Belling the Cat
34 comments
·September 7, 2025onionisafruit
JKCalhoun
Yeah, when I came across it recently (I was looking at it for inclusion in a free "Primer" for school-age kids I am creating) I realized it was a lot more cynical than I remembered.
I think it's hard to draw any other conclusion (at least from the versions I found online) that it's really about individuals wanting someone else to do a thing that they are afraid to do. "Talk is cheap" could be the moral they append to the end (I hate those though and am stripping those off for the fables that I am re-printing).
JdeBP
In fairness, there have been a lot of versions of this over the past 15 centuries, not always with the same moral.
The Wikipedia writers here have not plumbed the full depths of this, and have not yet reached Paul Franklin Baum.
* https://www.jstor.org/stable/2915573
Nor have they incorporated that one Piers Plowman text had a proposal to kill the cat, not to bell it.
riffraff
ooooh, so that's what https://www.bellingcat.com/ is called this way!
renewiltord
Amusingly the part of the story that refers to the partially solved problem is also on its own just as evergreen.
"All you have to do is" is such a common phrase online. "why didn't they just". If one is a solo builder, yes, by all means. But why didn't the SFMTA "just build side bike lanes instead of center running bike lanes in the first place?"
Betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge of how democracies make decisions: it is the center of gravity of an object with varying mass distribution.
derektank
"People will not just" is a good mantra to keep in one's head
card_zero
I'm surprised that medieval Europeans apparently put bells on cats sometimes. Did they care about the lives of small fluffy animals?
behringer
I'm guessing it was more about stopping the cat from getting worms
thinkmassive
Also possible they wanted to reduce the number of small animal carcasses to clean up, whether from the doorstep or interior of the home. Cats love to bring these as gifts to their keepers.
bitwize
Or small feathered animals. Because they tended to thwart hunting, the bells could also discourage domestic cats from wandering.
praptak
It's also a tragedy of the (anti-)commons. The mice should coordinate, tax themselves fairly and hire a ninja to put the bell on the cat.
ben_w
The cat can represent many things, one of which is a government easily able to mobilise against such organisation.
DaveZale
walterbell
Inspired by 800 years earlier parable?
> One of the earliest versions of the story appears as a parable critical of the clergy in Odo of Cheriton's Parabolae. Written around 1200, it was afterwards translated into Welsh, French and Spanish.
thrance
It's no secret. Jean de la Fontaine was an Academician (as in, the French Academy) around the time of the ancients vs moderns quarrel. As a member of the former, la Fontaine believed everything good had already been written and all they could do was retell old stories.
He himself claimed to have based his fables on the writing of, among others, Aesop.
ursuscamp
I never looked up the origin of the name before. Interestingly enough, I associate Bellingcat with permanent cold warriors, a group of people who seem determined to fulfill the moral of the tale.
esafak
Can anyone recommend an illustrated translation of La Fontaine's Fables for children?
JKCalhoun
Hard to do better than Gustave Doré: https://archive.org/details/fablesoflafontai0000lafo_y7d3/pa...
homarp
project gutenberg has one https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7241/7241-h/7241-h.htm
JKCalhoun
Not illustrated. (Are any of Project Gutenberg's texts? I kind of hate that, ha ha.)
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Traubenfuchs
Reminds me of us europeans expecting Ukraine men to defend us from Russia.
Which they have kind of been doing for years now, showing us what a big fat joke Russia is.
amelius
From EU perspective it seems like the decisions are purely based on short-term economics. I.e., just enough weapons are supplied to Ukraine to extend the war indefinitely, as opposed to supplying enough weapons to stop it now.
ACCount37
US aid seems bound by the willingness to spend money and escalate. EU aid seems bound more by the industrial capacity and willingness to escalate.
Still, just "willingness to escalate" would move the needle by a lot, and I'm of the opinion that the only language dictators truly understand is violence. Anything short of that is far too often interpreted as a show of weakness.
ben_w
Yes, but not only economics, I think.
Russia cannot be allowed to win.
But also, Putin cannot loose so hard that he actually reaches for the nukes (meaning either he needs to die or those weapons are first removed from use), and even without Putin there's a fear a collapsing Russia would disperse nukes on the black market and/or oligarchs would fruit into atomic warlords.
This does mean Ukraine destroying Russian nuclear delivery systems a while back was directly useful, makes it easier for everyone else to help them.
But even so, I have no idea how this plays out: Russia's death throes spraying nukes at the west is still entirely possible; as is Ukraine developing a nuke, pointing it as stuff Russian oligarchs like, and getting them to defenestrate Putin without Ukraine even launching the weapon.
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Other things to consider: qhich power grids, if any, can cope with a single nuke triggering a high-altitude EMP? Most extreme estimate I've heard says it would take only one to kill 90% of the USA in a year just from loss of electricity in too many places at once to repair fast enough.
How sure can we be that all post-Russian nukes get accounted for?
thyristan
I'd wager that we couldn't be, even back in the 1992 USSR collapse. I'd guess a few are gone missing, and they didn't tell the world, or didn't even notice.
pengaru
> showing us what a big fat joke Russia is.
The only joke in your statement is how naive you must be to believe that.
AnimalMuppet
As a conventional military power, Russia has definitely shown itself to be something of a joke.
As a nuclear power, a cyber power, or a disinformation provider, not so much.
cedws
I mean the US also lost to the Taliban after trillions of dollars and 20 years.
s5300
[dead]
nwellnhof
Russia is a nuclear power and direct NATO involvement could quickly lead to nuclear war. Doesn't sound like a joke to me.
This makes me realize I’ve been misinterpreting bell the cat references my whole life. I thought it was about team work.
My mother told me a version that had the mice building some rube goldberg contraption to get the bell on the cat. It’s a very different lesson from what’s described here. I wonder if she got her version from someone else or if it was her addition to avoid teaching me a cynical lesson.