IF YOU YEARN to travel the world in a cloud of chaos, relish battling bureaucracy from the First to the Third World and beyond, and don't mind giving your couch, best chairs and bed the occasional haircut, get a cat. Or two, or three.

Along with the visas needed to go intercontinental and the inoculations necessary to keep them from dying for the privilege, testing for mental stability ought to be required for anyone volunteering to undergo global travel in the company of the most self-important creature on nine planets.

Also handy would be a nest egg of reasonable proportions, such as a win at Powerball. Now I acquire cats like most people acquire foot diseases or attacks of the green apple quickstep - never deliberately, and not always willingly. From street corners in New York City, grisly pet shops in Beirut or garbage piles in London, strays unerringly seek me out. No effort on my part is ever needed.

As you can tell, I like cats. And I have carted them around the globe, shattering nerves and bank balances all the while. Three of my Siamese, Oliver, Alicia and Toby, managed to get themselves misplaced on our move from Brussels to Hong Kong. It took a three-pack of vice presidents from UPI and Pan-American World Airways to track them down - in Frankfurt.

The cats had missed their airline transfer. While I was calming nerves at three bucks per large Scotch in Brussels, they were lolling in the Executive Suite at Frankfurt's airport, waiting for the next flight out. Expense does not end with airfare. Getting animals into most, if not all, countries in the British Commonwealth involves putting them into animal quarantine for six months - to protect the locals against rabies, I'm told. It's get out the checkbook time, and a bit of smooching of the appropriate part of your bank manager's anatomy might not go amiss.

There's the business of convincing the government of the country to which you are bound that, no, you're not bringing along a wild-eyed, foaming-at -the-mouth pile of fur and, yes, you do wish to spend thousands of dollars so you can eventually bring it home to throw up on your television screen.

My own adventures in getting Flavius, Penelope, Pandora and Basingstoke past the gunmen at checkpoints in Beirut and onto the plane back to London are another story, for another day. Suffice it to say that six months and the equivalent of about $3,000 later, they were safely home in London.

(Once during this period, I flew back from Beirut to visit the kennel. What I found were four cats with their own private tree, grass, garden, rockery and bed underneath a heating lamp. All they needed was a gin martini and wrap-around sunglasses, while I was living in the battle-scarred Commodore Hotel, wondering just who was conning whom.)

This little drama has been played out in Britain and Hong Kong on several occasions, and only slightly less traumatically in the United States, Belgium and Lebanon - all in all, about $12,000 worth of kitty shuffling over the years.

The globetrotting has ceased, although not the financial outflow. After additions and inevitable attrition, six furballs remain at Chez Webb, keeping the Felix cat food salesmen and the kitty litter people in their Mercedes-Benzes and Jaguars. We're paying the price of putting it in one end and taking it out the other.

There's the cloth furniture, the bottom fringes of which are periodically reduced to matted stringy bits by cat claws and have to be tackled with scissors - and, about every five years or so, replaced entirely as terminal and extending baldness sets in. For this, we buy the privilege of watching the Persian, Coco Chanel, climb atop the television set and barf down the screen, or Penelope the Siamese getting her head firmly stuck in the spittoon that General Dynamics once gave me. (In those days, I was a missiles and space writer, and presumably GD hoped its little largesse would distract my attention from its Atlas ICBMs that kept blowing up.)

My wife Elizabeth cites a saying from some anonymous and presumably well-savaged sage to the effect that cats are "self-centered, egotistical, serious opportunists - and that's what makes them so lovable."

May be. But upon due consideration, I think maybe the little buggers also can be of some practical use on occasion. So the next time an episode of that singularly ghastly sitcom "Friends" shows up on TV here back goes Coco to the top of the set. Then I'll sit back and hope she'll render a good ol' Technicolor smile.

Thought for the Week: Build a better mousetrap, and you get a bone-idle cat.

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