Life & Wisdom Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s line lands like a throwaway joke, then sticks because it’s actually a tight little theory of how “normal” gets policed. Cats are already small predators with blades for fingers, a talent for stalking, and a blasé attitude toward property. We forgive all of it because they fit neatly into our domestic scale: they can’t knock down a door, can’t plausibly threaten an adult, can’t be read by the state as a public-safety problem. Double their size and the same behaviors stop being “quirky” and start looking like liability.

The intent is comic exaggeration, but the subtext is about how legality often tracks fear, not principle. Coupland isn’t really talking about cats so much as the way power responds to anything that slips from cute to capable. There’s also a consumer-culture sting here: the pet is an object of affection we control, a creature we’ve domesticated into a lifestyle accessory. Make it bigger and the fantasy breaks. We’d need permits, fences, regulations, insurance. The intimacy would be replaced by governance.

Context matters: Coupland is a chronicler of late-20th-century anxieties, the guy who understands how modern life converts everything into risk management. The line winks at a culture that instinctively legislates what it can’t easily contain. It’s funny because it’s plausible; it’s unsettling because it exposes how thin the line is between “beloved” and “banned.”