THE BRITISH cannot seem to hold onto an empire for all the tea in Boston harbor, their beer tastes like it's been microwaved and they eat stuff like jellied eels, but at least they know a proper pet when they see one. In the land of the bulldog, the cat is king.

Anyway, that's what an outfit called Datamonitor says it has discovered. It seems its research shows that while dogs may still be man's best friend, cats now run the household. That would appear to reflect the reality of man vs. woman in human life, but there you go.

Whatever, the folks at Datamonitor say there are now 8 million cats in Britain, or about one litter tray full of feline pooh per day to every seven million people in the land. Dogs are buried under this heap of cats at about 6.5 million.

Only a decade ago, there were nearly 1 million more dogs around, and 1.1 million fewer cats. The British are finally learning the lesson they missed back in 1665, the year the rats and bubonic plague did an Osama bin Laden on London.

Now don't get me wrong - dogs are cute creatures, even if some of them tend to look like hairy, overgrown cockroaches and the English bulldog variety resemble a genetic experiment on Winston Churchill gone sadly awry.

But when it comes to rats, dogs are about as useful as a mother-in-law at a divorce hearing. This is where cats come in (dealing with four-footed vermin, not the two-footed sort), and Londoners needed a lot of them that they didn't have back in 1665.

This was in a day, before Margaret Thatcher came along and handbagged them, when Englishmen were persecuting women as witches and, seeing the little furballs as the witches' "familiars," slaughtered cats in their millions.

The result was several hundred thousand dead Londoners, plagued by the fleas the rats carried, but at least there was no more of this kicking the cat nonsense. We still have the Labor Party, trains that get delayed by dew on the tracks and the French for neighbors, but at least Tiddles generally gets three squares a day.

Which brings us to another Brit shortcoming - their near-complete inability to name pets, particularly cats, but even dogs come in for some real cringe-makers.

Another survey (some people are forever sticking their noses in other peoples' business) produces the not-too-startling news that the favorite name for cats in this land is Tigger, or Tiger, followed by Charlie, Misty, Tom, Smokey, Harriet, Poppy, Sam, Sooty and Blackie.

Harriet??? With that sort of imagination, is it any wonder that the British failed to produce the first martini, win the 1976 Olympics 100-meters dash or invent Disneyland?

(Dogs, let it be said, don't fare much better. The most popular name for the canine set was Ben, followed by Max, Bonnie, Sam, Jack, Toby, Ellie, Meg, Poppy and Rosie. Had I been a dog named Poppy, my owner would still be picking bits of my incisors out of his derriere.)

You would think that a nation where the bluebloods bear handles like Lord Reginald Coddlington-Fotheringhay and Lady Penelope Sneath-Winstanleighshaw could come up with something a bit sparklier than Tom or Blackie.

Still, there are pockets of imaginative pet-naming dotted around the countryside. There is Kamikaze Adventurer, a tabby point Siamese living in a London suburb, and Manamans Mist (a foreign blue named after the Celtic god who lived on the Isle of Man and the mist that often shrouds the place).

Or how about Murgatroyd (a cat named after a toy rabbit), or Netochka Nezvanova (after a novel that Dostoyevsky never got around to finishing - the name roundly translates as "Nameless Nobody," and the cat goes by the nickname Notty), or Popocatepetl (to be avoided if you stutter)?

I might avoid Eric Argus Chesney Herbaceous Border, the burden of a tomcat in Tisbury, England. But I favor the ever-popular Cooking Fat, a reflection of the British fondness for Spoonerisms and their penchant for pronouncing "-uck" as "-ook."

Which brings us, as these things naturally tend to do, to Angel Gabriel.

As anyone who bothers to read this column even once every six moons or so is by now painfully aware, Angel Gabriel is the new, now seven-month-old black-and-tan tabby kitten at chez Webb, Chard Cottage, in England's leafy, pastoral Midlands.

I use the phrase "kitten" advisedly. Angel Gabriel already weights slightly more than seven pounds, has a tail that measures just short of 12 inches and a mouth that at mealtime does a remarkable imitation of a steam shovel in full scoop.

He is, as my wife Elizabeth and I are quite aware, the most misnamed cat on the planet. At one time or another, he has been caught curling up for a nap in a half-filled coal scuttle, dismantling a series of artificial plants after eating the real ones, and eyeing a leap onto a small chandelier over the stairs to get at a dragonfly.

Angel Gabriel's latest party piece was to haul a 10-inch fish from the microwave where it was thawing and drag it down the hallway and up the rug-covered stairs, at which point he was intercepted en route to the bedroom where he carts all his prized possessions.

Ah, well, they are kittens only once, so we just have to lock away the dearer crockery and vases (the ones he hasn't already demolished) for the duration.

There are worse things than cats, even ones like Angel Gabriel. Over at the Penhrys Inn pub in Wales, landlord Lee Jones has had to banish his parrot, Captain, from the premises for drinking, smoking, swearing and making passes at the women.

"To start with," says Lee Jones, "it was good fun to see him swoop onto a customer's shoulder to get a free drink. Captain's got a taste for beer now, and he's always got a cigarette in his mouth."

"He swears at the men playing pool," the exasperated pub operator adds, "but the worst thing is the wolf-whistling. Women hear it and think it's me."

What he needs is a good cat. I suggest Angel Gabriel could sort out a pesky parrot in short order. And hold the mustard.

Thought for the Week: Money talks, although mostly it tends to say goodbye.

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