I joked about not wanting to be called The Cat Lady since I live with six felines.  But you know what?  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why that thought crossed my mind.

In the U.S., households with cats nearly equal the number of households with dogs (36% and 39% respectively).

The number of cats sharing a home with humans vastly outnumbers dogs living with humans (by more than 25 million).

If someone mentions they have four, five, or six dogs, no one blinks.

If someone mentions they have four, five, or six cats, suddenly they’re “The Cat Lady.”

Why is that?

It’s a stupid cultural thing.

We subdued and domesticated dogs.  They didn’t even choose to live with us.  Our relationship with them is based solely on subjugation and manipulation, our desire to take the most friendly wolves we could find and change them from what nature made to what we scrambled together through applied force and superiority.

On the other hand, cats chose to be with us.  They represent our only mutual relationship with another animal that’s not of our making, one where an animal allied itself with us millennia ago of its own volition.  To this day, this fact can be seen in how cats relate to us, how they react to us, how they treat us.  Being that they’re here because they chose to be here, they owe us nothing and they feel no inferiority in our presence.

Why then do you suppose are people with cats treated so differently than those with dogs?

Could it be that felines challenge our view of who’s in charge?  Could it be that we don’t like not being in control of the relationship, one that has lasted thousands of years only because the cats chose to create a form of community with us by their free will, not ours?  Could it be that the majority of us are challenged by cats because they represent a joining of two species that we didn’t create?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t possibly care less why there exists a certain human-induced disdain for those living with cats, why anyone with more than one or two cats is derided, deprecated, and disparaged.

Such are the ways of the small minds, after all.  Such are the ways of the weak and ignorant.

I’d rather share my home with a thousand felines who chose to live with humans than live with a single human who’d rather manipulate life to make it a pet.  After all, dogs are pack animals who need to be in charge or need to be ruled.  Cats, on the other hand, are independent and choose who they want to live with.

There’s a big difference.

So let me be owned by a cat rather than owning a dog.  And let me called whatever shallow names the obtuse wish to employ.

At least I know my home is filled by those who wanted to be with us rather than those forced into servitude.