Belling the Cat

This makes me realize I’ve been misinterpreting bell the cat references my whole life. I thought it was about team work. My mother told me a version that had the mice building some rube goldberg contraption to get the bell on the cat. It’s a very different lesson from what’s described here. I wonder if she got her version from someone else or if it was her addition to avoid teaching me a cynical lesson.

I've always felt a connection to this story in my professional life. I've been in enough rooms full of "ideas people" who will spend an entire meeting talking about tools that should exist or processes that need to be changed, if only "someone" would implement it. It's about work that everyone agrees someone else should do. Everyone wants the cat belled, no one wants to do the belling.

Trivia: The journalistic website bellingcat [1][2] is named after this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat [2]: https://www.bellingcat.com/

This fable is the inspiration for the CIA funded mouthpiece Bellingcat. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/09/bellingcat-intelligence-c... https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agenci...