Cats | Fat Wallet Refugee

Dogs or cats?

I did have a dog for a while but he didn’t get trained properly and grew up to be something of an idiot.

You don’t have to train a cat. They work properly right out of the box. No assembly is required.

They have the decency to bury their poo and don’t leave it all over the lawn. Nor do cats treat a litter box as a smorgasbord.

Yes, my idiot dog had a s***-eating grin.

That’s not to say that cats are not without their own set of issues.

I recall being awoken one morning by a kitten going pee in my hair. I’ve cleaned and disposed of many household objects that got sprayed on. I have painful memories of scratches and bites come bath day.

But overall I still prefer a cat to a dog.

I believe a dog topic that has received little attention has been their historical uses regarding race-based violence and chattel slavery in the Americas.

Particular breeds were used to track and hunt down those escaping enslavement. Punishment, while often depicted in media as whipping, often did involve abuses by the master’s dogs.

Law enforcement’s use of police dogs to capture and subdue a fleeing individual is another example of canine violence.

Some of the more popular breeds today have a violent history which I feel deserves more attention.

That’s it for today. Thanks for taking the time to read this and have a great day.

Cats. It’s got to be cats.

When I was 12 years old I and my mother picked up a pair of kittens from a woman who was giving them away at the local Safeway grocery store.

A female and a male. I named the male Zachary after the Black Power Ranger, while my mother names the female Calisto after a character from the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess.

Calisto bore a litter of her own shortly before her death. A woman came to the door one day in tears and said that she had just hit our cat.

Calisto managed to make her way home to nurse her kittens one last time. The internal damage had been catastrophic and we had the veterinarian put her down.

Of the kittens, we kept but one, an all gray runt of the litter. We named him Zing. Both Zachary and his nephew Zing remained with us until the family left Washington around 2006.

Zing found a home with a family friend, while Zachary joined my mother as she flew to their new home in North Carolina.

Zachary lived to 21 years of age, quite old for a cat. In his old age his kidneys were just about shot, the limits of diet and medicine. As his pain and general discomfort became apparent my mother took him to the veterinarian one last time.

Sadly, I was away from home at the time and did not get to say goodbye to a most cherished member of our family.

I am comforted by the many photos I took in his more spry days.

He was often found napping on the back porch.

In my memory he is still there.