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How a dog person learned not to hate cats
By Bob Rybarczyk
STLtoday.com columnist
11/16/2004
Bob Rybarczyk
I’ve always kinda thought of myself as a dog person. My family had a dog when I was growing up, and he was an absolute blast. His name was Snickers (over my staunch opposition – I wanted to name him Doug), and he was a mutt both by breeding and personality. Ever since Snickers, I’ve been a dog person.
I feel like I can relate to dogs. I had a lot in common with old Snickers. We both frequently smelled bad. We were both a bit lunk-headed. Neither of us ever caught a bunny or squirrel, but we both thoroughly enjoyed terrorizing them by chasing them recklessly around the yard. We both liked Mom’s spaghetti (though I was considerably more skilled at digesting it).
Though I haven’t owned a pet since Snickers bought the puppy farm several years ago, I always assumed that my next pet would be a dog. Never, ever, ever did it occur to me to keep a cat. Never in a million years would I have a cat.
So, yeah, right now I’m living with a cat.
Allow me to explain.
What, there are only 101 uses?
Before I get into the explaining part, I’d like to point out that I’m not anti-cat. Yeah, I laughed quite a bit at that classic bit of early 80s American literature, “101 Uses for a Dead Cat,” but only because those cats were already dead. If the book had been titled, “101 Ways to Make a Cat Dead,” I’m sure I’d have laughed a lot less. Unless monkeys were involved. Monkeys are funny.
I just don’t really identify with cats. They’re not pets as much as they are moving furniture. They liven up a place, sure, but they don’t fetch, they don’t roll over or play dead (which never struck me as a somewhat gruesome form of entertainment until just now), and they don’t drink out of the toilet. Heck, you can’t even have fun by feeding a cat a glob of peanut butter and watching him try licking it off the roof of his wee mouth. Cats clean themselves, sleep a lot, and generally ignore people.
If I’m going to go to the trouble of owning a pet, I want it to entertain me, not ignore me.
So how did I end up with a cat? Well, when I moved in with my fiancée about six weeks ago, I didn’t move in with just her. I also moved in with her 7-year-old daughter, an aquarium full of hermit crabs, and, yes, a cat.
The cat’s name is Frisco. He’s 10 years old, is mostly gray with some black mixed in, and is, to put things delicately, fat. No matter how little we feed Fatboy, as I often call him, he doesn’t get any smaller. If anything, we suspect that he is still managing to get wider. How, we’re not sure. At this point we’re beginning to think he’s just doing it out of habit.
Frisco also is, at times, the most attention-starved cat I’ve ever met. Whereas most cats seem to come up with reasons not to be around people, Frisco is so hard up for attention at times that I wonder if maybe he should get some therapy.
If one of us sits on the couch for more than 10 seconds, he jumps up and attempts to settle his considerable weight on the nearest lap. It’s not the most pleasant experience in the world. Frisco has an uncanny knack for walking on the one spot on a person’s body where his gravitational pull can cause the most pain. The person on the receiving end of the stomping has a difficult choice: either wait it out and hope that Frisco settles comfortably, or send him flying and hope that he doesn’t come back 20 seconds later for another attempt.
Don’t stand, don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me
It’s even worse at night. It’s not uncommon for me to open my eyes in the middle of the night and find Frisco’s face close enough to mine that if he stuck out his tongue, he’d lick my cornea. Why he finds it necessary to stare at my face up-close in the middle of the night is beyond me. Maybe he thinks I’m food.
Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that before. Note to self: feed Fatboy more often.
When he’s not staring at my face in the middle of the night, he sits on the bed and cleans himself. Everywhere. If I ever find myself needing to deprive someone of sleep, I’ll just play a tape of Frisco cleaning himself. It is simply not possible to fall asleep to that sound. It’s not the sound itself that’s the problem; it’s that, in the dark, there’s no way to know exactly what he’s licking.
Then there are his issues with water. Frisco adamantly refuses to drink water from a water dish. The irony of this is that he’ll drink water from any other container imaginable. Leave an unattended cup on the coffee table and you’ll come back to see Frisco’s furry head jammed in it as far as his little kitty head can go. (I keep a digital camera handy at all times so I don’t miss capturing the moment when he manages to get his noggin trapped in a glass of Sprite.) He’ll lap up spilled water on the kitchen floor, too.
His favorite watering hole, to my eternal amazement, is the toilet. After a lifetime of being “trained” to lower the lid after using the bathroom, I had to re-train myself to get in the habit of leaving it up. If I forget, Frisco sits in the bathroom and howls in frustration. If only that cat had a full appreciation of how I treat that toilet, I think maybe he’d reconsider the water-dish concept.
So all in all, it’s kinda weird. I’m a dog person living with a cat that thinks it’s a dog. He drinks from the toilet, craves attention, throws up a lot, sheds like a mother, and licks himself. I don’t really feel like I’m truly learning how to live with cats. I’m merely living with a small dog that doesn’t bark or poop in my shoes.
Which, come to think of it, is not a bad thing at all.
Now if only I can get him to eat some peanut butter.
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He was very much a dog person but as he said ... you can't play fetch with a dog indoors 
Spencer loves to retrieve toys, and is a bit on the large side to be chasing them inside! 
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