A Reddit.com user has spilled the beans after six years. Before he married his girlfriend he claims that he swapped her cat for an identical one that was better behaved.
He posted the revelation on Reddit’s True off My Chest category (subreddit) using the username: Throwawaycatswap. Highly appropriate. The people who commented couldn’t believe it or found it a bit shocking. But his post has been popular with 57,000 up votes.
He is married now and it happened six years ago. He explained that at the time she had a black cat. He says that the cat was extremely aggressive and scratched everyone. We don’t know the cat’s sex because he refers to the cat as “it”. Anyway, she went away for a while and he was asked to look after it.
As soon as he got there things went downhill. “It” scratched his arm badly. He told the cat that he would replace it if he got scratched again. It was a joke but he realised that it didn’t have to be a joke. He could actually do it. The next morning he went to the local animal shelter.
He found an identical cat who was litter trained and socialised but who was a little skittish but nonetheless a lot friendlier and better behaved he thought. He took the cat to his then girlfriend’s apartment. He settled the cat in and took her original cat to an animal shelter a good distance away (“a town over”) to make sure that his girlfriend didn’t find out.
His girlfriend didn’t find out and she didn’t recognise any difference in her new cat either. And after six years, he divulged all on Reddit.com. He said:
“It’s been 6 years since then. We got married 4 years ago. We still have the swapped cat. It answers to the original cat’s name. My wife knows nothing. She loves this cat and brags about how much better behaved it is. Every time I see it, I feel like a total piece of s***.”
Below is the Reddit post that he made. As it has been seen so many times there are lots of comments and some of them question if the story is true. They can’t believe that she didn’t recognise the difference between her original cat and the one he adopted without her knowing.
The reason is that the cat was all-black. Provided the new cat was of a similar size with a similar facial appearance he believed that it would work and it did. I think that if he’d tried to do that with any other type of cat he would’ve failed. Although it has to be said that all cats do have a recognisable facial appearance so perhaps his then girlfriend was not that connected to her cat. Plus, there must have been an instant change in the cat’s character. This should have been noticed. Apparently she claimed the improvement in personality was down to her.
I would be one of those who question the whole thing. You have to think about the cat who was abandoned. Was this cat really so bad? Could they have done anything else to have improved its behaviour? We’ll never know.
Below is a comment from TrayusV which kind of sums up the negative aspects of the story:
“I feel absolutely horrible for the original cat. He had a home, and then he was suddenly taken away and sent to a shelter, where he probably died. Alone, without his owner that he loved in his own way. I’d definitely separate from someone if they did this. I wouldn’t need to jump to divorce, but I’d want some time to wait. And I’d go track down the original cat. This just breaks my heart.”
In response to the possibility that his then girlfriend’s abandoned original cat might have been euthanised at the shelter, he said that it was a no-kill shelter. We know that no-kill shelters are not places where there is absolutely no killing. It just means that 10% of the cats might be euthanised. Shelters have to save and find new homes for 90% of the cats to get that accolade. It is, therefore, possible that this poor cat did end up being euthanised if its behaviour was as bad as he states.
The behaviour of shelter cats and how it affects their adaptability is a very big subject which has been well discussed on the Internet. The essential problem is that you can put a well-behaved cat into a shelter and they might start being behaved badly or in a frightened way and become defensively aggressive. That’s why it is very difficult to do a proper character assessment in a shelter. Once they get used to the place they settle down and become more friendly. But this points to personality assessments being a potentially problematic area and some good cats being killed.
SOME MORE ON DEFENSIVE AGGRESSION:
Maybe, if I was young and felt my only obligation to the persnickety problem child cat was feeding it. Like I said I have 2 black cats I have a problem which is which. Only when they are side by side do I know who’s who cuz one is a little bigger. She had no attachment to the cat.
Could be true. But would you be fooled like that? I don’t believe I would be.
The boy friend was screwing with the cat and that’s why it scratched him. Being a man he thought he could make the cat obey him, lol. So he got rid of the cat because he couldn’t live with a cat he couldn’t control…
But Mike it was one of “those” cats that just wasn’t into people and she let it be it’s self. Some people like cats that don’t bond to them, you know what I mean? I have several like that. Don’t pet me, don’t hug me just feed me and leave me alone, lol. That’s probably what her stolen cat was like. I’ve had Itty Bitty for 4 years I rescued her and her feral momma when she was 8 weeks old and she has never sat in my lap or purred for me and if I try to pick her up she scratches me. So I let her be. Some are just like that and her owner accepted her as she was. 🙂
I think quite a lot of people would agree with you. But the girlfriend was sufficiently connected to her cat to even see the personality change.
OMG if this was my boyfriend/husband I’d kick the living crap out of him, good bye Felicia. What a horrible thing to do and a crime since our society sees pets as property. I have several black cats but 2 of them are nearly twins. I’ve had them a year and still get them mixed up, even though one is a little bigger. I give him jerk of the century award. I hope she finds out.