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I will never forget the following passage from the Charles Portis novel "Dog of the South."
'Not even my food was safe. She ate very little, in fact, but if some attractive morsel on my plate happened to catch her eye she would spear it and eat it in a flash without acknowledging that she had done anything out of the way. She knew I didn't like that. I didn't tamper with her plate and she knew I didn't like her tampering with my plate. If the individual place setting means no more than that, then it is all a poor joke and you might as well have a trough and be done with it.'
I think of this sanctity of the place setting notion all the time when we go out to dinner at nice restaurants and I have my eye on Mr. Troutbend's plate. Much as I would like to taste what he ordered, I always restrain myself and wait for him to offer. Fortunately, he usually invite me to taste, and I in turn offer him a taste of what I have. This is so that ordered civilization can march forward without impediment from us.
I look upon it as a way to cancel the adverse consequences to civility in our society of letting the cat get up on the breakfast bar whenever he wants, so I have to admit the net effect on our legacy as a family is zero.
Now, if we had impressionable young children around here, there would have to be more rules because we wouldn't want to give them the idea that it's okay to do just anything that pops into a person's (or cat's) little pea brain.
