The Cat's False Piety

An old cat, grown too slow and stiff to chase mice or birds through the usual means, sat herself down conspicuously at the base of a tree full of nesting sparrows and announced loudly that she had renounced violence entirely, embracing a strict vow of peace and vegetarian devotion for the remainder of her days, and wished only to offer wise counsel and blessings to any creature who sought them.

At first the sparrows kept a wary distance, remembering her old habits, but as weeks passed without a single sparrow being harmed, and as the cat spoke with increasing warmth and apparent wisdom to anyone who approached, trust slowly grew. One by one, sparrows with troubles or questions began visiting her privately for her supposedly blessed counsel — and one by one, they simply never returned, each visit ending quietly out of sight of the others.

It was only when a particularly observant young sparrow noticed that the cat somehow looked steadily plumper each week despite her claimed vegetarian diet, and that the population of elder advice-seekers had thinned considerably, that the pattern became clear. She warned the rest of the flock just in time, and they abandoned the tree for a safer one entirely, the cat's practiced piety having fooled nearly the whole community for exactly as long as no one thought to compare what she claimed against what was actually, quietly happening around her.