Cat Hell

The documentary Home Movie featured a couple who converted their entire house to a kitty condo for their 11 cats, with brightly colored mice decorating the walls and cat runs on every wall. Alex Boese made me think of two sets of relatives who owned nine cats. One of them kept hygiene in check. The other didn't.

The bad relatives were 20-something ex-college students who decided not to work but to wait for their parents to die and inherit (I wish I were making this up). Along the way they began to collect animals, not because they actually cared about animals but because they thought it would be cool, like someone who would steal a tombstone just to say they owned one.

Soon their cats began dropping kittens. They never cleaned the litterbox so the cats defecated all over the house. They particularly liked shoes and closets so getting dressed must have been like camping in Africa. My wife's cat makes so much noise when he's hungry that I can't imagine anyone not feeding one cat let alone 11, but they frequently let them go without food. The mother cat eventually turned cannibalistic and would wait behind furniture or random piles of crap for a kitten to walk by. When one was unlucky enough to do so, she leapt out, killed and ate it.

Although they couldn't properly keep a cat, the brain trust decided to get a puppy. The mother cat attacked it but it was too big to kill although the morons thought it was funny to watch. They'd push the puppy to where the cat was waiting to see the fight. The kittens associated anything large and hairy with instant death so they scratched up the puppy when they came into contact with it.

When the joke got old, they kept the puppy in their basement, usually for days on end. They couldn't be bothered to housebreak him so they just let the feces pile up--they'd grown used to the smell of cat. Other times they let him outside in their unfenced yard, expecting him not to roam.

At one point, when one of them went on vacation (the one who at least made a token effort to care for the animals), she asked me to watch the puppy. I wound up keeping him and although I haven't provided the perfect home, it's better than where he was.

The mother cat was never spayed and continued to mate with outside cats whenever it found a broken window. Finally it died during birth. Some of the surviving kittens were old enough to turn cannibals themselves but the lease on the house ran out and the group split up. They took some of the kittens but left behind the rest.

One of the main idiots now has three children and plans on at least two more. He has very little to do with raising them which is probably a good thing.

The King of the Idiots got involved in several illegal activities before literally losing his head in an accident. The police had the other idiot identify him before they brought in his torso.

Sometimes there does seem to be a God.