What’s better: Dogs or cats? Before you decide, know that there is only one right answer here. That answer is dog. I present to you my evidence:

I mean, LOOKIT THAT PUPPY. This is my dog, Millie, who’s ¾ poodle and follows me everywhere. Conversely, I have never met a cat that didn’t have murder in its eyes. I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust an animal that is constantly thinking about how I might taste.

But! What about the law? Legally, which pet is superior? Consider this: North Carolina has an official state dog (we’ll come back to this), but a bill pushed by fourth graders in Nash County to recognize the bobcat as a state symbol died in committee back in 2015. Hence, we have an official state marsupial, but not an official state cat.

Here’s another metric: If you steal a cat, it’s possible that you’ll only get a misdemeanor. Stealing a dog, though? Automatic felony charge! I only learned about this after reading a Reddit comment from a former North Carolina police officer who said he was taught this fact in the academy. It was also stressed that, as Rabbit Hole readers discovered last year, you can’t get a DWI on a horse (we’ll also come back to this!).

So, um, why? Why does this state think dogs need extra protection, but not cats? Which lawmakers are in the pocket of Big Canine? Are there more dog lobbyists than cat lobbyists? (Note: If you are a cat lobbyist, please email me. Or, if you are pretending to be a cat lobbyist but are just a bunch of cats underneath a fedora and trench coat … also please email me).

Let’s go way back to the beginning. For as long as humans have lived with animals, other humans have tried to take those animals. Thieves were always stealing cows to eat or horses to ride (or, um, to eat). Dogs were also targets, and even kings weren’t immune to having them stolen. In 1660, three years before he signed the charter that created the Province of Carolina, King Charles II reported that one of his greyhound-spaniel mixes was missing. When a reward didn’t work, the king himself had to take out a newspaper ad pleading for its return. The dude loved dogs, so much so that the King Charles Spaniel was later named in his honor. “He took great delight in having a number of little spaniels follow him and lie in his bedchamber,” wrote John Evelyn in 1685, “where he often suffer’d the bitches to puppy and give suck, which render’d it very offensive, and indeed made the whole Court nasty and stinking.” Okay then!

In Victorian London, thieves would steal dogs and hold them for ransom. In the United States, college students dognapped their rivals’ canine mascots (In 1934, editors of the Harvard Lampoon stole Yale’s bulldog, named Handsome Dan II). In 1965, a Sports Illustrated story about a dalmatian that died after it was stolen and sold to researchers led to a sweeping federal law, the Animal Welfare Act.

Historically, though, stealing a horse was the thing that could get you in the most trouble. You could be executed for taking one, especially in the more lawless wild west. Those hangings also, occasionally, happened here. A list of North Carolina executions lists five horse thieves who were hung between 1768 and 1809. Two horse thieves from Tennessee were executed in Asheville in 1835. Another man was hung in Macon County in 1863 for stealing a single horse. After the Civil War, horses and mules were being stolen at such a rate that in 1867, legislators passed a state law that formally instituted the death penalty for thieves. They were goaded on by, among other things, a Salisbury Banner editorial that called them “chicken hearted” and “squeamish,” and sympathized with the farmers and others who depended on horses to plow fields and to get them to town.

A few years later, lawmakers got rid of the death penalty for the crime, but expanded the law to include harsher punishments for people who stole other forms of livestock like cows and pigs. Meaning: Farmers were protected in ways that regular pet owners were not. Animals that aren’t specifically wildlife have always been considered to be property, so stealing a pet might be akin to a misdemeanor. Your dog or cat, in the eyes of the law, was once akin to a lawnmower or a yard gnome.

That was the case up until 1989. Here, we run once again into a recurring Rabbit Hole character: State senator Bob Swain of Asheville. Swain, a lawyer and conservative Democrat, was a particularly powerful orator who, among other things, didn’t like change and thought a lot of punishments were too harsh. His senate Judiciary committee was the one that advanced a law that prevents you—to this day—from getting a DWI on a horse. He also, single-handedly, once stopped an anti-cockfighting bill that was almost certainly going to pass. He was, as my grandfather would probably way, a character.

But! Swain was very much a homer for a specific breed of hound, one that had roots just a single county over from his district. Over the years, people had come to him with ideas for an official state dog. Some had suggested the Labrador retriever or the Irish setter, but Swain didn’t like the fact that those dogs had other places in their name. The Plott Hound, however, was a dog that was brought over from Germany to Western North Carolina. For generations, it was bred by the Plott family in the area around Waynesville. Swain liked the fact that this dog, unlike other state symbols, actually did something: Track and fight bears. “They’ll hunt for their master. They’ll protect him. They’ll do all of these things,” Swain said in an interview in 1989. “Why, hell, a state bird won’t do that.”

On April 10, Swain introduced his bill to make the Plott Hound into a state symbol. Just days later, a new state representative saw an opening. Julia Howard, a real estate agent from Mocksville, had just been sworn in for her first term four months before. Two days after Swain introduced his Senate bill to recognize the Plott Hound, Howard introduced a bill in the House that would increase the punishment for people accused of stealing pets.

It’s worth clarifying: $400 was the diving line between larceny that’s a misdemeanor and a felony back in 1989 (it’s currently $1,000). Meaning: If your lawyer can convince a judge or jury that the marmot you stole is worth $999 and not an even grand, then you’re going to face less punishment. Hence, the theft of a purebred Plott Hound, which could sell for $5,000 back in 1989, would have always been considered to be felony. What Howard wanted was to make the theft of any dog or cat into a felony.

So, why did she introduce the bill when she did? Howard, who is now 81 but is still serving in the state House, picked up the phone at her realty office this week. “I do remember this,” she says. “Strange.”

The idea for her bill came from an incident—Howard thinks it might have been at East Carolina University—in which a student’s seeing-eye dog was “borrowed” around Halloween time. A bunch of kids got dressed up and took the dog out with them. “They had a couple of shooters, they let the dog go, and it got killed in the road,” she says. Howard thought something ought to be done about it because of the emotional and financial toll. A replacement service dog would cost $10,000 to $12,000. (For what it’s worth, I tried without success to find this story in the newspapers back then and couldn’t. Howard also says the victim here went on to become a U.S. Attorney.)

The story moved Howard and other lawmakers, and her bill easily passed the House. Swain’s bill sailed through the Senate. And that’s when the games started.

Howard’s pet larceny bill ended up in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Swain chaired. That committee tabled the bill in late June because senators thought that the increased punishment wouldn’t always match the crime. But! The House now had Swain’s Plott Hound bill, and they decided to play a game of their own. They attached an amendment making it a felony to steal any pet dog, one that could be punished with up to 10 years in prison. They dropped the part that made cat theft a felony because, as Howard stated at the time, it might have been ruled out of order in a bill that was about dogs.

Swain wasn’t happy. Publicly, he said he’d pass the new bill, but wasn’t “crazy over the thing.” Privately, he had other reasons. During the debate, Howard said she ran into Swain at one of his constituent events in Raleigh. “I’ll tell you why I’m not going to let the bill go,” she remembers him saying. “You’re a damn Republican, you’re a damn woman, and you’re a damn freshman.” That private comment didn’t stay private. Howard said some of his constituents heard what he said, and the next day, his hometown newspaper quoted him verbatim (Again, can’t find this story! But other stories allude to the fallout).

Howard’s original bill never passed, but her maneuver got the felony upgrade for stealing a dog through the Senate. That meant the combined Plott Hound/dog theft bill had to go before a join conference committee to iron out the differences before becoming law. Just to continue to poke Swain in the eye, the Democratic speaker of the house appointed five freshman Republican representatives to the committee. Four of them were women. “I’d give almost anything if I could I could keep from meeting with them,” Swain said at the time.

They eventually worked it out. When the final bill passed the senate, Howard and the three other Republican women on the committee gave Swain white carnations. “I want to express my appreciation to you for recognizing what a fine man I am,” said the thrice-divorced, Equal Rights Amendment-opposing Swain. “I take back everything I said about Republican women.” The whole episode got a lot of laughter (again, this was 1989), and Howard and Swain became friends before his death from cancer in 1991.

In the end, Howard tells me that she achieved her objective, thanks to help from her fellow lawmakers and a craft move that outsmarted a grumpy, powerful lawmaker who stated that he didn’t even like cats because he’d been “scratched and bitten too often.” Protecting people’s pets was always the goal, and while it would have been nice to make the theft of cats a felony too, Howard is good with how things turned out. After all, she says, “I’ve never seen a seeing-eye cat.”