Although the best-known felines in the world are lions, tigers, leopards, pumas and jaguars, none of them can be considered the planet's deadliest. That honour goes to the black-footed cat, a small African cat which measures no more than 50cm long (20in), is no taller than 20cm (8in) and weighs no more than 3kg (6.5lbs). According to PBS Nature, the black-footed cat can bring down more prey in one night than a leopard will in six months and its success rate makes it the world's most lethal feline. It's got three hunting methods: the speed it runs at causes great confusion which it takes advantage of to use its fangs to devour its victims; secondly, the ambush tactic so common among leopards; finally, patience, a virtue that allows it to wait for the most opportune moment to finish its prey. A video from US channel PSB broadcast some months ago shows how these cats act, their skill, their efficiency, how it's constantly on the prowl. In short, how they pounce prudently on their prey.
Watching the Catalan independence trial being held in the Supreme Court these days, every time lawyer Javier Melero speaks, I sit down quietly in my office and wait to see how he destroys his victims like a black-footed cat. He's not a leopard, nor a tiger, nor a jaguar, nor a lion, but at one moment or another, with a gentle manner and almost without the person being questioned noticing, he ends up destroying them and ruining their testimony. And their position and their contradictions. Of the last few witnesses we've seen in the Supreme Court, he made literal mincemeat of former deputy prime minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría who, as we know, is no easy prey thanks to her training as a state lawyer, and then former minister Juan Ignacio Zoido, although in this case what's strange is that he was named a minister, even in a Mariano Rajoy government where by the end the bar was very low.
How did someone become interior minister who has admitted in court that he hadn't read the legal rulings before the 1st October referendum, that he'd found everything out through the media, that he had no clue about the police operations, nor who had ordered them, that he didn't know there had been firearms in the Civil Guard vehicles in front of the Catalan economy ministry during the protests in September 2017? They're asking for hundreds of years in prison in total for the defendants and some of them have been political prisoners in pretrial detention for 500 days. But, nonchalantly, he doesn't know anything. Neither him, nor Rajoy, nor Soraya. Nothing of the greatest institutional crisis Spain has faced in recent decades. Incompetence can't be too far away from all this. Negligence neither.