Another heartbeat in the house
Alternatively titled: learning to love animals, and why it’s a political issue
Alternatively, alternatively titled: being existentially humbled by my cat
It might seem hypocritical that I’ve been vegan for the best part of 12 years, and yet for a very long time I did not particularly like animals. I can explain why. I’m 30 years old, and I had never had a pet until three weeks ago. I had 3 tiny fish (Echo, Clare and Anya) when I was a teenager but they offered very little in the way of entertainment or affection, and lived fairly brief lives. I never had a pet that lives in your house with you, that sits by you on the couch and wanders into rooms unexpectedly. A pet that’s present in your space, like an elusive housemate. I didn’t really understand why someone would want one.
My parents aren’t huge lovers of animals, but more crucially, we moved around a lot when I was growing up and always lived in rented homes. It never seemed very fair to bring a cat or a dog into the family in those circumstances. Because of this, I never had much reason to give thought to animals. My only feeling toward animals was fear; I felt fearful of the unpredictability of people's pets, largely because animals were so unfamiliar to me. I didn’t know how to interpret an animal’s behaviour, whether they were friendly or not. If I went to a friend’s house and they had a pet, I felt dread about the idea of having to face it, holding myself tense in case the pet appeared in the room while we were hanging out. I felt that people who had pets must have a special sort of temperament that meant they weren’t alarmed by having a creature wandering around their house that they’re unable to communicate with. My fear of animals at some points turned to dislike, and even disdain of people who I felt showed too much affection toward their pet. I didn’t understand it and it frustrated me, so I dismissed the idea of ‘pet parents’ (a phrase that irrationally annoyed me) and their love for their pet as something that was immature or even anti-social. I would never have said this aloud of course - but in my mind I questioned how someone could have so much love for these strange creatures. This feeling directly clashed with the fact that I did believe strongly, as a vegan, that human beings were responsible for mass cruelty toward animals, and that that needed to change.
The first cat that I befriended was Domingo, a black-and-white cat my friend Rachel rescued from the street in 2015. Domingo was occasionally a visitor in my uni flat, and was even cat-sat by my flatmates a few times that year. I remember her climbing all over our coffee table (eternally stacked high with Domino’s pizza boxes and empty Diet Coke cans), and sitting on my laptop while I was trying to panic-write an essay. I was very tentative about her, lest she scratch or bite me without warning, but she proved a very silly and curious cat.
Next was my friend Eleanor’s cat, Koshka. I spent possibly hundreds of hours at Eleanor’s house in the first couple of years after graduation, many of those with Koshka napping on the sofa beside us. She sat through far too many episodes of Glee and the chaos of podcast recordings. Koshka was very gracious about being held like a baby, and seemed largely unfazed by any of the antics that went on in that house. She was probably the first cat I properly loved. Koshka died earlier this year, after a long life of being very loved by Eleanor and the rest of the Thomas family.
I have two more cats to talk about, and then we can get to the point.
Leeloo, 2021
I met Leeloo in the first week of living in me and Josh’s first flat in Tāmaki Makaurau. She came in through the cat door brazenly, and nonchalantly explored our flat. We later learned that she belonged to a neighbour who was stuck in New York because of Aotearoa’s COVID restrictions, and she was being cared for by his tenants. She was used to being allowed into our flat by the people who’d lived there prior to us. She was a frequent visitor over the year and a half that we lived there, often hiding under our couch and napping on our bed. On a particularly bad day when my endometriosis cramps were unbearable, she rested next to me quietly for eight hours, and only wandered off when I had started to feel better. One day we watched out of the window as her owner’s mum turned up in a car, collected her, and drove away. Apparently she was moved down to the South Island where she had plenty more space to roam. This was my first real taste of having a cat in my home.
Nutmeg, 2024 & 2025
Lastly, after moving into our current flat, our beloved neighbours Evie and Nora adopted Nutmeg. Since knowing her we have become her unofficial uncles/godparents and forever members of the Nutmeg fanclub. She’s a tabby, soft and cuddly, and always screams for pats when she spots us outside. If our door is open for long enough she’ll zoom in, and happily spend hours on our couch or in the nearest patch of sun. Evie and Nora have graciously allowed her to hang out in our flat a lot over the last two years. Nutmeg has spent so much time here that in the last few months, I really felt her absence on the days she didn’t pop round. I felt sadder about her leaving and going back to her own house. This was the first time I really missed a cat and felt the regret of not having our own. Hence, Robin.
Robin, 2025
Despite my growing fondness of cats, I've been shocked by the sheer volume of the love I feel for Robin.
We adopted Robin very quickly. Our building has an unofficial two-cat-maximum policy, and when another neighbour of ours moved out (taking their cat with them), I fired off a text to our landlords asking if Josh and I might be allowed to adopt our own cat. A week of deliberation from the landlords and they said yes. I had already been scouting through local pet refuges’ websites and spotted Robin, so I immediately organised with her fosterers to meet her. Josh and I had been discussing it for several months already, but he was nervous at this point. He didn’t want to get too emotionally attached to Robin in case it somehow didn’t work out, if the fosterers didn’t like us or if she somehow got adopted by someone else first. We only hung out with her for about 15 minutes and by that 15th minute we were signing the adoption forms on my phone. We arranged to collect her two days later.
The first night of cat-parenthood was very stressful. We kept her to our room while she was settling in, which meant we were woken up every hour by biscuit-munching, litterbox-scratching, or hyperactive zooming. I got a fright when she jumped up on the bed during the night. I felt sudden dread for the disruption I’d brought into my own life, a glimmer of that childhood fear of the unpredictable creature skulking around the house. Fast-forward three weeks to now, and I can happily say that Robin is absolutely adored by me and Josh. I am obsessed. I have developed a full-on baby voice that is reserved for talking to Robin. She has an array of nonsense nicknames, including 'Miss Girlina Boots'. Her typical 5am wakeup call (which involves her jumping onto my chest or in front of my face and purring at maximum volume) is a delight and not a burden. I even cleaned her vomit out of carpet recently with only minor complaints. Talking to my friends, I described the experience of loving a cat as having “a baby who is also a strange acquaintance and also my friend”. It’s pretty life-affirming to experience a new type of love at the age of 30. I sometimes wonder if I’ve experienced most of the things adult life will have to offer (naive of me, I’m sure) and so to feel something truly new is almost magical. I didn’t expect to love a cat as much as I do.
A 2024 study showed that people who have pets are more likely to spend time outside, do more physical movement, feel more happiness, and feel more loved. I suppose what I hoped for when adopting a cat was that I’d feel a sense of companionship. I don’t love spending time by myself (a topic for another day, with my therapist probably), and I thought it would be nice to have, as my mum put it, “another heartbeat in the house”. I didn’t expect though the joy of play, of dangling a felt fish over Robin and watching her pounce for it. I didn’t expect how nice it is to feel the unconditional love of an animal, who as long as you keep feeding them, will wake you up for a cuddle every morning, and curl up next to you while watching TV. I think being loved by a pet makes you feel special. It’s also an opportunity to care for a being other than yourself, to be tender toward someone. I think the love and care that people show to their pets could be a gateway for showing more vulnerable tenderness to the human beings in our lives too.
Anything that helps people to feel connected to Earth, to nature, and to animals is a good thing. The more that we recognise that animals are our neighbours, and we are all supposed to tread lightly on this planet, the easier it’ll be to convince people to do tough stuff like cutting out meat consumption or quitting fast fashion. I know it’s not quite that simple; plenty of people have pets and still eat meat. I didn’t really know any cats before, so didn’t think or care much for them. The same is true for most people with cows, pigs, chickens. They can write them off as being somehow different to their beloved pet cat, even though they’re all sentient animals that deserve to live their own lives. Perhaps part of it is just recognising that we do have the ability to truly love and care for animals. Maybe then it’s finding ways to spend time with different types of animals, like at an animal retreat or a farm (I particularly love The Retreat in Ashford, Kent, where they rescue former farm animals and are an entirely vegan organisation, including their on-site cafe). It’s spending more time in nature and practicing feeling gentleness towards the birds and bugs you see, rather than dismissing them as an inconvenience. It’s remembering that our fellow human beings aren’t inconveniences either, that we can (and should) extend kindness and empathy toward beings that we do not already know or love.
My takeaway from adopting a cat is that we are all more capable of love and care than we might realise, and that we can learn to love what was once unfamiliar. We should allow more strangeness and newness into our lives. Be open to expanding our whānau and our community. Let people (and cats) in. And to hop up on my vegan soapbox for a minute, we can treat animals with more kindness, and less as assets in the meat, dairy and fast fashion industries. Loving animals can give us an opportunity to love earnestly and vulnerably without judgement. Let’s embrace that and be open to what it can teach us.
