Chipper, right, and Chickory shine at Pug Fest.Until this year, I was pet-free. And, due to my aversion to poop, I liked it that way.
I'd had a cat in the past, a gray and white kitten I'd received this way: So-and-so knew somebody's cousin's uncle who found a cat half-dead in the street and, it seems nice so … do you want it?
I'd never had a cat before. Putting things mildly, it did not work out between us.
Turned out, I was not a cat person, but I didn't know that until I actually had a cat. I figured this out on the day she dragged a live blue jay into my apartment and then acted like she'd done me a damn favor. This is the kind of situation that elicits screaming, and so I did. My boyfriend at the time ran from the bathroom to the living room – wearing an unsecured robe and a pair of fireplace gloves – picked the bird up and threw it out the window. A few weeks later, I found a blue feather behind a stereo speaker and gave the cat a disgusted look.
Although this cat was female, she only responded to the word "Gary." I'm not kidding about this. Rather than finding this humorous, I thought she was trying to tick me off. Like your typical anti-cat person, I took it personally.
Eventually, I'd had enough. The question is, how do you get rid of a pet you hate? How do you pawn it off on someone else? ("Well, I hate her, but YOU might not.") Gary now lives with my friend Mike at his farm in South Whitley. She hides whenever I come over, but I hear that she is fat, loosing her teeth and likes spinach dip. In the summers, Mike lets Gary run around the farm where, I imagine, she spends her days torturing small animals to death.
And when my friend comes home from work in the evening, he stands behind the house and yells into the field: "Gaaaaarrrrry!" And she comes bounding toward him through the beans, he says, licking her chops.
Emma Downs is a Features writer at The Journal Gazette and a Tall Tails blogger.
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