I just read an article online that is a perfect illustration of how cats
potentially lose their homes because someone is suckered/manipulated by
someone that they are "in love" with. That there is even a question in
this woman's mind after what this jerk pulled is amazing to me. I wrote
a response which I will include at the end and I urge others to email if
they feel the same as I do.

Megan

From:
http://www.newsday.com/features/columnists/ny-etcolumn3708495mar16,0,6062987,pri
nt.column?coll=ny-features-columnists


When suddenly you are the cats' meow
by Katti Gray


March 16, 2004
Baby is the first-born cat in the feline clan sharing my apartment, an
13-year- old gray tabby with black stripes across his back, a chest of
snow white and what my veterinarian once called a wide, well-appointed
Roman nose.
"You mean African nose. He lives in a black woman's house," I countered,
then cracked up right along with the vet.
Before moving in with me in 1995, Baby had spent most of his first four
years cowering behind a bookshelf in the condo where Don McIntyre, the
cat's former caretaker, lent me a spare bedroom as I hunted for a home
to buy. I retreated from the home- buyer trail after a few months.
The week before I was to sign a lease on another apartment, Baby crept
one night from his corner into the borrowed bedroom, inched toward me
and backed away several times, eventually heading back to his corner. He
repeated the same over the course of a few days before finally edging
close enough for me to scratch his head. With my small talk, I'd also
been trying to coax Baby out of his hiding place. I'd been filling
Baby's food and water bowls and cleaning his litter box because Don, a
college classmate, had been more attuned to his human needs than the
cat's.
On the eve of my departure from the condo, I asked if the cat might take
his leave with me.
"Sure," Don said, "You can have him."
Just like that.
Baby needed a better home.
He got deathly ill - or so it appeared - the week I started setting up
house in a new place. He spent a couple nights at the vet, recovering
miraculously from something nasty in his blood the vet said could have
killed him. Baby got vaccinated and neutered and a whole new life. He
began to look happy, his coat gleamed, appetite grew and, when lights
went out at night, he took to leaping upside the walls at phantoms.
(That habit continues as he ages. I call it the midnight crazies.)
Baby also became fixated on me, was steadily underfoot. When I moved, he
moved. Where I slept, he slept. When I opened the door at day's end, he
was waiting there on his haunches, looking forlorn and, by his
expression, wondering why in the world I'd been gone so long.
Getting another cat might help, I decided. She came in the form of a
calico kitten. A former NYPD sergeant in Northport who rescues abandoned
and abused animals let me pick Cally - the ex-cop's choice of names, not
mine - from her brood of dogs, cats, birds, et al. Sugar Gray was the
new name I wrote on the vet's sign-in sheet, Shug for short. She barely
grew at all and turned out to have feline leukemia. For a few weeks
after Shug was diagnosed, I dedicated hundreds of dollars toward making
her well. When she drew her last breath, she had not reached her first
birthday yet. Her eyes were open and the vet's euthanizing needle in her
vein, and I wept harder than I had over my father's grave.
After Shug, the ex-cop gave me a tortoise-haired beauty I renamed She,
one that begs for scraps at the table. I shoo her away when company
comes.
After She, came Scarface. Afraid she might contract some fatal disease
during the months- long quarantine required by the government in South
Africa, where my brother worked at the time, I took Scarface in as a
temporary boarder for my niece, my brother's child. The arrangement is
entering a fifth year.
Being a cat woman was not my plan. Dogs, animals that can manage well
outdoors, were the preference in my Arkansas family. Animals belong
outside, my father said, laying the hammer down.
"The cats come with me," I said, laying the hammer down with suitors I'd
entertained since becoming a caretaker of cats.
The current sweetheart was kind to the cats from the start. He let me
hand him my heart and appeared to bear up under the cats before
declaring - now that we are in deep - that he'd have a difficult time
with animals in the house, what with fur balls and scoopers and ruined
furniture and cat hairs all over.
Who goes? The sweetheart or the cats? Most of my friends think the
question absurd.
"Girl, do you know what time it is?" asked Freda Thomas, high on my
short list of chums. "Take the man. Hands down. Take the man."
I do lean in that direction. But I find myself, an unexpected cat-
woman, in a jam. Truly in a jam.

Katti Gray's e-mail address is kgray@newsday.com

My response:

The cats or the guy...you think you are in
a jam?

I think not.

Someone that truly loved you and was the *right* one would never ask you
or attempt to manipulate you into giving up your beloved pets.

Someone that truly loved you and was worth your time would willingly and
lovingly accept those that came before him.

If the price of love means abandoning pets that, unlike humans, have
blessed you with unconditional love and trust, it is a price that you
should refuse to pay. If a man came to me trying to pull that junk, the
door *would* hit his a.s on the way out, along with my foot. Hard.

Cats are a wonderful barometer with regard to a person's character. This
man is playing dirty in a very subtle way (which makes what he is doing
even more heinous.) I would like to believe that someone that comes
across as intelligently as you do would not be so desperate to have a
man that you would be so easily manipulated and sacrifice the ones you
love.

Who knows what the future holds, but my hope is that one of two things
will happen. You'll dump this jerk and eventually meet a truly wonderful
man that loves you *and* your cats, or you'll decide that you're
comfortable living "as is" and ignore the silly pressures your friends
seem to want to inflict on you. Either way, you'll win. So will the
cats.

Megan