Can you fall out of love with your cat?

You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling with your cat. It’s worse. You dislike your cat. It’s actually worse than that; you wish your cat was dead.

She’s become old and ill. There’s the vet’s bill. It can get expensive looking after an old cat with a chronic and incurable illness.

You’re busy and you now find that after all these years of cat ownership, your cat just irritates you and gets in the way.

If you have these dark thoughts, and I am sure some people do, you’re not the right person to look after a cat. No way, no how. Never live with a cat again.

A proper human-cat relationship has echos of the best marriages. There is give and take and mutual support. It’s ’til death do us part. That is the unwritten commitment a cat caretaker makes when adopting a cat. Nothing else will do.

The commitment can be tested in a cat’s old age. This is a time when the wrong person might feel like getting a new cat in the same way he gets a new car or sofa.

I was prompted to write this article on reading an article on the Guardian newspaper entitled “I wish my cats were dead”. The author is Dave Hill. It was written in 2006 so I expect his wish has come true by now.

He blandly states that he has three cats and he hates them. He explains that he hates them because:

Stinky (formerly Marmalade) produces smelly poo and she sometimes poops out of the litter box. He then inadvertently discloses that he is to blame for Marmalade pooping out of the box because it is dirty (“when the tray is on the full side “) and that the smelly poo is possibly due to a thyroid problem (hyperthyroidism). Marmalade’s hyperthyroidism also irritates him as she is too active. So Dave, I am sure you have learned by now that your attitude is appallingly insensitive.

Then Dave blames Sneezy (formerly Smudge) for being idle and poking him for attention when he is reading to his children. It seems to me that Smudge was probably neglected and when he hears Dave’s voice he is attracted to it and comes over for some interaction.

Finally, he blames Scratchy (formerly Cinders) for scratching herself all the time because of a flea bite allergy. Dave hates it. He also hates it when she joins him at his desk when working at his computer (a Mac). He accuses his cat of being scabby and pawing at his shiny, clean Apple mouse! This is appalling. Clearly Dave had almost completely abdicated his responsibilities towards his cats.

He hates the idea of spending hundreds of pounds on treatments for hyperthyroidism. He prefers to euthanise the lot. So much cheaper. Perhaps the whole article is tongue-in-cheek but it comes across as serious. I think it was meant to be deliberately provocative.

The comments to the article are enlightening. You might expect nearly everyone to criticise him but no, far from it.

At a rough assessment, 45% are against him, 30% for him and 25% who are in the middle ground suggesting something like pet insurance to ease the cost. In other words they are ambivalent.

Perhaps the comments are more shocking than the article. Having managed PoC for 7 years there is no doubt in my mind that there is a large percentage of people who either dislike cats and/or animals generally. Many people are unconcerned about animal welfare. That is the current state of play in the human-to-animal relationship circa 2000.

To answer the question in the title; it is NO, you can’t fall out of love with your cat if you truly love her.

Original article