Tag: Seattle

Another Serial Cat Killer, This Time Fresh From Prison, Goes Right Back To Killing Strays. Clearly, Existing Laws Are Not Enough

When serial cat killers serve sentences of less than a year due to plea deals and early release for good behavior, how much deterrent value do our laws have? Not much, it seems.

Note, 5/3/2025: We’ve heard from two readers who say the MyNorthWest report contains inaccuracies. We’ve reached out to the police and will follow up with police and courts on Monday to verify the facts and correct potential misinformation. Apologies for the confusion.

Every couple of months, at least in the last year or two, I’ve slowed down on posting, and almost always for the same reason: my cat-related news alerts are  seemingly endless streams of depressing stories about people shooting, strangling or dismembering cats.

It never ends, and sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I’m put off from writing for days. At the same time, I am not a believer in the idea that all animal blogs should be saccharine feel-good fests about fluffy kittens and TikTok videos of cats doing silly things.

There’s always a place for celebrating cats, but if they’re in danger, and if the stories point to wider trends that cat lovers should know about, then I think it’s our responsibility to remain educated. Not only so we can guard against threats to our little friends, but also so we can add our voices to the chorus calling for tougher laws and greater accountability.

That’s ultimately what this is about: accountability.

Stories about two cat serial killers in about a week have made it clear that even the strengthened animal protection law — the Preventing Animal Cruelty, or PACT Act — passed in 2019, during the first Trump administration, raising animal cruelty and murder to the level of a felony, are still not enough. They’re not a deterrent, especially when the convicted abusers and killers end up serving a year or less because prisons are overcrowded and the wider law enforcement community still doesn’t take animal-related crime as seriously as other violence.

Antoine Leander Runner Jr. is a serial murderer of cats. The Seattle man was recently released from prison after serving just a year for a felony animal cruelty conviction.

The 43-year-old’s modus operandi was setting up crude, homemade snares and traps to capture and harm felines. He was also known in cat rescue circles, where he posed as a cat lover and took advantage of programs to get free supplies, including “cat food, kennels, collars, leashes, and treats to lure cats and kill them,” according to MyNorthWest, a Seattle news site.

When locals discovered new homemade traps in Runner Jr.’s old haunts and trail cameras picked up images of the man himself stalking wooded areas, neighbors called police and area shelters. The evidence showed Runner Jr. was allegedly visiting cat colonies at night and had picked up right where he left off. One colony cat’s body was discovered on March 31, “disemboweled and publicly displayed.”

“Animal Control confirmed the injuries to the cats were human-caused,” MyNorthWest reported, adding that it appears Runner Jr. was visiting colonies “every night” to hunt cats.

Above images by u/picardhasyourback, posted to the SeattleWA subreddit. Click on the images to see full-size versions.

Runner Jr. was picked up by Seattle police this weekend after a neighbor spotted him in a wooded area and phoned authorities. The convicted cat killer, who had a new bench warrant out for his arrest, was charged with a misdemeanor, but more charges are likely as police investigate his latest alleged attacks on Seattle-area cats.

The Seattle man was originally arrested for killing cats in 2023, but was released early. The Seattle area was also terrorized by a serial cat killer who stalked the area in 2018, mutilating cats so badly that I won’t repeat the details on this blog out of respect for readers.

It should be made clear that Runner Jr. was not connected to the 2018 killings, but police should reconsider those cases as well because if it turns out Runner Jr. is guilty of these latest cat murders, it will be abundantly clear that he is a high recidivist offender who cannot be trusted to leave the animals alone. He should serve a long, unabridged prison sentence and be subject to constant monitoring when he’s released.

Antoine Leander Runner Jr. was arrested this weekend by Seattle police. Credit: Sarah Seiler/Facebook Georgetown Community Discussion Group

What’s the solution here? Increasingly tough criminal penalties for animal abuse and murder? Expensive monitoring equipment to watch over every cat colony? Education and training for law enforcement so violence toward animals is taken as seriously as it should be?

I hate to keep pointing out that people who harm animals are likely to “graduate” to harming humans, as many studies have shown, because it implies that we should only be concerned about animal abuse for its tendency to turn into human abuse. It obscures the fact that animal life is intrinsically valuable, and that cats — and dogs, many bird species, mammals and marine life — are sentient, with their own thoughts and emotions. But if that’s what it takes for people to take this sort of thing seriously, then it’s worth repeating the point.

A Cruel, Emotionally Manipulative New Scam Targets Cat Owners

“I had to leave work because I was a wreck, fully believing my cat was on the verge of life and death. It’s cruel that people do this,” one victim said.

Two weeks after his beloved cat vanished, Justin Hills received a phone call that simultaneously gave him hope and filled him with dread.

The man on the line spoke with practiced professionalism and told him that his cat, Little Wayne Shorter, had been found badly injured after he was hit by a car.

Little Wayne urgently needed surgery, said the man who identified himself as a staffer with Seattle Animal Shelter. Veterinarians were ready to begin surgery if Hills gave them the go-ahead and sent $2,800 via Venmo.

“The back of my head is screaming, ‘This is a scam. This is a scam.’ But at the same time, because it’s such an emotional pull, I’m thinking, even if there’s only a 10% chance that this is real, you know, I want to go ahead with it,” Hills told Seattle’s WKIRO.

Little Wayne Shorter

“The guy was rehearsed, was smooth. He sounded like, you know, an experienced person,” Hills said. “They had done some research on me before they called. You know, they knew my name. They knew my cat’s name, you know, the address and all this.”

When Hills called his bank, they warned him it was a scam. Hills said he’s glad he didn’t send the money but also devastated his cat is still missing — and that he was given false hope by someone trying to manipulate him in his desperation to be reunited with Little Wayne.

He’s not alone. In a post to Facebook group for missing pets in King County this week, Seattleite Harris Alex described a call from a person who claimed to work for Seattle Animal Shelter.

“They said someone found my cat, Binx, and that he had been hit by a car. They told me if I didn’t pay for surgery, he would die or be paralyzed within the next hour,” Alex wrote.

A caller said Binx, above, was seriously injured and needed urgent — and expensive — veterinary care.

Alex grew suspicious when the caller asked for a payment via Venmo, Paypal or Chime.

“I called the shelter to confirm they do not have him,” Alex wrote. “I had to leave work because I was a wreck, fully believing my cat was on the verge of life and death. It’s cruel that people do this. Be careful out there.”

Staff at Seattle Animal Shelter, which is run by the city, are aware of the scam and have gotten several calls from people asking if the shelter has their cats after being in contact with the impersonators.

“We would never ask somebody over the phone to make a payment,” said Don Baxter, manager of field services at the hospital. “We’re going to get that pet to a veterinarian and get it care and treatment, and then we’ll work out how to get the pet back to the owner after that.”

The lost/injured pet scam isn’t limited to Seattle, and the perpetrators will often switch to targets in another city if too many people become aware of their efforts, only to pop back up again later. The scam’s combination of social engineering and emotional urgency encourages victims to act quickly without giving the situation too much thought.

Experts advise people to keep their cool despite their hopes or fears, and demand proof that the person has the animal:

“This is one of the more difficult scams to deal with emotionally. If someone really has your pet, they should be able to at the very least send photos. Most people should be able to do a video call.

In general, scammers will pressure you to send money in advance. They will often make lots of excuses for not being able to provide proof they have your pet or meet in person.”

This general category of scam isn’t new, but social media has enabled scammers to believably pose as shelter staff using information pulled from the victim’s own lost pet posts and profiles, the FBI notes. The bureau also warns of several variations on the scheme.

Binx

The people running the con find their victims by scanning local missing pet groups on sites like Facebook and Reddit. They gather names and descriptive details, spin a narrative that shocks their intended victims, and create a sense of urgency by saying the cat will die if there’s any delay in performing surgery.

That’s what happened to Susan Burgess, who’d posted about her 15-year-old tabby cat, Linus, going missing. The caller said Linus was hurt and he needed to confirm her name, but Burgess realized he would have known it if he’d scanned Linus’ microchip.

She gave the scammer a piece of her mind before hanging up on him.

“On the off chance that you do have my cat, I hope that you are able to show some compassion and do the right thing,” she told the caller. “But I’m pretty sure that you don’t, and what you’re doing is very cruel.”

PSA: Speaking of scammy behavior, I can’t control the ads that are shown on PITB, but if you’re seeing ads for an amazing-looking, ultra-realistic toy rabbit presented as a great Easter gift, don’t fall for it. Here’s a video revealing what you’ll actually get from the deceptive seller:

Amazon Driver Who Stole Family’s Cat Claims The Feline Ran Off, Amazon Offers To Compensate Family With Stuffed Animal Resembling The Cat

Feefee the cat’s family is deeply frustrated at the lack of answers about their cat and the lack of urgency by the company in trying to locate her after an Amazon delivery driver stole the 13-year-old tabby on July 21.

After a 10-day saga in which tan Amazon driver stole their cat — and Amazon did little to help recover her — a Washington family has been told the feline is gone, and has been offered stuffed animals in her stead.

Feefee the cat was taken from the Ishak family’s driveway in Everett, Washington, on July 21. Footage from a motion-activated security camera shows an Amazon delivery driver crouching in the driveway and petting Feefee, then driving off.

A representative from Amazon’s customer service department confirmed the driver took the cat, but has not helped reunite Feefee and the Ishaks beyond giving the family an email address that law enforcement can use to contact the company.

At first, an Amazon rep told Ray Ishak that the driver — who has not been named by the company — contacted law enforcement to return Feefee. However, neither the Everett Police Department nor the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said they had any record of anyone approaching them about surrendering a cat.

Amazon response
An Amazon customer service representative told the Ishak family that the driver “contacted the police to return your cat.”

Amazon declined to put Ray Ishak in touch with the driver or to tell him the general area where the driver lives, so he might contact local law enforcement there.

The story changed on the morning of July 30, when the sheriff’s office told Ishak that the driver now says Feefee “allegedly escaped a few days ago,” Ray Ishak told PITB.

“They will not tell me where. If I could find out the vicinity I’m pretty sure I could have found the cat,” Ishak said. “I asked the sheriff’s deputies how I can find out the area and the only way is for the driver that stole the cat to tell me.

“I asked them to have her text me or call me from a blocked number or [create] a temporary email, just to tell me where it is because [the police] can’t tell me. It has to come from her and she has refused to do so so far. I fear that [Feefee’s] gone.”

PITB has reached out to Amazon and will update this post if the company responds.

In the meantime, while Amazon will not assist Ishak in trying to recover Feefee himself, a customer service representative asked the Washington man for a description of the 13-year-old tabby “so they can send me a stuffed animal that looks like her,” Ishak told PITB.

“I am serious,” he said, adding that he’s kept copies of the email correspondence with Amazon’s customer service department.

amazonishak2
An Amazon customer service representative said the company would do “everything we can to investigate” and offered to send stuffed kittens “that look like” Feefee for the family’s grandchildren, who are close to the cat. Credit: Ray Ishak

As we wrote in our earlier post about the incident, Amazon has handled the case as if it were a dispute over a returned item or a delivery problem, even asking Ishak to rate his experience with the company’s customer support immediately after informing him they can’t give him more information. The company has not taken active measures to reunite the Ishak family with their cat, and has refused to provide any information about the driver, even vague information that could help Ishak find Feefee.

“What baffles me is that no one seems to understand that this is a CRIME and we the people who were hurt by this crime are being kept in the dark when we should be able to find her,” the family wrote in response to Amazon’s most recent reply.

The language reflects the deep frustration the family has felt over the incident and the company’s response.

“I just pray we find her alive. I am also tired of getting the brush off, generic emails and no information on our case.”

feefeecamera
An Amazon driver playing with Feefee in the Ishak family’s driveway before driving away with the cat. Credit: Ray Ishak

If the driver is telling the truth and Feefee escaped, finding her quickly is critical. The vast majority of house cats do not do well when forced to fend for themselves, and Feefee has been a member of the Ishak family for 13 years, since she was a kitten.

If the driver is not being truthful and still has the cat, there’s no way for the family to know, and no indication Amazon or law enforcement can be convinced to find out if she’s telling the truth.

As one of our readers wrote in response to our previous story, few things are more heartbreaking than someone stealing a family’s well-loved cat. The saga has been stressful for the Ishak family, and has undoubtedly taken a toll on Feefee, who was taken from the only home she’s ever known. Feefee suffers from asthma, Ray Ishak said, which is why she was allowed to spend time outdoors immediately outside the family’s home.

Ray Ishak said his family was gathered this weekend for his son’s wedding and he had to tell his grandkids, who are particularly close to Feefee, that the cat was elsewhere. That quickly backfired.

“The emotional distress for me having to lie to my grandkids that the cat is safe and fine,” Ishak told KING5, a Seattle NBC affiliate, earlier this week. “Then, watching my granddaughters cry after they found out because they heard us talk about it. It was a double whammy from every single front.”

This is not the first time a delivery driver has stolen a pet, and not the first time an Amazon driver has done so.

  • In 2021, a driver for Uber-owned Postmates stole an 11-month-old ginger tabby named Simba from a Colorado family’s driveway after delivering a package. Postmates was similarly reticent to help the victims, and the family was never reunited with Simba.
  • In 2020, a 23-year-old delivery driver stole a Minnesota woman’s cat from outside her home and repeatedly denied taking the 12-year-old tabby until, three months later, he wrote an apologetic letter admitting he nabbed her, felt guilty and tossed her out of his truck later the same day.
  • In 2022, an Amazon driver stole a Michigan family’s dog. The pup was returned four days later.
  • Earlier this year, an Amazon driver tried to steal a family’s dog after admiring the pup and telling the family he wanted a puppy of his own. The family caught the driver in the act, and the driver did not escape with the dog.
  • On July 3, a FedEx driver stole a French bulldog named Tori after delivering a package to her owner’s home in North Carolina. The driver, 44-year-old Kimani Joehan Marshall, left Tori in his truck as he continued making deliveries and the pooch died as temperatures pushed well into the 90s with high humidity. Marshall dumped Tori’s body by the side of a road and the family continued to post missing flyers and search for her until July 10, when police confirmed their dog was dead. Marshall remains in jail on $50,000 bail and faces a felony cruelty to animals charge as well as larceny and possession of stolen property.
  • Most recently, an Amazon Flex driver allegedly stole an Austin, Texas woman’s dog on July 25. The woman, with help from friends and online sleuths, tracked the driver to his home 50 miles away and was able to recover her dog after confronting the man with evidence — including video from a neighbor’s security camera — showing he’d taken the pup.

That’s not a comprehensive list, and the cases that make the news involve pet thefts caught on camera. Victims who don’t have security or doorbell cameras generally have no recourse, and thefts by delivery drivers won’t make the news unless the victims take their stories to local newspapers or TV news stations, or local reporters discover reports by checking police blotters. The latter situation is becoming increasingly unlikely as so-called “news deserts” — locales not covered by any local media — expand with every newspaper that folds and every round of newsroom layoffs.

We hope someone in Amazon management is paying attention and can help the Ishak family get Feefee back. After all, who wants Amazon drivers delivering packages to their homes if the company allows those drivers to steal from customers with impunity?

As we wrote previously, this isn’t a customer returning a sweater or complaining about a late package, and it shouldn’t be handled that way. Feefee is a living being with emotions, and she’s been part of the Ishak family for 13 years. The very least Amazon can do is have a compassionate and empowered manager call them, apologize profusely, and vow to do everything possible to reunite the family with their well-loved cat.

Top image of an Amazon delivery driver in a Prime van courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An Amazon Driver Took A Family’s Cat, And Amazon Has Not Been Helpful

Amazon’s response not only leaves a lot to be desired, it’s also an example of precisely what not to do when an issue goes beyond a simple customer service complaint. The company missed an opportunity to respond with compassion and earn a family’s gratitude.

An Amazon delivery driver took a Washington family’s cat and drove away with her on July 21.

Since then, Amazon has admitted its driver has the cat, but has offered little more than carefully-worded customer service responses mixed with boilerplate language about valuing the family’s business and feedback.

Ray and Karin Ishak have video of the driver petting and playing with 13-year-old Feefee in the family’s driveway during the delivery. The motion-activated camera timed out, according to a report by Seattle ABC affiliate KING5-TV, but when the camera began recording again, triggered by the driver pulling away, Feefee was gone.

“The driver [was] driving away and there’s not a cat in sight. It’s pretty obvious the cat disappeared in those seconds,” Ray Ishak told the station, adding he filed a report with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.

feefeecamera
An Amazon driver playing with Feefee in the Ishak family’s driveway before driving away with the cat. Credit: Ray Ishak

Amazon has chosen to deal with the incident via email, as if it’s a dispute over a returned item rather than a living being who is valued as a family member by her people.

A company customer service representative told the Ishaks that the driver said she contacted the police to return Feefee, but the family called the sheriff’s office and the police in Everett, Washington, where they live, and both agencies told them they hadn’t heard from the driver or from Amazon.

The Ishaks asked Amazon if the company could at least tell them the town or city where the driver lives, figuring the driver may have contacted police there instead of the departments that have jurisdiction over their hometown. Amazon declined to provide that information.

When the Ishaks followed up with Amazon again, a customer service representative said she’d be happy to help — if the police approach Amazon. She provided an email address for law enforcement use only, said Amazon will cooperate if the police contact them, and ended the reply with a request to “vote about your experience today.”

This is an awful response by Amazon, and the company deserves any bad PR it gets as a result. The very first thing the company should have done was escalate the ticket to a manager empowered to take care of the case directly, and that manager should have picked up the phone, called the family and promised to get their cat back immediately.

If the company doesn’t have anyone in its customer care hierarchy who understands why it’s important to make that kind of judgment call, then it’s done a poor job of hiring and training its employees.

Alternately, Amazon’s known for keeping its employees on an extremely short leash — the company is notorious for watching its employees via cameras, has been fined tens of millions of dollars for “excessive surveillance” of its own workers, has forced employees to “justify” things like bathroom breaks, and operates on founder Jeff Bezos’ belief that employees are “inherently lazy” — so if the email-only response was due to strict company policy, that’s another negative that can be chalked up to a toxic corporate culture.

Treating this like a routine complaint only exacerbated the Ishak family’s stress and uncertainty regarding the fate of their beloved cat. Putting the onus on the family and the police to sort out of the problem makes things worse, and you’d think any halfway competent customer service rep would skip the “rate your service” pitch, at least until after the problem is solved and Feefee is back with her family.

Feefee with granddaughter
Ray Ishak said Feefee’s disappearance has been especially hard on his grandchildren, who love the gentle feline. Credit: Ray Ishak

It doesn’t matter how massive and successful the company is, there has to be a better way to handle issues like this without requiring even the police to approach Amazon like customers dialing a service line, or supplicants petitioning a king to turn his gaze toward a situation that normally falls beneath his notice. There’s also no recognition of the impact on Feefee, who is almost certainly confused and stressed at being separated from the only home and family she’s known for her entire life.

Lastly, Amazon missed an opportunity to respond with compassion and earn the gratitude of a family whose members are obviously very concerned about their cat. A PR win like that is worth a thousand commercials, and can earn enormous good will with customers. Instead, people will hear about how the company treats a problem like this as if a customer is returning a shirt that’s too small.

As for the Ishak family, they say they’re giving the driver the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she thought Feefee was a stray. But, as Ray Isha told KING5, it’s been made abundantly clear that Feefee is a beloved member of the family, and she needs to be returned.

“Maybe you did this out of the kindness of your heart,” Ray Ishak said. “I appreciate it, but bring me my cat back.”

Top image of Feefee as a kitten with one of Ray Ishak’s grandchildren courtesy of Ray Ishak, via KING5.

The Bizarre Effort To Brand Cats And Dogs According To Political Ideology

“Things are just a little more progressive here in San Francisco.”

In one of my favorite South Park episodes, Kyle’s father Gerald uproots his family and moves to San Francisco because, he explains, he can no longer stand the narrow minded, gas-guzzler-driving, gun owning people of South Park.

He throws a party in his San Fran townhouse, inviting his new neighbors who all have multi-hyphenate last names and a habit of speaking with their eyes closed, settling into deeply self-satisfied reverie as they literally savor the smell of their own farts.

“Can you believe those morons in Texas just executed another prisoner?” one of Gerald’s new neighbors says, tooting into an empty wine glass before raising it to his nose like an aromatic vintage and taking a deep, enthusiastic huff. “Things are just so much more progressive in San Francisco.”

While reading this article about the Portland metro area boasting the highest percentage of single cat-owning men in the country (more than twice the percentage here in New York, and almost three times more than Miami), I couldn’t help but picture some of the men in the story as crudely drawn South Park characters, inhaling air biscuits as they associate an animal with their politics.

“I think it makes sense because it’s a more progressive part of the country,” one of the men told the Seattle Times as he tried to explain Portland’s high percentage of single “cat daddies.” “I think there’s more freedom to not be ‘toxically masculine’ in this part of the country.”

https://youtu.be/havq7pZQNrk

Because we can’t help but ruin everything with politics in this country, the effort to drag cats and dogs into the left-right divide has been picking up steam in recent years, aided by click-seeking media.

“Republicans Are Dog People, While Democrats Prefer Cats,” reads a Business Insider headline. “What our cats and dogs say about our politics,” reads another from the Washington Post. Time magazine quizzed 220,192 readers on their politics and pet preferences, concluding: “It’s True, Liberals Like Cats More Than Conservatives Do.”

The alleged political divide over companion animals has been the subject of research papers in psychology and veterinary journals, and pets are now routinely included in the ideologically-motivated invective that saturates social media. Conservatives are portrayed as poor, shotgun-toting rednecks driving beat-up pickups covered in Gadsden flags while their faithful but stupid dogs hang their heads out of the windows, trailing globs of drool.

Liberals, meanwhile, are portrayed as unmarried middle age women who spend their Saturday nights on their couches with pints of Ben & Jerry’s and their feminine, useless cats, bemoaning their lack of relationships.

The incels and pick-up game “artists” have even gotten in on it.

“Only a cat-owning bitch would complain to the police about a f—ing joke,” manosphere influencer Andrew Tate raged in a 2022 video after one of his intentionally inflammatory social media posts provoked a stronger response than he anticipated. “Who calls the police on a f—ing joke? Cat owners. Cat owners are liberals. Cat owners believe in hate speech. Cat owners are Democrats. Cat owners are dickheads!”

Tate, by the way, has been rotting in a Romanian prison since December after he was arrested and accused of running a human trafficking ring that exploited young women. Tate, his brother and their associates lured the victims with declarations of love and promises to get married. Once the young women arrived in Romania, the country’s authorities said, Tate and his crew would confiscate their passports, imprison them in Tate’s mansion near Bucharest, and force them to perform sex acts on live streams for the financial benefit of the defendants.

Tate was arrested after unsuccessfully trying to troll Greta Thunberg on Twitter by showing off his expensive, gas-guzzling hypercars and bragging that he likes to eat pizza without recycling the boxes. Romanian police, who were already looking at Tate in a wider human trafficking probe, noticed the pizza boxes seen in his videos were from a local chain and moved quickly to arrest him.

Tate has lost three appeals to toss the case, which is ongoing. But the alleged human trafficker still boasts a massive and loyal online following, and as far as his fans are concerned, his words are law. If Andrew Tate says cats are the preferred pets of “liberal bitches,” then it’s true in the eyes of his fans, many of whom pay hundreds of dollars a month for an online “school” where Tate purports to teach them the finer points of masculinity.

Aside from ruining yet another one of life’s joys by dragging politics into it, I’m worried that pets will pay the price for the misguided effort to associate them with ideology.

Cats in particular are already extremely vulnerable and tend to get the brunt of abuse by proxy. That is to say, studies show men who are abusive toward women often target cats belonging to women as proxies for their anger. They associate felines with the feminine. Women target cats to harm their exes and significant others as well, but there’s a lack of statistics since men don’t usually seek help in domestic violence situations.

Likewise, sitting on porches while drinking beer and shooting at critters who happen by is practically an official sport in some parts of the country. As someone who has Google News alerts set up for cat-related stories, I see the same depressing stories every day: cats who die a few feet from their front doors or who make it home with BB wounds, arrows sticking out of their chests or actual gunshot wounds.

Those stories are so common, it’s difficult not to despair for the poor cats and for whatever diseased way of thinking prompts people to hurt and kill innocent animals.

Do we really want to give people more incentive to kill cats?

Do we want gun owners regaling each other with stories about how many “liberal cats” they’ve shot?

Do we want potential caretakers passing on adopting cats because they’re worried their choice of pet indicates they belong to a certain ideological tribe? After all, everything from the cars we drive and the stores we shop, to observing basic hygienic practices during a pandemic, allegedly says something about our political beliefs.

Buddy the Handsome Cat
Buddy the Cat: Not wimpy!

As for men who love cats, we already deal with absurd stereotypes. (We’re invariably described as gay, feminine and somehow not as manly as dog owners, even those of us who have hulking, muscular house tigers like Buddy!) We don’t need to encourage even more stereotypes, and in general I think we could all do with less box-checking. Life is not a Myers-Briggs test.

I know one thing for certain: cats are masters of living in the moment, and they have no patience for human nonsense like politics. They are innocent and pure. Sullying them with political associations is a disservice to these regal, wonderful animals.