had been disposed of by burying them alive. Again, the perpetrator (a peasant farmer) couldn’t understand his indignation, this was the usual method of disposing of unwanted puppies.
If you’re livestock farmer you can’t afford to empathise too much with animals, you couldn’t do your job. Here in the U.K we have a split between rural and urban areas over the issue of fox hunting because the “townies” think it’s cruel and the country folk don’t care if it is. I can understand the “no empathy” perspective, even if I don’t agree with it.
From another message board… http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/bulletin_board/messages/2569.html
Follow the links.
They give the same answer that Dr. F does, along with a nautical guess that it was a description of taking a whip (cat of nine tails) out of a bag.
Just to go along with the off-topic bit, if you think an animal needs killing (for work, food or sporting reasons) I was always taught that it was best to relieve it of life as fast and painless a way as possible. In my opinion, and most of the farmers I’ve talked with, that doesn’t include drowning or starvation.
No UL here, George. In 1982, I was living in Mt. Vernon, NY. My roomie Pam was walking her dog. It’s November, and very cold. She comes running back in, saying she hear something, and the dog was going nuts. We find a paper bag, lunch-bag sized. In it are three live kittens, and one dead one. They were not more than 24 hours old.
Off we go to the 24-hour animal hospital, where the nice Dr. informed us that they would likely die without their mother. Despite the runt getting sick a few weeks later, they all lived. We took turns, round the clock ( the three of us were in college, with the usual flexible schedules) feeding them, and teaching them to go potty.
I assume by now that they’re all dead ( I’ve only had one cat who lived to 19 ) , but they were surely abandoned by being thrown out in a bag.
Cartoniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
AuntiePam, places like this: http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-let1.htm
and the word detective: http://www.word-detective.com/backidx.html
are great resources for word origins.
Thanks for sticking up for me Crystalguy and matt. I wasn’t sure if I would get a touch of flame for my post but coosa certainly got to foaming at the mouth. Not only would she/he like to drown me, I got called a troll!
Didn’t a previous post wonder if drowning cats in a sack was an UL? I put that to rest.
Plus, I never drowned a cat in my life. I like cats. I don’t want public bodies of water polluted with rotting dead cats and I don’t want children finding drowned cats littering shorelines.
I guess my big offense was saying drowning a useless cat ain’t much of a crime. The priest jailed for it in Florida did it in a bucket in his yard and probably thought he was being humane.
According to my local newspaper people drive out of the city limits all the time and toss out their cats and dogs to live off the land. I never heard of any of those thousands of people going to jail. The local farmers do not appreciate all the starving lost cats and dogs wandering into their yards. They probably just shoot 'em on sight with a .22.
AuntiePam, There are several books out that go through sayings such as this one and investigate the origins. One of the best is by Funk. THe titles are “A pig on Ice” “HEavens to Betsy” and a couple others I can’t remember. Funk is often cited by the word detective (also a great site for this stuff) and Cecil.
IF you read funks books you can keep people at parties entertained for hours 
Hey Al, I grew up in rural America on a ranch, such practices were not uncommon, and still aren’t. This board only allows a narrow view on such issues, I have found it better to avoid controversial subjects altogether.
As a volunteer at a no-kill animal shelter I’m quite aware of how Americans feel about their pets. They’ll spend a small fortune on their own pet but won’t give a dime for all the unwanted pets.
They don’t want to know or think about all the death and suffering involved in pet ownership. Fortunately there are people who care about the welfare of animals and make an effort to address the problem (I’m not talking PETA, I’m talking about all the volunteers and sponsors of no-kill shelters.)
Now let me just jump off my soapbox and be on my way.
Don’t know about the rest of the country, but in the rural South this practice was/is common with kittens and especially puppies. It was done for practical reasons. When dog or cat had more puppies/kittens than she could nurse the weaker ones were sacrificed so the others could survive.
I never knew anyone who thougt it was done out of cruelty. More like it was a humanitarian gesture. Is it better to kill 2 pups so 6 can survive or let all 8 die of starvation?
It’s easy to say it’s cruel and mean if your sitting in your suburban home with your cable TV and Internet access. If your poor and living way out in the boonies you do what you got to do.
Another common practice was shooting old dogs. When a dog became old and sick, or blind he would be taken out in the woods and shot. Was this a cruel practice or euthenasia? Remember people didn’t always have the money to go to town and let the vet do it.
Note that I do NOT condone cruelty to animals in any form. I think alot of it happens because people don’t realize just what caring for an animal entails. They get all caught up in the materialistic “I Want It, I Want It” mentality and never stop to think about the responsibilty and work involved. The way I was raised we learned these things at a young age.
Al Zheimers, perhaps I shouldn’t have jumped on you so hard, but I work in a vet clinic and had just come home from euthanizing a rescued cat that had been locked in a cage, starved almost to death, and left untreated when it developed pneumonia. Today we euthanized a stray cat that had been dumped at someone’s house and then attacked by dogs. Its right front leg was crunched into pieces from shoulder to paw, its abdomen was punctured in several places, and its spine was pulped. It was laying out in 27 degree weather with these kinds of injuries and was in incredible pain when the homeowner found it and brought it in.
Let’s see, what other interesting things have I seen lately? How about the man who dipped his dog in a vat of battery acid to try to kill the fleas? Or the woman who called the vet to her house because her little poodle was ‘sick’, and we found the dog on her front porch, still alive but eaten almost to pieces by maggots - her eyes and anus were completely eaten out, the maggots just hadn’t reached any vital organs yet. And then there was the beautiful Golden Retriever puppy that was hit by a car - besides its other injuries, it had a broken bone sticking out of one leg. The owners let the dog lay in their garage for three days before bringing it in, then insisted we keep it alive but untreated except for pain meds for three more days while they decided whether to euthanize it or not. Despite the incredible damage done to its body and the pain caused by our handling, the puppy wagged its tail up to point that the Sleep-Away stopped its heart.
I am not some little sissified city dweller who doesn’t understand the natural world - I grew up on a farm in the sticks. We disposed of many stray dogs who were dumped at our farm (usually pregnant) with the .22 rifle method - we certainly couldn’t take care them all, and it was the most merciful thing we knew to do.
I mostly became upset by your last paragraph. First, your implication that drowning was a merciful method of killing an animal - how in the world can you consider slow suffocation a merciful death? If it is necessary to kill an animal, do it in the quickest and most painless method possible - chop off its head, shoot it in the head, take it to the vet for a lethal injection. Don’t make it suffer and be terrified for minutes or hours before it dies. That’s not mercy killing - that’s torture.
Secondly, your statement about killing a ‘useless’ cat not being such a crime. By what criteria do you decide that a cat, or any other animal is ‘useless’ and doesn’t deserve to live? Just because it doesn’t meet your expectations, as a human, for what a cat should be? A cat is a cat - it what way does it have to be ‘useful’ in order to earn the right to life, or at least a merciful death? If a cat (or any other animal) is so vicious that it is dangerous, then yes, its life does not have priority over the safety of the humans and other animals around it. But at least have the decency to grant it a merciful end, not a torturous one.
Thirdly, your claim that encouraging people to pay a professional to give a lethal injection is ‘capitalistic and bureaucratic’. How do you reach that conclusion? What is capitalistic and bureaucratic about offering the option of a quick, painless, clean death for a suffering animal? What about all of the other veterinary services we offer to ease animals’ pain, heal their injuries, cure their diseases, prolong their lives and make them healthier and happier? Is this all capitalistic, bureaucratic nonsense? The veterinary profession began as a way to preserve, prolong, and improve the lives of domestic livestock - the animals that we eat, that provide us with wool, milk, and leather, and, before automobiles, provided us with transportation. As many people left behind their ‘agricultural roots’, as you put it, companion animals became more common and the veterinary profession broadened its practice to include the improvement of the lives of these animals also. The treatment of companion animals grew from the demand of the owners of these animals, not the other way around.
And I would like to point out that the inability to feel compassion for animals is a serious character flaw - modern psychiatrics consider cruelty to animals in childhood a major predictor of cruelty and violence towards fellow humans in adulthood. Profilers use this fact to help detect serial killers. The abuse of pets in a household has been linked to both child and spousal abuse. This has nothing to do with ‘animal rights’ or any such thing - it is the inability to be compassionate towards a living creature that is dependent on and under the control of that individual.
Finally, I would like to apologize for my comments about jumping off of the bridge. My intention was to jar you into placing yourself in the same position as the cat, and to see how you would feel about dying in that manner. Suppose your next door neighbor decides you are a pain in the ass and should be disposed of. He could just walk up to you and shoot you in the head - but no, that’s a waste of a perfectly good bullet and messy besides. So he ties you up, stuffs you in a burlap sack, throws your spare tire in with you, and dumps you in the river. He doesn’t care about your terror, or how you are going to struggle vainly to free yourself, to hold your breath until your lungs are bursting, and your horror as your need to breath forces you to fill your lungs with the water that will kill you, your body’s instinctive struggle to stay alive by continued efforts to breath,the futile pounding of your heart as it tries to supply oxygen to your body by increasing circulation, the slow shut down of your brain from oxygen deprivation as the last molecules are extracted from your bloodstream, until you are mercifully unconscious and unaware of your final moments.
And the priest with the bucket? Let’s draw another pretty picture here - do you think drowning kittens in a bucket means you just toss the kittens in and poof! they’re dead? No, this priest who supposedly was full of the love and compassion of God, took tiny, helpless creatures and held them underwater while they fought and struggled to reach air and life, until they were forced to breath in water and drown. Six months in jail? Fine - but it should have included a nice session with his head held down in a bucket for a few minutes every day so he could experience first hand what it was like.
And in case you’re wondering, yeah, I know first hand what it’s like. Be glad to give you the gory details.
Some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the hydrant.
coosa-- don’t apologise-- troll or not, al deserves it, and it was clear that the comment made was in the spirit commensurate with its prompting.
al-- do you really think that someone who describes your p.o.v. as the “‘no empathy’ perspective” is sticking up for you?
mr. zambezi-- was that funk as in funk&wagnall?
the hog squeal of the universe is coming from my modem!