4/11/2023 0 Comments Scorn definitionI often admire friends’ and neighbors’ devotion to pets and other animals, and see pet guardianship as a very good thing. (No, I don’t live in the mountains I live in Long Beach.) I built two cages outside with open access to the house so she could roam, lay in the sunshine and explore the outside world without being carried off by a hawk or eaten by a coyote. My three dogs adapted to her while she took over their territory, including their beds. Every year at this time she tears out her hair in chunks, so I have hunks of black hair everywhere. I inherited “Mommy’s” 12-year-old cat eight years ago. To the editor: I laughed and sprayed my morning paper with coffee while reading Abcarian’s column. Those who made it work, so to speak, learned to embrace the habits and inconveniences in ways that would seem masochistic to some but entirely relatable to other cat parents (or at least to me). There were tales of rearranging rooms and lives to accommodate the new companions some did this successfully, if grudgingly, while others admitted they couldn’t take the upheaval and found new homes for the cats. I was also amused by letters from readers describing their own experiences with their new feline roommates. ![]() ![]() Reading only that, any experienced cat person would know how this turned out for Abcarian. ![]() So I was delighted to read the July 13 op-ed column by Robin Abcarian about the “4-pound, furry ball of destruction” she inherited from her late father, a 22-year-old cat named Inky who must now cohabitate with dogs many times her size. As a cat person who currently has dogs (I’m finding it hard to replace my late friends Siri - named years before the eponymous Apple assistant, thank you very much - and Leif Erikson), I’ve found that one key difference between guardians of the two kinds of animals is that cat parents resign themselves to a kind of inter-species codependency and must tolerate a level of emotional complexity found less often in dogs.
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