Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 was viewed as violating basic human rights, not only of the suffragettes but of other prisoners. The Act's nickname of "Cat and Mouse Act", referring to the way the government seemed to play with prisoners as a cat may with a captured mouse, underlined how the cruelty of repeated releases and re-imprisonments turned the suffragettes from targets of scorn to objects of sympathy. The Asquith government's implementation of the Act caused the militant WSPU and the suffragettes to perceive Asquith as the enemy — an enemy to be vanquished in what the organisation saw as an all-out war. A related
The drunken mouse and the cat The drunken mouse and the cat The story of the drunken mouse and the cat who rescued him was a joke that appeared in several mediaeval collections of stories. It is numbered 615 in the Perry Index as among those that were only recorded in the Middle Ages. A mouse falls into fermenting beer and cries for help. A passing cat offers to pull it out if it will give him a reward when asked. However, when the cat later becomes hungry, the mouse refuses to emerge from its hole to satisfy it. “What about your promise?” the cat asks.