Oh yes, kitties in the house from the time I was old enough to remember, and both mom and dad loved them (though my mom was much goofier about it than dad!) Then I got married, and my new husband came from a one-dog always home, but we lived in rental units where you couldn't have pets. I always told him the day we bought a house would be the day I got a kitty, and fate stepped in beautifully - we hadn't even moved into our house yet (we were still painting it, etc.) and my (RB) Leticia Ratt was found and given to me. My husband always thought that it was a setup, that I had planned it beforehand, but it was just fate. He grudgingly accepted the kitty, but 2 years later, when we had our daughter, it started a chain of "sibling rivalry" behavior that persists to this day. I mean my daughter not accepting the cat, not vice versa. I sometimes think she was switched at the hospital with someone else's baby because she's nothing like my husband and I! She is definitely FASCINATED by animals, always has been, since she could talk, but she has always been MEAN to whatever cat we own. When she was 5, she cut the whiskers off of my girl kitty when I wasn't looking, and just LAUGHED about it when she got scolded. She used to get down on the floor and bark like a dog in the cat's face, just to bug her, and would startle the cat out of a sound sleep by making loud noises deliberately. Thankfully she never did anything really cruel, or I would have taken her to a psychiatrist immediately. Then girl kitty passed away 2 years ago and we inherited boy kitty, whom she had idolized and adored when he was Grandma's kitty, but now that I was showering him with affection, he became her rival. I tried to explain to her that she would never win the cat's trust unless she was CONSISTENTLY kind and quiet, because it took the kitty a while to get used to our entire loud family when compared to my mother-in-law's quiet, empty house. The kitty ended up not liking my daughter too much, so she decided to repay him in kind, I guess. She's almost 15 now (and an only child), and still has to annoy the cat at any opportunity, such as scaring him on purpose to watch him skitter across the hardwood floors, knocking into the chair he's sleeping on to wake him up, and just generally making loud noises at him for no reason. When I ask her why she does this, she just grins. She can be reduced to tears reading about animal abuse, and has her room plastered with pictures of dogs and horses, but just can't be nice to this one kitty. I guess my attempts to show her how to love an animal backfired into her jealousy.

By the way, that is a darling picture - so nice to see furkids and skinkids bonding so beautifully. (And I've been a Trevor fan for a while now - we had a big old orange kitty when I was growing up.)