Page 3 - Nutshell 1

“They sound very dangerous to me,” cried Furina. “If we can’t
stop them, who can?”
“Ah,” purred Grandcat, “we didn’t have to stop them with force.
That was the genius of Nyattula. He foresaw that the bipeds would
continue to develop bigger and better weapons, simply because they
could not stop fighting each other. That would mean the end for any
other animals they wanted to kill. We cats are a perfected species:
nothing can make us better than we are at what we do. Humans are
not like that. Once they became clever, they did not have to become
good at anything else, like living within their means.”
“Now, it happened that humans had discovered ways of
changing plants so they could be easily grown and used for food.
Unfortunately, that allowed them to reproduce and spread over the
entire planet. Again, I can tell you about that disaster another time.
What the king of Sylvestria saw was this: the humans could not eat
everything they grew at one meal, so they stored the rest for the
future. Strange, isn’t it?”
The kittens, who never left anything uneaten, agreed.
“One thing they kept in great quantity was grain, the dried seeds
of plants they could make into various edible preparations. The
humans had to build special places to hold that stuff, called
granaries. And they needed to keep away any other animals that
liked to eat grain. That became a big problem. They could fight off
the insects most of the time but rodents were much sneakier. Some
of the people had to be constantly on guard, and the rats and mice
would come at night when the bipeds could not see them.”
Furkin, whose eyes were different colors, interrupted. “I’ve heard
that they have tiny round pupils in their eyes, and that is why they
don’t have any night vision.”
“Quite right,” said old Grimalkin. “Another imperfection. At any
rate, Nyattula put it all together and copied one of the humans’
strategies: the protection racket. That is where you supply the
solution to a problem that you have created in the first place—and
get away with it! So the king of the Sylvestrian cats first chased
dozens of rodents into the nearest human habitation. Those rats and
mice were happy to find gigantic mounds of their favorite food
ready to eat, and they overwhelmed the people in charge of the
granaries. Very quickly the rodent population was out of control.
And that was exactly what Nyattula intended.”