Opinion #2: Cat Person/Dog Person

When I was growing up, our house was always crawling with animals:  a dog, a cat, budgies, canaries, hamsters, turtles, fish...  I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to function in a household occupied exclusively by humans.  By the time I had reached my teens, though, I had crystallized my allegiance to felines as the ideal companion animals. 

Cats are perfect:  Not demanding (most of the time), independent (most of the time), just affectionate enough to make one feel loved without being too clingy..  Beautiful, smart, funny, cuddly, playful...and able to self-entertain.  There were no better housemates for childless workaholics like my husband and myself.  Over the years, we've shared our home with nearly two dozen felines.

Dogs...well, dogs were never my favorites.  They were too...overt.  Completely without guile.   Sloppy, smelly, over-eager and demanding.  And it wasn't merely the dogs that were annoying.  It was their owners as well.  There are the ones who are dragged around by  a 150-pound behemoth over which they have no control; and the ones who have attached little "Muffie" to themselves by an invisible umbilical, dragging the tiny, shivering hound with them everywhere they go.  Why is it that dogs seem to bring out the worst in people?  Ninety percent of dog owners can't get their shit together when it comes to their canines; so dogs are generally obnoxious, annoying, or downright dangerous.  Not the dogs' fault, really.  Humans have done a bang-up job of totally screwing with this species with whom we have cohabitated for millennia.

So, yeah...cats.  As I write this, we share our home with six.  Two of whom are old and circling the drain, and there are days when I feel like the head nurse at the Raminiak Home For Geriatric Felines.  That's the price you pay for the love they give.

But you know...this card-carrying, rank and file cat person...

Lost her heart to one special, special dog.

And I miss her still.