I Just Can't Reach Them

On the car radio the other day, Bill O'Reilly referred to his old days as a teacher. He mentioned that, as a result of facing especially recalcitrant students, he learned to be satisfied with reaching 85% of the students and just giving up on the rest. As a teacher myself, I find there is a certain appeal in giving up on 15% of the youth under my charge and leaving them to their doom, especially those who do not laugh at my jokes. But it struck me that that "At least I can reach 85% of them" doesn't work as well when you're talking about smaller quantities, like cats.

We have two cats. 85% of two is a rather weird number. After doing the number-crunching, I determined that if we mess up with one of the cats, we are complete failures, or at least 50% failures. Admittedly, we might have extenuating circumstances, such as if one cat is a "special needs" cat (even though I really don't know how to determine whether a cat suffers from mental retardation, clinical depression, etc.); however, I'm guessing those are rare, so statistically, I'm probably the one to blame. Sometimes, when we have problems like one of them not using the litter, I consider giving one of them to the SPCA, which essentially means sending them off to kitty heaven. (What prospective cat owner is going to go to the SPCA and say, "Hey, I don't want a cute kitten, I want that old-looking cat, the one whose card says that he poops on the carpet!") Regardless of where one falls on the issue of capital punishment, few would be so extreme as to advocate the death penalty for inappropriate pooping.

Now, I'm sure there might be parents out there who would say, "Look how silly it is for this Leopoldtulip guy to worry about cats--have some kids, and then you'll see some real problems!" Such an argument is fallacious. Should the owners of a nuclear warhead say to the third world country, "Man, I face dilemmas every day about whether I should blow other countries up and destroy billions of people, whereas all you have to worry about is petty internal human rights violations?" The nuclear warhead dilemma makes the human rights dilemma no less real or significant. In the case of cats pooping, it is arguably more of a problem than having kids--parents can take for granted that their children will learn to control their waste product disperal, but the owners of cats are not so lucky. Parents can take for granted that their children will learn to talk and will understand sentences like, "Pooping auf dem floor ist verboten," whereas cats will not.

Parents can take for granted that, if they ask, "Why aren't you using the litterbox?" the child will respond intelligibly, "Because I am not a cat." Now, we have two litterboxes: one litterbox is stinky because our cat Pippin doesn't cover up his messes, and the other litterbox is always clean because neither cat uses it. Our cat Cricket invented a third waste dispersal area in the corner near the exercise bike. There is no way of asking, "Cricket, why is the clean litterbox not meeting your needs? What does the exercise bike corner have that the clean litter does not?" I have spent literally several minutes analyzing the granules in the unused litterbox, pondering, "These granules sure look to be above average in quality. What does he see that I do not?" In teaching, we're taught that there are different types of learners: those who learn visually, those who learn by writing something down, by hearing something spoken, etc. Having cats has taught me that there are also different types of poopers, but I do not know how to reach them. The apostle Paul wrote of being "all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." Daily I am learning what it means to be "all things to all kitties, that I might by all means save some from using the exercise bike corner."