You live with a person. You want to go away for a break. You love your cat and set high standards of cat caretaking. Can you trust your partner to look after your cat while you are away? What sort of things can go wrong? How do you deal with it if you can’t trust your partner to care for your cat? It is embarrassing and perhaps a indicator that you should not be in a relationship.
These are some of the considerations that come to my mind. I am sure I have missed something:
- You partner likes a drink. She works full-time and has a bad attendance record at work. How much time is she able to give to your cat when she is at home and sober?
- You have a new live-in partner. You trust him but don’t really know him. He is allergic to cats. Is he going to cope with looking after your cat to a decent standard?
- Your partner has a slightly aggressive streak. He seems tense and irritable. You are not sure why. You love the edginess but you love your cat with a passion. He has no track record of looking after a cat. He goes out quite a lot and comes home late.
- Your partner is allergic to cats and likes dogs.
You can understand the sort of message I am trying get across. The above are just top-of-the-head examples. There are others. If you want your partner to look after your cat and if you are a damn good cat caretaker who genuinely loves cats, you do not want to leave the welfare of your in the hands of anyone other than someone who you are certain will do a good job.
That sets a high standard. It may mean that you don’t go away because putting your cat into a boarding cattery may not be acceptable to you.
As an alternative, can you employ a person working for a cat sitting company to come in and check up on your cat? I don’t think you can if the cat sitter is, in effect, checking up on your partner.
Abuse?
There is a worse situation. You have gone away and left your boyfriend in charge of your beloved cat. On your return there are signs that your boyfriend has abused your cat but you don’t want to believe it. You are in conflict between the love for your cat and the love for your boyfriend.
You come back and your cat is frightened. She is hiding. She has what appears to be minor bruising on her ears but your vet says the bruising is also deep inside the ear.
This is a scenario from the Catsite forums and the overwhelming opinion from visitors is to dump the boyfriend asap.
That sounds harsh but if you suspect that your boyfriend (or your partner, male of female) might be abusing your cat, when you are not there, it is time to say goodbye. The risks are too high and trust is already eroded.
Of course there has to be a sensible approach. The signs of abuse have to be real and tangible. If you leave your cat in good health and go away for a few days leaving her in the hands of your boyfriend and on your return your cat is injured and the injury is not consistent with a typical cat accident (on your vet’s advice) then you have to come to one conclusion especially if your boyfriend has shown little signs in the past that he dislikes cats such as being allergic to cats and keeping your cat away from his bag because hairs might get on it! If a person is that twitchy about cat hair, it does not bode well for the future of your relationship if you are committed to looking after a cat for the cat’s lifetime, which is the only way to do it.
I think we should trust our instincts on these sorts of things. People are able to pick up on small signs that indicate a problem. The biggest problem, however, is for the cat owner to face up to the possibility and put cat welfare first.
My childhood friend Melanie lives in the Milwaukee area too now so I used to have her watch Monty. She’s like a second sister to me and we even look more like sisters than Jen and I do. I had no worries about her with Monty. But she had worries about him. She says she won’t stay over and cat sit anymore because as she scooped his litter box he sat above her on his cat tree and growled in such a menacing fashion that she became quite frightened of him. She still finished scooping the box, because that’s just the great gal that she is– but no more.
Monty is hostile to those he considers strangers in his house and he deplores overnight guests. I thought I was doing him a favor– leaving him a companion. His poor “companion” was terrified of being mauled in her sleep or viciously attacked while awake. Monty’s growl is worse than his bite, but he can be quite intimidating. So now my sister, my husband and I can’t all go on a trip together.
I’ll bet Michael expected stories of cats being terrorized by cat sitters, but not the other way around!
Yes, Caroline, he does. I’ve come home from an overnight trip to find Monty in a food coma sleeping it off. Once I drove back through a horrible blizzard because Jeff told me Monty didn’t eat supper. I could have stayed another day, but I pictured Monty as being distraught without me, to the point of refusing food! I got home after three miserable hours on the road (should have been two, but for the weather) and found out that Monty didn’t eat because my sister had just fed him a huge meal before Jeff got home and even Monty’s tummy has limits, apparently.
I let me ex girlfriend who I got Lilly with and who likes cats, look after mine for a week while I was in England for work. When I cam home I was very unhappy with the details. The fountain was not even plugged in and there were things which I said to not leave around like string incase the kittens would swallow it (they were still small last summer) and I was just generally not happy with the state of the litterbox and from that moment on I decided I would not let her be the one to look after my cats. Yet I might at some point get back together with her but this factor is working against that actually. She has 3 cats who she loves alot but hasn’t enough time for because of work – not her fault but they are indoor cats and she should find time to play with them a bit. In the end they are not equal to her as a humans are and I differ there. To me they are the same or more important than humans and their company is satisfying as such. I am not sure we will get back together and this is a major part of it. I am going to visit her for a week leaving on wednesday and I can’t wait to see her cats – and it will be nice to see her but it’s reached a point where I am going to have to say something to break off the direction of us possibly getting back together.
It has become that my cats are very important to me. Even with a job I don’t have as much time as I would like for them. So I don’t think that leaves room for being in a relationship. That brings it down to living with a human or living with cats but not both. I guess in the end I am very happy right now and love my cats and don’t want to even risk changing that for a day. Does it have to be a choice? In a way yes I think.
Yes, I was just thinking about that. They must have killed their cats if they were buried with them. That is not good. However, I see your point. It is an interesting idea to explore.
The only person I would trust to look after our cats is my sister and I’m sure she feels the same way about me, the downside is we can never go away together on holiday, but that’s a small price to pay to know our cats are safe and happy. We are both ‘home birds’ anyway.
I think you can tell by a cat’s reaction to a person if they will be kind and trustworthy, when we did cat sitting for Cats Protection we always asked to meet the cats before the person went away.
Anyone using a cat sitter should notice if they ask to do that and if the cats interact with that person without him/her forcing themselves on the cat.
No holiday is worth coming home to find your cat hurt or frightened by the person you left to care for them.
Sure, I’ll do that. There are some articles on Bastet and Ancient Egypt on PoC. Don’t think that everything was rosy perfect for the cat in Ancient Egypt. I argue that there was cat abuse just as there is today.