Miscellaneous Pets

Zoe's school is hosting a Pet Blessing this week for the 4th and 5th grade classes. Students and their parents bring in one family pet to be blessed in a ceremony held in the back yard of the youth house. She's been talking about this since Kindergarten, so it's a pretty big deal. Let me clarify the bringing part: students go to school and meet their parents, who have toted the family pet from home, at the youth house. The children do not take their pets to school that morning, which I think would be awesome. Especially since by 4th and 5th grade we're trying to instill personal responsibility.

She's been debating which pet to bring for four years now. Do we bring Hershey, the tiny but robust guinea pig, who is the newest and happiest member of our pet family? Do we bring Max, the sneezing furball who is missing a fang and who yowls sings the song of his people incessantly? He probably needs a blessing more than anyone, given the sorry state he's in. No, she decided on Tachikara, the fat cat. This means I get to cram Her Largeness into a pet taxi and lug her up to the youth house, while she peeks out the holes and cries about being transported more than two feet from her food bowl. She will sit on my lap as I lose feeling in my legs, meowing and crying through the entire event. Because she is out of her normal environment, she will shed like a mother and tufts of black and white fur will waft gently through the air. This is her default self-defense mechanism. Distraction and eventual suffocation by fur. The fur comes off her like a squid shoots ink, so, you know, I think it's pretty effective.

We filled out the reservation form last week and sent it in. Right after the section on "type of pet," we had to answer, "weight." Oh boy. Given that Tachi is a female creature, I know that she would be very unhappy should her true weight be disclosed. So, just as my drivers license has a bit of, ahem, creative license in regards to weight, so does Tachi's reservation form. We wrote 14 lbs, although I'm sure she's closer to 16. (Don't tell her I disclosed this here. She doesn't read this blog regularly so I think I'm okay.) I did laugh, though, because cats are cats. Even the fat ones aren't huge, at least not by horse and llama standards.

What I realized, upon receiving the event seating chart today, is that the weight classification is really for the dogs. The overwhelming majority of pets being brought to the pet blessing are of the canine variety. We are seated with three other families in the Miscellaneous Pets section, which could, I suppose, also include hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, lizards, and the one crocodile that I know is owned by one of Zoe's classmates. Fingers crossed the crocodile doesn't make an appearance. Tachi will come unglued. The other 43 families are divided up into small dogs, medium dogs, and large dogs.

Is it just me, or does this sound like catastrophe waiting to happen? 43 dogs + 1 fat cat + 1 crocodile + 2 mystery pets. Yeah.

I may live tweet this event. I've never live tweeted anything in my entire life. To be honest, I think I've tweeted less than two dozen times ever. However, I think this event might be the perfect venue to start. I'll need hashtags, of course, so people around the world can follow what's going on, much like how they've been following the Pope. Because this is so on the same scale.

#petblessing2015 #miscellaneouspets #fatcat #crocodile #toomanydogs #meow

If I can keep fur from clouding the lens on my cell phone camera, I will report back post-event with photos. I'm not taking the Nikon, because I'm pretty sure my hands will be full with a 16-pound molting bag of meows.

I'm pretty disappointed in the ratio of dogs vs. cats. Even if all four Miscellaneous Pets are cats, that's pretty far out of whack from the ratio in the general population. The American Pet Products Association reports that 47% of households own at least one dog, and 46% of households own at least one cat. That's a pretty even split. The average household with cats has 2.11 cats, while the average household with dogs has 1.47 dogs. Clearly the crazy cat ladies are skewing the data. Still, I think the representation at this week's pet blessing is wrong, and I'm considering protesting. I just might haul two pet taxis up there, a cat in each one, to help boost the Miscellaneous Pets category. Because the only thing better than one miserable cat is two miserable cats.

I also protest the placement of cats into Miscellaneous Pets. Cats, being the preferred pet for nearly half the population, are clearly not miscellaneous. It appears that the Catholic Church is biased against cats, which is odd, since it's the CATholic Church. We learn everything from the CATechism. Something must have happened in the history of the CATholic Church. I bet there was some cat-hating pope who used DOGma against the felines. I don't think it was any of the popes named Leo, for obvious reasons. I bet it was Pope Severinus. That jerk.

I'll have to see how this goes. Perhaps for this first year it would be best for me to sit back and observe. I'll have one year left, 5th grade, to make my move. That's 365 days to campaign for cats. I'll kick it off with my live tweeting, if I'm not gagging on fur and if I can figure out how to surreptitiously tweet during a liturgical event.

Oh, meow.