I like cats a lot more than I like dogs.

Cats are sly, wily beasts that you know could easily take over the world if they thought power was in any way superior to snoozing and licking themselves on a sunny doorstep. Dogs are too busy trying to be the popular kids at the back of the class to conjure any sort of workable despotic manifesto of their own.

Cats make you want to do something with your life. Dogs make you believe you've made it even if your walls are corrugated and all you own is a kazoo and a laminated sign that doubles as a ceiling.

Cats can charm themselves free into all the nightclubs, captivate the women with their cosmopolitan chat and then slip off into the night leaving a trail of wistful sighs and broken hearts. Dogs do the Macarena on the dancefloor, tell offensive jokes, pee on their bird of choice and get chucked out by the bouncers, leaving a trail of ridicule and suspicious smells.

Cats were worshipped for thousands of years and will never forget this. Dogs' enduring legacy is a series of car insurance adverts and a proven aptitude for frolicking endearingly with toilet paper.

Yes, cats are definitely better. Disloyal, yes. Arrogant, yes. But just absolutely, irreducibly better.

And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Mr Catt thinks so too. Yes, that's Philip Catt, of Catassic Park, Village Road, Finchley. A man to whom a cat is not just a pet, but a lifestyle choice.

At first I thought, as anyone would, that Mr Catt's transformation from mere mortal Philip Winton was down to some sort of Michelle Pfeiffer-esque incident involving high rooftops, a heavy fall and hundreds of local wildcats nibbling at his comatose body. But it turns out that Finchley doesn't do things in quite the same way as Gotham City, and in fact he did it by deed poll. But still - spooky.

Once the name had changed, so did the number plate, to CAT343X, and the street name behind his detective agency (yes, detective agency - if he doesn't own a shiny pink spandex suit, I'll eat my tabby cat), to Siamese Mews.

In the meantime he put his energies into building two monolithic cat breeding enclosures in his garden in the hope of converting passion to pocket money: which, at £12,000 a pop for top quality Savannahs, showed a shrewd materialistic guile worthy of the greatest feline. Not to mention a distinctly catlike disregard for the feelings of everyone around him, whose enthusiasm for the project was somewhat marred by the mass of trees, dirt, skips, lorries and concrete blocks crashing to and from their doorsteps every day for two years.

Which is why the whole £150,000 shebang had to be removed by Barnet Council last week.

Of course, Mr Catt is quite mad. He doesn't believe he's mad - but then, mad people never do, or they would be displaying a rational understanding of their own temperament that would immediately disqualify them from the whole madness thing.

But, the thing is, I quite like madness. Dogs would never be mad: they'd just run about the place, yapping at their own tail and juggling on unicycles and crying out "look at me, look how crazy and utterly insane I am!" while being completely, depressingly in control of their faculties the whole time. But cats are mad to the very core. Cats would wear a monocle and white gloves and sit in a big black leather chair stroking another cat while nonchalantly feeding their enemies to a pool of piranhas, if circumstances would allow.

So in the event I actually found myself quite liking Mr Catt. Because even in the midst of the destruction of his great dream, he still had an oddly serene and superior air about him.

Or maybe that was just the money. After all, with tens of thousands of pounds of quality cat flesh lurking in his garage, it ain't no dog's life, that's for sure.