The dead cat bounce

I feel it’s my duty to call out ACT leader David Seymour for his misuse of the expression “dead cat bounce”.

The phrase cropped up in Parliament yesterday when Winston Peters, under the protection of privilege, tried to divert attention from the scandalous taxpayer-funded Antarctic junket he arranged for two wealthy friends by naming Seymour’s former partner as the person responsible for leaking details of his (Peters') superannuation over-payment. (As an aside, are we witnessing the increasingly desperate flailing of a politician who senses he’s on the ropes? First the pathetic invitation to Seymour to join him in the boxing ring, and now this?)

Seymour responded by accusing Peters of using “the old dead-cat bounce – throw something on the table in the hope that it would overshadow the bad news coming his way”. A Stuff journalist helpfully tried to explain that “the dead cat strategy is a common political tactic. It refers to the practice of unveiling a ridiculous, scurrilous story to take attention away from a more legitimate issue. It’s likened to throwing a dead cat on the table”.

But that makes no sense and it's not what the expression means. I first heard the phrase during the share market crash of 1987 and it came, as so many colourful expressions do (think “lonely as a bastard on Father’s Day”, “as flash as a rat with a gold tooth”), from an Australian.

Share prices had briefly rallied after a prolonged and spectacular fall, raising hopes that the worst might be over. But an Aussie analyst laconically punctured the premature optimism, explaining: “Even a dead cat bounces”. So the phrase has nothing to do with attempts to create political distractions, as Seymour and the Stuff reporter seem to think. The appropriate zoological metaphor in that situation is “red herring”, which supposedly derives from an attempt to throw hounds off the trail of a fox by dragging a smelly smoked fish across their path.