DOES A CAT MAKE A GOOD GIFT? THE ANSWER ISN’T AS OBVIOUS AS YOU MAY THINK.
Your friend tells you how much she adores your cats and frequently comes over to play with them, your young niece asks Santa for a kitty, an elderly neighbor living alone loses her cat of 20 years. Saving a life by adopting a cat – or any animal for that matter – from a shelter and surprising a friend or relative with a kitten seems perfectly in line with concepts we associate with the holidays: Helping the less fortunate (in this case the animals) Thinking of others (the lonely neighbor) Giving (often in grand unexpected ways) Not to mention the images we’ve seen in movies and advertisements of an impossibly cute fluffy kitten with a big red bow under the Christmas tree being discovered by an overjoyed child Christmas morning. Still, if you’d asked my what I thought about giving a cat – or any pet – as a gift, my answer without skipping a beat would have be an unequivocal “NO! Of course not!” It seemed like common sense to me that this was a terrible idea. Most k...