Kitten's Got Talent

So how does one explain the success of the website kittenwar.com? Established in 2005, it's the brainchild of Fraser Lewry - the Don King of cat combat. It operates on the simple premise that an owner uploads a photo of their kitten to the site (there are 179,190 competitors at the time of writing) and then it's matched against another kitten's picture to decide a victor. Visitors to the site use one criterion for their decision: cuteness.

'I previously had another site called cutelittlekittens.com,' explains Fraser. 'It had a picture of a kitten with a button underneath saying: ''Oh, how cute. Show me another.'' It got a fair amount of traffic and, when I was offered money for the domain, I sold up. I immediately felt guilty because lots of people had taken time to upload their pictures, so I decided to set up a bigger, better version.' Kittenwar.com was the result.

In the same way that all good parents believe their offspring to be the most adorable to have graced the planet since the dawn of time, cat owners labour under the illusion that their Burmese blue queen Cleopatra is more ambrosial than a bathful of Ambrosia Creamed Rice. Or that Teddy the tomcat with a Hitler-moustache rules über alles. One of the great things about kittenwar.com is that it provides an opportunity to put those convictions to the test.

I've long been suspicious of people who thrust their progeny - natural or otherwise - into the public eye for approval. Films such as Little Miss Sunshine and Best In Show have illustrated just how frightening the worlds of pushy parents and obsessive pet owners can be. Detractors will also point out that it's deeply shallow to judge anyone or anything solely by appearance, thereby ignoring all the other ingredients that up for a fully rounded personality. But they'd have to concede that it's extremely difficult to dig very far below the surface of a cat's psyche and unearth its feelings about world peace or, say, the Burmese political crisis. Similarly, attempting to judge a kitten's character by analysing its hobbies and lifestyle also offers limited scope because it's unlikely that the answers - if, by some miracle of nature or an unanticipated leap forward in the field of inter-species communications, answers could actually be provided - would stray too far from the activities of sleeping, eating and personal grooming. (There are parallels here with Paris Hilton, but I digress). Nevertheless, we decided to bite the full-metal-jacket bullet and conscript our tabby cat Jarvis into the kittenwar.com ranks.

The first step was to select a picture. He's a strapping two-year-old now, but we chose a photo that was taken when he was just a few months old, posing on the back of a sofa. A short while later, he was on the site. Let battle commence! E pluribus unum! Unleash hell!

Maybe we'd been subtly brainwashed by the current X Factor and Britain's Got Talent culture into believing that an important executive at a cat food manufacturer like Go-Cat or Whiskas would see Jarvis's picture and issue a Cecil B DeMille-style command: 'Who is that boy? I must have him in my ad campaign!' Or perhaps we'd anticipated fame, fortune and free cat litter. Actually, we hadn't, but we had expected him to win more than his fair share of battles. Yet as the stats started to come in and the losses outstripped the victories, it was possible to understand what it must have felt like to be Mickey Goldmill in Rocky, Frankie Dunn in Million Dollar Baby or even Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid, looking on helplessly from the side of the ring as their protégés took a ferocious pummelling. What have we done? we asked ourselves. Will he ever recover from the hurt? Will this lead to the sort of emotional scarring that's seen so many other child stars spin out of control? How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale?

Realising we were quoting from Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes was the wake-up call we needed. Fraser Lewry says that our reaction was a fairly common one. 'I've had feelings of disappointment from owners,' he reveals. 'A few people have asked me to remove pictures once it's turned out that their kittens aren't doing as well as they expected, but usually they handle the results with good spirit. I've actually had more people ask for pictures to be removed because the kitten in question has passed away. People seem to feel uncomfortable about having a departed pet still battling away on the web.'

As the legend on the site says: 'All our kittens are winners really.' And that's absolutely right. There's no point in worrying about the majority view, so why not go ahead and swell the ranks of feline combatants. Even if your cat isn't on there, kittenwar.com is an addictively entertaining site to visit. Once you start judging the battles you'll be hooked. And I guarantee you'll find yourself saying: 'Just one more war,' as if you were George W Bush, stalking the Whitehouse corridors during his final days in power.

Lest we forget

*Simon the cat served on the Royal Navy sloop HMS Amethyst during the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He was posthumously awarded the PDSA Dickin medal - the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross - and given the rank of Able Seaman for bravery during the Yangtze Incident.

*During the six-month siege of Stalingrad in World War Two, a cat called Mourka carried messages from Russian scouts detailing the whereabouts of German military positions.

*Oscar the cat survived the sinking of three different ships in World War Two, including the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. He lived to a ripe old age at the Home For Sailors in Belfast until his death in 1955.