My wife and I share our home with a young cat named Lucy, and she can sometimes be a pretty big pain in the butt. At times in the past, we have had as many as three cats, and I have often wondered why we let these rowdy little troublemakers live with us. When you think about it, cats have a considerable downside, such as:

Cats have no manners. If your sleeping face looks like a good place to sit, they’ll go ahead and sit there. If you leave part of the roast beef on the cutting board while you sit down and eat, chances are your cat will invite herself up there to investigate, and lick the meat in several places before deciding, oh, I guess I’m not that interested in beef after all.

If, while watching the big game on TV, you place the remote down on the coffee table, your cat will walk across the table and step on a button, changing the channel to the Home Shopping Network and causing you to miss the play of the century. If you set the antique gee-gaw that Aunt Ethel gave you up on a high shelf, your cat will climb up there to investigate, and knock it down and break it. If you have a favorite chair, your cat will shred it with his claws or spray it to indicate whose chair it really is.

Cats are stinky. Because, for some reason, we care about our cat’s welfare, we are required to keep them inside, and that means having a cat box. There is no good place in a house to put a cat box. Wherever it is, you will still hear the “scritch, scritch, scritch” of your cat burying her business. Afterwards, she will jump out and happily strew litter doots in a wide swath throughout the house, which will stick to your feet and cause you to do the Cat Doot Dance. When you clean the cat box with your slotted scoop, your cat will come and watch with great interest, as if you are a pirate unearthing nuggets of gold from an exotic beach.

  

If we were smaller, cats would play with us, then eat us. Cats only care about us insofar as we happen to have handy appendages with which to scratch them on their fuzzy noggins. To them, we are a necessary nuisance, large noisy creatures that make them move from their preferred snoozing place on the couch, but also possess the secret knowledge of cat food can-opening and doorknob turning. Cats do not love us, although some can fake it pretty well. They have the cunning to know a good thing when they see it.

  

Cats once had a useful function. For thousands of years, people kept cats for one reason: They are the world’s experts at catching and killing rodents. When most of us lived in rural settings, a couple of cats hanging around the barn were a necessity, to keep the rats and mice from eating all of your food and infecting you with the diseases they carried. Back then, cats were outside creatures, half wild, that might come by to rub on your leg once in a while, but were fully capable of feeding themselves and managing their own affairs. (loudly, while you were trying to sleep)  No one could have imagined a day when we would lock cats inside and actually let them crap and/or vomit up hairballs in our houses.

And now, a rebuttal from an expert witness: My cat, Lucy, has been sitting on my lap while I was writing this, and I am inferring from the bleeding claw marks on my thigh that she is not happy with the premise of this blog. “Hey!” she says, “Who was it that killed that large roach in the kitchen last night while you were soundly sleeping? Who has given you hours of entertainment watching me hide in boxes, play with string, and chase jingle balls? Who lowers your blood pressure by giving you a round, furry ball of purring feline to pet? Who sits in the window, waiting for you to come home? Your cat, that’s who!” 

So I guess we’ll keep Lucy around. But she stays at number 3 on our favorite pet list, behind number 1, Dog and number 2, Fish.