What a furry, purring ball of happiness cats can be. They have plenty of character to make us laugh and just the right personality to double up as a soft shoulder to cry on. They’re independent enough to not trip us up every our walking moment, yet have the kind of dependency on us to make us feel that little bit special.

No wonder then that they were painted in hieroglyphs and mummified as the appreciated witnesses to the refinement of human civilisation on the banks of the Nile.

There is, of course, a limit. Having half a dozen cats as pets is fine. Double that figure and you’re bordering on nursing a cat sanctuary in your living room. And if you dress them up, have hour-long conversations with them and include them in your will as sole beneficiaries, then you have a problem.

The online equivalent of that are cat videos on You Tube. Let’s do a little experiment here. Fire up You Tube and search for ‘cats’ – you get more than 700,000 search results.

Let’s refine our search and go for ‘cute cats’ – more than 400,000 results are served. A ‘funny cats’ search also runs into hundreds of thousands of hits.

‘Cat and chocolate’ will get you a video of a cat whose mewing – if you have plenty of imagination – faintly sounds like ‘chocolate’. For ‘cat and dolphin’, you get a cat playing with a friendly mammal. Even improbable searches like ‘cat and cinnamon’ will give you a result – a video called Adventures of Cinnamon the cat, part 1. Yes, Cinnamon the cat has lived through enough adventures to deserve a sequel.

The truth is that if you have a cute cat, it’s nothing special – and that’s because every cat is cute. So there’s no need to make You Tube more cat-friendly than it already is.