Moscow-Pullman Airport (in the distance)

The Moscow-Pullman Airport, not one of the big hubs, is located out in the rolling Palouse fields more than easy walking distance from either city, and the site of sporadic regional air travel. The main difficulty there is keeping a steady enough flow of flights (a few each from Alaska and Horizon) coming and going. But if you’re the Department of Homeland Security (memo to Barack Obama: Please change that name; we need no reminders of Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa), your eye might have been caught by this descriptor line about the airport in Wikipedia:

A cat named “Dash” occupies the airport and freely roams through the security checkpoint.

Well, that Siamese just couldn’t stand (even if Dash has been an airport fixture for four years). In his latest email to constituents, state Representative Tom Trail puts on the wry: “Many of us who used the airport looked forward to this friendly feline. However, it is apparent that in reality Dash was a deep undercover terrorist cat trained by Al Qaeda and just waiting to launch an attack on local citizens. Homeland security agents became suspicious when they saw Dash with a deadly weapon – she unsheathed her claws. Agent suspicions also grew in intensity when they realized that over 4 years there had not been a single high jacking, terrorist attack, the sign of a single rodent, and not a single case of bubonic plague at the airport. This perfect record was just too good to be true. Dash was last seen being escorted under armed guard and the rumor is that she is being shipped off to Catanamo for intensive interrogation.”

Actually, there’s an effort underway to find a new home for Dash.

(There’s the argument that someone might be allergic to a cat, and this is why the removal. That will not become credible at least until cats, and dogs, which do regularly travel by plane, are banned from airports even for travel purposes.)

Praise be that the feds are out there to protect us all from a little slice of humanity . . . or felinity.