Kitty Love

I’ve talked to a couple other expert-ish cat people—another vet and a guy who fosters cats in his house—and none of them see this as a crazy idea. All of my friends, obviously, view this as the next step down a road that inevitably ends with my corpse being eaten by starving cats in some filthy house somewhere.

Frankly, I’ve always been wary of exceeding parity on the human/cat ratio in a one-bedroom apartment. Somehow that moves you from a person who has cats to a cat person. But if the total level of cat-related worry and cleanup decreases when you move from two to three, doesn’t that make you less of a cat person? And also, it still means that I spend less time caring for my pets than a person who has only a single dog.

And I have to admit the idea of getting a new frisky young kitten is appealing. I mean, try and not find a kitten appealing. But on the other hand, if Frank and I are shopping for apartments to possibly purchase, as we very soon may be, will that move us into the category of people who have “actual” pets? (If you are not an apartment dweller, it seems that one or even two cats don’t qualify as the kind of pets that might mess up an apartment, or cause a problem for the neighbors.)

Overall, I would just like to have a happy household, and for me that includes cats that aren’t constantly fighting. And don’t even think about suggesting giving one away because come on. I’m not a monster.

In terms of resources, three wouldn’t be a whole lot more than two. We’ve got lots of space, and if it would cut down on the fighting, it would seem like fewer cats than we currently have. And yet I can’t help feeling like having more than two cats is crossing some cultural line. Which, by the way, I don’t even have the energy to try and unpack the “ew gross cat lady” as spinster outcast phenomenon from a feminist perspective, though obviously it is richly layered.