Not A Cat Person.

I'm not. I don't wish them harm, on the whole anyway. I just don't like the species much. As with any generalisation, I'm willing to concede that individual cats may be perfectly tolerable, even likeable but for many reasons even the nicest cat and I are not destined to be great friends.

For one thing, I'm highly allergic to them. About 15 mins in the home of a cat owner, however meticulously they vacuum it, and I start to itch, another 15 mins and I'll start to wheeze. Even if I left after the initial 15. And I will keep wheezing for days. That's the main thing, but the air they have of barely repressed disdain for the humans they have to keep around the place but can never quite train to a satisfactory level doesn't help.
The crap in my garden is a mere discourtesy detail. And I it's a detail that sent me off one a bit of a one earlier.

Allow me to elaborate as I did on FB earlier.

If I had a dog, I'd have to look after it, keep it under control, know where it was, clean up after it and so on. If I just kicked it out of the door in the morning and let it relieve itself wherever it fancied until it came home again I'd have it taken off me for neglect. But it's fine with cats.
People say 'oh but they're very clean animals, they always bury it'. People are wrong, as my lawn will testify but even the cats that do bury it, they don't exactly dig deep do they? No, they just kick a few pawfuls over the mess as they strut off, nicely disguised for you to find with your trowel when you go to plant out the daisies or dig up the carrots. Yes, that's much better... foul creatures.
People say 'you can get cat repellents, they're very good' and yes you can but that hardly addresses the central problem does it? Why does cat ownership mean you can blithely expect other people to just spend a small fortune on lion dung (and why is lion dung preferable to cat dung anyway?), electronic beepers, hormones, essential oils etc rather than taking responsibility for your own pet?

I'm not actually launching an attack on cat owners here and I wouldn't harm a hair on a cat's body, of course I wouldn't and I totally recognise that many cat owners are very responsible/have housecats/train their cats to the litter tray etc but what I'm actually pondering here is why we maintain such a different standard of pet ownership for cats than any other creature? A perverse part of me would quite like to see people trying to walk their cats on a lead and following them around with a supply of plastic bags but I do know it'd never happen. Doesn't mean I don't wonder why not, from a purely logical point of view.