Kanone Hilbert liked cats.

He liked them because they were adorable. He liked them because they were silent, expert killers, and at times he saw himself in them. And foremost, he liked them because of their independence.

Those were the reasons he gave people, anyway, whether fellow Blade Children or Hunters. But they didn't tell close to the whole story.

Kanone Hilbert liked cats because of what domestic cats were. The cat was not some tiny, docile imitation of its wild ancestor, like the dog or chicken, molded for human needs. But nor, like the human, had it managed to wipe out its nearest relatives in a maddening struggle for survival of the fittest. Despite generations of genetic engineering – they called it "breeding" back then - on the part of humanity's ancestors, the African wildcat remains very much alive in its historic range. And it has managed to coexist quite well with its domestic counterpart in different niches, despite their considerable similarity.

It was this fact which gave him hope that Yaiba's curse could be defeated. And it was a reminder of this fact which ended his career as a Hunter, although it also took a strange and crazy girl wearing cat ears and the ingenuity of Narumi Kiyotaka's younger brother to remind him of that truth.

Had they used dog ears, he would've killed them all with ease.