“

Your fish are boring. Of course they are beautiful, but how long can I really watch something beautiful move back and forth in silence.

“

We can suss out how to handle our own waste, but hardly anyone has mastered a stress-free method for disposing of the junk that comes from our four-legged buddies.

“

“Sorry! Haha! You don’t need to see all those pictures of dogs that look exactly the same.” Yes. Yes. I do.

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Because there’s something considered a little off about a guy and his kitty. In fact, typing the word “kitty” just now gave me a little bit of seizure. But I am here to speak out on our behalf. I will endure the shame no longer. I am a male cat owner, and I want sdfsgar3ea! Sorry. My cat walked across the keyboard.

“

I didn’t know her dying would somehow be the first concrete evidence that time is something real and completely uncontrollable. I didn’t understand that her chasing a tennis ball up to heaven would also mean staring 11 years right in the face and confirming in a deeper way that, yes, everything ends.

“

They don’t tell you that one day you will break down and cry, not just cry, but really and truly red-face runny-nose sob in the middle of the Nordstrom shoe department because you saw someone her height, with her hair color, wearing her Hermes perfume and when you realized it wasn’t her, after having that flash of “oh there she is!,” it was just too much.

“

Of course, cats have just one life. This became apparent when Baldwin III, former Count of Ypres, made a game of flinging cats to their death from the top of a tower, and again when cats were persecuted alongside alleged witches during the Dark Ages, and yet again when the American Veterinary Medical Association published a study stating that a cat’s terminal velocity is 53 MPH.

“

I challenge you to, next time you’re at a party, pull down your pants and pee on the floor in front of everyone. As a dog, you’d be forgiven after flashing a fake smile and giving your ass a little shake. As a person, you’re lucky if nobody calls the cops.

“

Sarah McLachlan had a pet rabbit named Mr. Buns that she’d found hopping down the street one day and somehow managed to capture. I say “somehow” because he was not the nicest critter.

“

I hadn’t had any sort of high hopes for the rabbit in terms of stimulation, but I had assumed that I would at least find it cute, or that I would want to play with it a little bit, or, barring that, that I would find its general placid stupidity annoying. But my initial emotional reaction was neither even remotely positive or even remotely negative. It was nonexistent.