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Doggone it, Cats Like to Go for Walks Too!
Courtesy of The San Diego Union Tribune, 4/26/2005
It was 1 p.m. on Friday, time for Brenda Haines of Tierrasanta to take her two cats on a walk around the neighborhood in a device that looks like a baby carriage.
Brenda Haines says her cats Bella (left) and Cooper (in her arms) are "very spoiled." She uses the special pet stroller to take them around her Tierrasanta neighborhood. She does this almost every day, wheeling her cats from block to block in a pet stroller with a net over the top.
Sometimes people walk up to the pet stroller expecting to see a baby inside. Sometimes teenagers in passing cars point at the pet stroller and laugh. Mostly, though, her neighbors are very polite. There seems to be a general understanding in Tierrasanta that a person's relationship with her pets is her own business." They are very spoiled cats," Haines admitted.
People in San Diego County do some very odd things with their pets. A guy in North Park takes his iguana to Little League baseball games. A woman in Oceanside puts a harness and leash on her guinea pig and walks the animal on her front lawn. A Domino's Pizza employee carries his pet cockatoo on his shoulder while delivering pizzas in Carlsbad.
To tag along with Haines and her cats is to witness an act of physical and spiritual liberation. The cats are liberated from the house. The owner is liberated from the natural human impulse to avoid being known around the neighborhood as the lady who walks her cats in a baby carriage.
" I don't have to worry about making them neurotic," the 54-year-old holistic health practitioner said. Cats don't appear to have the capacity for embarrassment, she said.
She pushed the pet stroller out her front door and toward the end of her cul-de-sac on Pabellon Circle. On this particular day, the two cats, both Burmese, seemed only mildly interested in the outside world. Sometimes cats can be hard to read.
She wheeled the pet stroller up a neighbor's driveway to show the cats a bird sitting in a palm tree. "Look at the birdie!" she said. One of the cats tapped at the net with his paw.
The mailman drove by. He waved at Haines, then he waved at her cats. The mailman, Tom Hitchcock, also is a cat owner. He once toyed with the idea of putting his cat in a cage and wheeling it around the neighborhood on a wagon. He decided against it, figuring the cat might get wigged out.
Haines wheeled the pet stroller up and down Vivaracho Way. The day was bright and sunny. No lizards were in sight. Her cats "go wild over lizards," she said. She returned to her house and let the cats out when she got inside. One of the cats wandered off to play with a rag toy.
Haines bought the stroller a few months ago for $114 after reading about it on the Internet. The Kittywalk device is manufactured specifically for cats. Haines doesn't know anybody else who has one.
She said her three grown children don't give much thought to what she does with her cats.
" Some of the people they date maybe do," she said.
Not too long ago, Haines wrote her friend an e-mail in which she explained that she was about to take her cats on a walk in her new cat stroller.
" The what?" her friend wrote back.
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