Many of you reading this will be pet owners, so you likely won’t need us to tell you about the life-changing impact that they can have on our lives.
You’re essentially looking after a living being, and you’re entirely responsible for their health and wellbeing. It’s a huge responsibility, but also an incredibly rewarding one that no one should take for granted.
And so it proved for Reddit user u/default37 from Texas, who got a cat named Joe from a shelter at the start of the pandemic.
Previously, he’d been a dog lover: “I’d only grown up with dogs, we lived on some land and just always had multiple Golden Retrievers at all points of my youth."
"My family loved Goldens, as they should, and were the classic anti-cat dog people. So yeah I just had all the stereotypes ingrained in me.”
However, living in a block of flats, he decided that it wouldn’t be the ideal place to have a dog, and decided a cat would be more manageable.
Even so, the signs were that it was going to be a challenge. Joe had been at the shelter a long time, and had been returned twice, but that didn’t deter his prospective owner, who described how he “fell in love with a young black cat”. Joe was off home with him.
It wasn’t an easy start, however, as Joe immediately ran into a closet to hide, where he stayed for around 6 hours.
However, after going to bed, he “fairly quickly heard him scampering across the apartment to the bed. He jumped right up, rubbed his face against mine and curled up in my arms… and we’ve slept that way ever since.”
You can read his full account here, and we won’t spoil the rest of it, but suffice to say, we’re yet to find a more heartwarming account extolling the virtues of cat ownership.
Constantly portrayed as cold and aloof compared to their more exuberant doggy cousins, as Joe proves, cats have plenty of love to give too.
