Phasing out the pound
I love our cats, and I especially love the story of how we adopted them.
Our boy cat: After settling into graduate school in Illinois, I decided I was ready to finally take care of my childhood cat, after leaving him at home while I spent 4 years in undergrad at Grinnell. At about the same time, the cat stopped eating, and so my Dad took him to the vet to certify that he could travel, and to see what was up. I bought him a plane ticket, and meanwhile, the vet pulled one of his teeth. The cat seemed fine, but then a few days after his tooth extraction, he got really sick, and wound up having a heart-attack on my Dad's lap, while the two of them sat at the vet's office, waiting for help. So, I wound up back in NY with an extra one-way plane ticket for a cat. In the two or three days I was in NYC, one of my high school friends heard meowing while walking down the street in Park Slope. Yes-- there are lots of stray cats in Park Slope, but this one followed her home and hopped into her arms, and she gave me a call, and Jenny and I adopted him, and he's been ours for the last five years. He sleeps curled up in our armpits, and is kneading a teddy-bear as I write.
Our girl cat: She's from the Humane Society in Champaign-Urbana. Immediately after we adopted the other one, we'd decided he needed at least 45 minutes of play-time attention from each of us, every single day. He's turned out to be an incredibly sweet, very affectionate cat who sleeps with us every single night, but we decided he also needed a playmate. So we went to the Humane Society and there was this 3-month old kitten who was extremely loud. People weren't even stopping to look at her because she was yowling her little head off. We thought she was really cute and despite all the noise we brought her into the visiting room where you can "try out" the pets and see if they're good personality matches. She was a little quieter in the room, but mostly only because she caught a bug and ate it and seemed a little happier. So we adopted her. We had to sit through a two-day waiting period, and then when Jenny went to pick her up, the cat cried the entire way back, until Bare Naked Ladies came on the radio, and finally she was calm. But then she cried again when they played different music. She's still really loud. We don't know why. Sometimes she just walks up to one of us and starts meowing as loud as she can, and we just meow back, because we have no idea what else to do. She still really likes all Bare Naked Ladies songs.
The whole point of this, is that pets are amzing little love-buckets, and I can't imagine my life without the ones I've got. And I was really sad when my first cat died, but then these two came along. And so, I'm not opposed to this or this, but I just don't get it. I mean, maybe for allergy-sufferers the metal dog makes some sense. But, if I had just cloned my childhood cat, I wouldn't have this history with my cats, now. I'd have some boring history, involving a really large monetary transaction, and a corporation, and maybe I'd even have nightmares about all the kittens that I could have saved from the pound.