MISS MANNERS: LW Does not like that their partner allows the cats to act like cats

[lemonsharks]

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My partner of six years basically let my outdoor cats make themselves comfortable inside. We live in a warm, dryish climate, so they were happy being outside cats. I would feed them outside.

Now he is feeding them inside and letting them sleep on the chairs all day. I am fed up with all the cleanup. When I suggest he do it, he just doesn't. He loves the cats, but won't take the cleaning responsibility. What can I do?

GENTLE READER: What about putting him outside? Because if he is sharing your living space, then it is certainly reasonable that he participate in its upkeep.

Miss Manners recommends that you either tell him that your system was working and you plan to return to it -- or to start cleaning up cat hair. Perhaps you can get him a lint brush and vacuum for Valentine's Day.

Comments

[lemonsharks]

Dear LW:

I hope your boyfriend breaks up with you, steals your cats, moves to Chicago and dates me instead.

My cats sleep on my pillow, sometimes with their fluffy little cat butts directly upon my head. I know my place in this household.

More seriously, they're LW's cats and the cleanup is LW's responsibility because it is hella unethical and irresponsible to let cats outside unsupervised and off leash.

I do not want to hear one word about how it's different in other parts of the world. It's still unethical and irresponsible even if the local culture doesn't aggressively shame folks for letting their cats outdoors unsupervised and off leash like it should be doing.

Edit: people who wish to argue the ethics of outdoor cats may address complaints to Lyall Wren, lately of Aotearoa (New Zealand). If they can procure Mx. Wren's approval for their personal outside cat, I am willing to lay eyes upon their reasoning.

[azurelunatic]

I love our little robot vacuum cleaner. It cleans up a large amount of cat fluff every day.

[watersword]

I feel like there is information missing here: is the "cleanup" cat hair, or cat poop? Because I'm not convinced the LW has provided these cats a litterbox.

And I am not dealing with the LW's decision to murder local fauna.

[melannen]

LW, if you don't want to keep your cats safe indoors and do the work necessary, you should not have cats.

Also, if your partner does not want to do his part in keeping your shared living space clean to standards you both share, he should not have a partner.

I suggest you get rid of all of them, preferably together! Partner can probably find a cat-friendly apartment, which they can all cover in cat hair to their hearts' content.

[cereta]

You know, much as I disagree with the practice anywhere but farms, I can understand people who let their cats roam outside throughout the day. But why, why, would you have cats that you never let inside the house? I've had neighbors who do that, and I just do not get the point. They spend like a few minutes every other day with them. Why even have them?

[shirou]

I am fed up with all the cleanup. When I suggest he do it, he just doesn't.

I wish we knew what this entailed. It could mean that he refuses to clean ever, or that he refuses to accede to the LW's request that a chair be vacuumed every time a cat sits in it. The LW's choice to leave it vague, combined with their preference for leaving cats outside, does not incline me to view the LW in a charitable light.

[xenacryst]

I mean, it seems the issue here isn't the cats, per se, but the lack of communication about the shared responsibility of cleaning up after them. The conversation could be:

LW: I had a system that worked for me, and you changed it without asking me, and this is causing me extra work. Can you participate in doing this work?
Partner: No.

Discuss all you want the merits of indoor vs outdoor cats, but that's not really the issue. I don't know if that ^^ was the conversation that was had, but something about the two of them isn't coming together at a common point here.

[melannen]

I know people who feed and get vet care for the cats that happen to spend time on their property, because they don't want to see them suffer but also don't want cats. Sometimes they even call them 'their cats' as a shorthand, even though they will at other times be adamant that they don't have cats.

However that really doesn't seem to be what's going on with LW. I definitely don't get people who deliberately get cats in order to not spend time with them or let them inside or have work for them to do. I know people who do this with 'outdoor' dogs, too, and it's even sadder because at least the cats aren't usually confined.

[lemonsharks]

Yeah, that's a different thing than people who want to have cats but not cat hair

[conuly]

Okay, well, LW should dump BF because he's not doing his fair share of the cleaning (I guess? Not sure how much cleaning he's doing other than pet cleaning, or who is doing the litterboxes, which go curiously unmentioned) and he should take the cats with them because if they live in a warm dryish environment in the USA then they're gonna get eaten by a coyote or something.

[lemonsharks]

It really is about the cats. BF brought them inside, where they should have been the entire time, and the cat related tasks LW hadn't had to do before materialized inside.

The "system" that "worked" for LW was neglecting her animals so that's he didn't have to vacuum hair off the furniture once a week or scoop a litter box one a day.

So the scene actually at play is this one:

BF: I'm not letting someone I live with neglect their pets

LW: I GUESS

BF: now they're sitting on chairs all day because that's what cats do

LW: UGH, pets are so much WORK that I didn't have to do when I was neglecting my pets. BF, do my cat chores for me

BF: No, they're your cats and their upkeep is your responsibility

[jadelennox]

Discuss all you want the merits of indoor vs outdoor cats, but that's not really the issue.

agreed completely.

[xenacryst]

I didn't say whether the system that LW had was ethical, just that they had one and that there was a lack of communication between them and the partner about how it had changed and how they were going to deal with that. Bringing up the ethical considerations of outdoor cats would be part of that communication (assuming the partner agrees with us that it's bad), but I don't see from the letter that even that much communication has taken place.

Warning: animal neglect and abuse

[cereta]

Oh, yeah, we've done a bit of this with local...well, they're not strays. They clearly belong to someone. But those someones never bother to get them fixed, which is why many, many springtimes have been greeted with new orange tabby kittens. We've worked with a local organization to do a fix-and-release, and if anyone has objected, well, we haven't heard it. We also, sadly, took one of our then-next-door-neighbor's cats to our vet to be put to sleep, because the poor thing was clearly dying (among other things, it would lie on our driveway and simply not move when our car approached). We said nothing to the neighbors about it, and they said nothing to us. Things were pretty tense by then, anyway.

But yeah, this situation does not appear to be one of those, although I'd be stunned if these cats don't have at least one other family out there.

[melannen]

If they're still indoor-outdoor (which it sounds like) there may not be litterboxes involved - when we had an indoor-outdoor cat when I was a kid (technically one of those we-don't-have-a-cat neighborhood strays, but he ended up in a collar with our phone number on it) the litterbox basically only needed cleaned if the weather had been really bad for quite awhile; he had his own preferred potty spots somewhere else.

Of course, if they then end up stuck in the house for hours on end while everybody's at work, that may increase the mess considerably...

[conuly]

Well, if there's no box then somebody else is cleaning up LW's cat's poop.

[melannen]

I mean that's what was happening before they came inside!

But not necessarily, I'm pretty sure ours went down to the woodsy area near the creek. (Plus in our neighborhood there are a lot of people who just let their dogs go in their backyards, which is gross in its own way, but they wouldn't notice a bit of cat poop too.)

[conuly]

I mean that's what was happening before they came inside!

And if LW wasn't complaining about the existence of cat hair I probably would not have said anything.

[cereta]

Yeah, I'd like to take a moment to vent about people whose outdoor cats just poop wherever. The same neighbors mentioned elsewhere had like five outdoor-only cats, and every damn week when I mowed the lawn, I had to pick up a whacking lot of cat poop. I got to the point where I'd hang the grocery bag with the poop on their front door or somewhere similar. Eventually they started coming over to clean it up, but man, it was annoying as hell.

[lemonsharks]

Yeah, we had the misfortune of having a mostly sand back yard at the end of my childhood. It was great until I realized it was the. Neighborhood outdoor cat litter box. With my hands.

[lemonsharks]

If the system isn't ethical, then the system by definition isn't working.

Neglecting her cats (by having them outdoors) was not a system that worked for the LW. It was a system that allowed her to ignore their needs.

The fact that she now has, as a cat owner, the responsibilities of a cat owner in her face and in her house is 100% on the LW and 0% on her partner, who very likely saved the cats from grisly and premature deaths by bring them inside.

[azurelunatic]

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

[lemonsharks]

I believe I said OH GOD EW at the time