CATS ARE notoriously snobbish, uncooperative little buggers, so it was with some surprise and more than a little delight that I discovered that our fat tortoiseshell, Ali Magraw, would actually answer to her name. Then I found that she also answered to Doris Day, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Carlos the Jackal, God and Attila the Hun.

In fact, Ali will come running - or, in her case, waddling - along to any name you wish to draw from a 20-gallon hat full of them, so long as she is confident that at the end of a wearisome journey, that might cover at least 17 feet, is a pile of smelly cat vittles sufficient to render her comatose for the next 18 hours.

I don't have the earthliest idea what they put in cat food, nor do I have the least desire to find out. I do know that most of it is only marginally less retch-inducingly odorous than used baby diapers, and that as far as a cat is concerned, the more it smells like a freshly disinterred three-week-old corpse, the better.

Anyway, when it comes to naming cats, why do we bother? The fact is, if they are hungry, they will respond to the vilest epitaphs you could dream up, and if they are not, calling them Empress Hapsapsut Maharini All Glorious One Light of the Heavens will win you little more than a glare for having the temerity to disturb their snooze after only 12 hours.

Cats are not big on names. Cats are big on gut-stuffing, collecting zzzzzzzs and practicing home improvement on the living room furniture by reducing couches and chairs to stacks of shredded rubble in need of haircuts.

My wife Elizabeth has them pegged as egotistical, self-centered, serious opportunists - this, even as she bakes or boils up fresh salmon (purchase price: an arm and a fair portion of one leg) because Ali and her siblings, Penelope, Spider, Teddy and Currant Bun, have decided the canned stuff on this occasion is not to be touched with a 10-foot barge pole.

Whatever, we do go ahead giving them names, sometimes to ridiculous extremes as demonstrated by the tendency of snooty cat show folk to tag their little hairy heathens with labels like Princess Pocahontas Natasha Kalamazoo Napoleon Rameses Knick Knack Paddy Whack Give a Dog a Bone IV. I'd wee-wee on their boas, too.

The more common monikers are better, but not much. According to one recent survey on the Internet, the Top 10 feline names include Munskin, Fluffy, Precious and MiMi for females and Friskie, Moose, Mookie and Oreo for the boys.

If I named any of my little treasures MiMi, Precious or Mookie, I could expect to awaken some morning speaking in soprano and in serious need of a skin transplant. And rightly so. They may not pay much attention to this naming nonsense, but cats do resent being humiliated and are apt to react accordingly.

(I note that the chap who ran that Internet survey attached a disclaimer: "These names were not voted by me - they were voted by people who visited my site." I suspect he had just received a visit from his local Cat Mafia branch.)

Still, cat owners do feel an irresistible urge to call the little critters something other than "Ratbag" or "Hayew." (Or even "Cooking Fat," a surprisingly imaginative name that one cat-hater in England chose for his surly pet - or so it seemed, until friends remembered that he was a cockney with a penchant for transposing first letters of double names and to whom the diphthong "oo" was his rendition of the "u" as in "duck," and other such.)

Some years ago, friends at the UPI news agency where I worked in New York found a young cat in a carrier abandoned at a bus stop and decided instantly he was in need of an owner, namely me. He was a handsome lilac-point Siamese, and somehow the name "Bus Stop" that his rescuers had thought up just didn't seem to fit.

I mentioned my name plight to a pal at UPI, an old Arkansan whose demeanor and drawl rather reminded me of W.C. Fields with a southern accent. "Wa'al, Al," he said, "If I were you, I'd name my cat 'Flavius'."

Now my friend's attitude toward cats was of the brick and a bucket of water variety, so I was a bit suspicious. I pressed him for an explanation.

"Wa'al, Al," he drawled, "back in Arkansas when I was a kid, I had an uncle named Flavius. One morning, Uncle Flavius woke up, looked around him and discovered he was 18 years old and had a wife and three kids. Whereupon Uncle Flavius got up, got dressed and walked out the door."

"That was in 1918, and he hasn't been heard from since."

So, okay, that was perhaps a less than perfect reason for a name, except that Flavius was an exceptional name and this was an exceptional cat. He was a grand companion for many years, cheerfully beating up on other cats with paws that had no claws (his original owner had, for some ungodly reason, had him de-clawed), until he passed on peacefully at age 16.

A more logical choice of a name was Currant Bun, for our little tabby. There is an English muffin thingie called a currant bun, dotted with - what else? - currants. Just like the black dots on our cat's stomach, so Currant Bun it was.

Which is perhaps a roundabout way of saying, or admitting, that we choose names for our cats because they please us. The cats couldn't care less, one way or the other.

Probably T.S. Eliot, whose volume "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" was the source and inspiration for the stage hit musical "Cats," got it just right when he wrote that however long the list we consider, "there's still one name left over, and that is the name that you will never guess.

"The name that no human research can discover - but THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess . . . his ineffable effable, effaninefable, deep and inscrutable singular Name."

Thought for the Week: If God had wanted me to touch my toes, He would have put them on my knees.

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