Belling the Cat

"Bell the cat" redirects here. For other uses, see Bell the cat (disambiguation).
Gustave Doré's illustration of La Fontaine's fable, c. 1868

Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council. In the story, a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat's neck to warn of its approach in the future, but they fail to find a volunteer to perform the job. The term has become an idiom describing a group of persons, each agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task under the misapprehension that someone else will be chosen to run the risks and endure the hardship of actual accomplishment.[1]

Although often attributed to Aesop, it was not recorded before the Middle Ages and has been confused with the quite different fable of Classical origin titled The Cat and the Mice. In the classificatory system established for the fables by B. E. Perry, it is numbered 613, which is reserved for Mediaeval attributions outside the Aesopic canon.[2]

  1. ^ Strouf, Judie L. H. (2005). The literature teacher's book of lists. Jossey-Bass. p. 13. ISBN 0787975508.
  2. ^ Ben Edwin Perry (1965). Babrius and Phaedrus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 545, no. 613. ISBN 0-674-99480-9.