Obiter is as fond as the next person of a bit of word play, but from the point where there was ‘fur flying’ in the fight between the home and justice secretaries over the cat that had human rights (or not), it was clear that the feline pun industry was going a bit far.

It’s also overshadowing a more important question: should we not be putting more cats in prison? Over to an article by writer-researcher Jennifer Copley on website suite101.com.

She claims that ‘animal-assisted therapy, whether formally administered via prison programmes or informally through the adoption of feral cats, can have a transformative effect on inmates’.

And she has no shortage of evidence that we should be locking up more cats. Strafanstalt Saxerriet, a prison in north-east Switzerland, has a pet therapy programme, which also allows inmates to take their cats with them when/if released. However, in Virginia, US, inmates are advised not to get too attached to any feral cat arriving under the Pocahontas Correctional Unit Pen Pals program – once socialised, cats are ‘adopted out’.

The prospects of liberty for 700 cats in Bangkwang Prison, Thailand, are slenderer, as many of the inmates are serving life. Still, they may be comforted in the knowledge they are doing their bit. Copley quotes one gunman doing a stretch: ‘When I first arrived here, I was very edgy, so full of worries and bad tempers… But when I began raising and playing with these cats, my mind grew calmer.’

Obiter looks forward to another purrfect Tory law and order speech next year. You heard it here first: the category A prisoner who got early parole for owning a cat.