I swear, I am not making this up.

On MS-NBC, they showed a little video clip of a mouse who has been altered somehow so that he is no longer afraid of cats.

He was shown climbing all over the cat, punching the cat in the eye, making rude comments about the cat's mother, and stealing the cat's ball of yarn and knitting a little sweater.

OK, I'm as much for science as the next guy, but I'm having a hard time understanding the practical applications of this development. Is this for the benefit of the cats? Did some scientist just wake up one day and say, "You know, cats have gotten so lazy now that there is some doubt they will be able to survive unless we fix it so their food comes to THEM" -- ??

But then, with 974 different kinds of cat food on the market, how many cats rely on mice as their primary source of sustenance? Which would you rather have, "Fancy Feast" or "Dead Mouse"?

Or do they think that a new breed of courageous mouse will be of some benefit? Are they going to send brave mice to Iraq when our soldiers run out? (Actually, I can sort of imagine the Bush administration thinking along those lines.)

It just seems to me that, in the natural order of things, there's a pretty good REASON for mice to fear cats. Taking that out of them kind of messes up the balance somehow.

It would be like making it so people aren't afraid to jump off of 100-story buildings....who does this really help?

Or maybe this is just a prelude toward removing fears from people, down the road. The guy who has a terminal fear of poodles, if he could have that suddenly taken away, think how much better his life would be....

Oh well, I'm sure they will tell us their plains sooner or later.

And you might want to get some Slim-Fast for your cat.

I'm sure there is no interest to introduce the modified mice into nature. It's probably just a bunch of scientists trying to see what they can do. Perhaps they could engineer people to not be afraid of heights? It's interesting that they could remove an ingrained fear from mice. Now if they could make a cat that was afraid of mice, that would be just plain funny. I'm waiting for them to create "Chair dogs" like the ones from the Dune series, that would be awesome.

Got to love our tax dollars at work. Whats next???

probably toxoplasmosis. It encysts in mice brains, making them do stupid things (like not be afraid of cats) so it can move on to it's definitive host (the cat)