Oh, right, dogfighting is unconscionable, but THIS is fine.

Look, I understand that younger kids are not necessarily ready to learn all about the world’s cruelty and violence in gory detail. But does that mean we should make a lighthearted game out of it?

As a mouse, I find Goliath Games’ “Mad Mouse” game offensive, appalling, and a grotesque misrepresentation of the savage treatment mice suffer wherever felines are permitted to act out their baser urges. Is this really the proper conceit for a children’s plaything?

“Catch the mouse by its tail,” the box says, “and get back the stolen cheese!”

First of all, this gives misleadingly simplistic treatment to the question of whose cheese it really is. If the cheese is, in fact, “stolen,” then it seems to me its rightful owner is the cow. But if we allow that the farmer can “own” the cow’s cheese simply by possessing it through his own applied labor and ingenuity, then why is the same not true for a mouse? But let us set this aside for now. (In any case, we can probably agree the cheese does not belong to the cat.)

Would Goliath Games have us believe the cat is merely acting in a loss-prevention role here? Once he apprehends the mouse “thief” and recaptures the cheese, he has fulfilled his mission?

What mouse would recognize this topsy-turvy world where cats catch mice only to relieve them of “stolen” cheese? It would be funny if it weren’t so horrifying. People, your cats don’t care about disputes over cheese ownership. They catch us mice to devour us.

Oh, but Goliath Games has cats catching mice harmlessly “by the tail!” This is the cat’s-paw in kid gloves, right here. True, cats will sometimes catch mice by their tails. News flash: Our tails are part of our bodies. It still hurts. And even when they do catch us by our tails, step two of the “catching” process is to bite down fatally on our necks. But more often in real-life cat attacks, they snag us bodily on their claws, pinning us to the floor. This is like being caught in the sharpened-stick man-trap John Rambo sets in FIRST BLOOD. Why do you gloss over the gruesome truth about cat-on-mouse violence?

This is just a thing humans do, I guess. I have this cousin, a church mouse in Ohio. He told me he overheard a Sunday school lesson about Daniel in the lions’ den where the instructor got to where Daniel emerges from the lion pit unscathed and just stopped.

Cute story! Except that’s not the end of it. It ends after the king tosses Daniel’s accusers—and their wives and children—to the same lions, who tear them to shreds.

If you aren’t telling your kids about this stuff, it’s no wonder they think being caught by cats is all just hilarious fun and games.

It’s sick, is what it is. Just sick.

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