The Discriminating Cat Lover

Happy new year, cat lovers!

It has been called to my attention that our (my partner’s and my) policy of not welcoming non-cat-lovers into our lives and home is discriminatory.

DUH!!! Of course it is.

But we don’t stop there… We discriminate against many kinds of people. We are overachievers and wouldn’t limit ourselves to just excluding the un-cat people. Reach for the stars!

No one has a standing invitation simply by professing that they love cats. That’s the first criterion, but not the only one. As my partner says, it’s a deal breaker. But we’ve closed the door to many people who clearly love and adore cats and are still not individuals we want in our home.

People who are…

not pure of heart

who don’t respect us (which extends to our material things by proxy)

who wish us harm

who try to negate our values

who argue

whom we don’t trust

who lack empathy

who don’t recognize our cats as our family

who try to compete with our cats for our love and attention

who don’t see anything wrong with declawing, debarking, ear cropping, and tail docking

who begrudge us owning our own home (this resentment is incredibly common!)

who see animals as flushable as bowel movements

who try to drag us into religious and/or political debates

who would try to exploit our resources any time they think our backs are turned and believe they can get away with it

who try to screw with our heads and tamper with the way that we live

who have defective personalities

who bait-and-switch us for their own ends and try to justify their predation are not welcome.

The U.S. is the land of the free, but that freedom stops at our property line. We’re the ones who decide what kinds of people and behaviors we’ll accept, because it’s ours, period. If anyone feels discriminated against, it’s because they are! Feelings don’t lie. It’s no illusion: if you don’t like cats, stay away.

What baffles me is how anyone could have a problem with that?! If some loser who doesn’t like cats is rejected by us, so what? They have a fundamental difference with us — they would not like us anyway. Our lives are built around our cats and our love for them. Our whole household is devoted to their pleasures and well-being. We wouldn’t live any other way. So what has any non-cat person lost? Where is it written that everyone has to like each other? With seven billion people in the world, we are certainly not suffering from a lack of humans wanting to glom onto us. We can afford to discriminate.

Anyone who would have a problem with (not just asking about — that’s ok) us only inviting approved people into our home is most likely (a) very young and hasn’t had enough life experience to know that some people are just bad seeds who have to be excluded or they are well aware of bad people out there but they don’t place enough value on their own quality of life to discriminate against these creeps (b) doesn’t really know us or understand us but wants something from us which they balk at being ineligible to get. In either case, it isn’t about us; it’s about them. If they can’t distinguish between public and private property, they have much bigger problems than being denied access.