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 For the last few years of my marriage, without really intending to, I relied upon a stock response for the moment when strangers asked me if I have any kids. “No,” I would tell them. “Six cats, though!” In all honesty, it was something of a defence mechanism. I know all too well how easy it is for a childless couple in their thirties, who’ve been married a few years and have a house full of felines, to be perceived as employing their cats as child substitutes. I do not think of my cats as my children, and view the term “fur babies” as about as appealing as the prospect of eating a tasty pouch from the Sheba Fine Meat Dining Collection, but I had come to the conclusion that I may as well get it out in the open as quickly as possible: my domestic life was dominated not by nappies or trips to adventure playgrounds, but by the whims of several furry dictators kind enough to let me share my house with them.
Right from the first time I met my wife, Dee, cats were a major bonding point between us. The Cat Lady is such an entrenched stereotype, one might have presumed that expressing an interest in finding a female partner who loved cats was the male equivalent of a woman saying, “I’ve always wanted to go out with a bloke who loves football and farting!”. But oddly, until I met Dee, all the girls I’d fallen for had been either allergic or indifferent to my favourite animal. Walking through South London’s suburbs after our first few dates, we would befriend strange moggies together and give them names. When we decided to get married and move to Norfolk in 2001, the kittens we planned to add to Janet and The Bear, Dee’s two cats, were an intrinsic part of our lifestyle fantasy. So when we split up, a year ago, deciding the fate of our cats was always going to be one of the most painful parts of the process – so much so that, for a long time, weeks after we’d talked everything else over ad infinitum, we avoided the subject entirely.
How do you divide six animals that you both love to an equal extent? Neither Dee nor I would like to think that we had a “favourite” amongst our cats but some of the bonds we have with them are undoubtedly more poignant and adhesive than others, and our separation highlighted them, often agonizingly. Bootsy was the cat that we got when Dee was ill a few years ago, the cat that, in many ways, helped her recover – the one cat that, even though I was designated cat feeder, would always make an unconditional beeline for my wife’s lap. I couldn’t take her away from Dee, could I? No. But I also found it hard to picture a time when my working days would not feature Bootsy matching me step for step as I paced the house looking for writing inspiration, or trying to muscle her way onto the keyboard of my laptop, as she had done almost every day for the last two years whilst Dee was out at work.
But if Bootsy had to go with Dee, surely so did Pablo, our ginger feral. I’d looked at him as my “project cat” – a ginger wretch I’d saved from euthanasia who now had the appearance of a large, happy pompom and would happily sleep on my chest without moving for the space of time it took me to read an entire novella. But he was also Bootsy’s cuddlebuddy. Okay, so in this case “cuddle” was often a euphemism for “dry hump”, but they were the only two cats we’d ever had who’d ever been affectionate with one another. If I ever doubt this, I only have to look at my last book, Under The Paw, a cat-themed memoir whose hardback cover featured the pair of them, snuggled up in their cat igloo, staring somewhat dementedly at the camera. Some people just have photo albums of to remind them of their ex-pets; now, every time I sign a copy of my book, I will be reminded of Pablo and Bootsy.
To further complicate our division of our cats, during our break-up one of Dee’s original cats, Janet, became extremely ill. Janet has a girl’s name, due to a mix-up when Dee inherited him (“How was I to know? It’s very fluffy down there” she told me when I met her) but is actually a man cat of such hulking heavy-footedness that, while we were still together, I would hear him coming on the stairs, and call out to Dee, mistaking him for her. During the first weeks of our split, as Janet violently lost weight, I heard neither set of footsteps any more. 
On one hand, Dee had had Janet before she’d met me, so perhaps she should have taken him. On the other, she had a lower income than me, so it would have been unfair of me to expect her to pay the sizeable vet bills that were needed to keep his hyperthyroidism at bay.
These were the practical concerns that, in any sensibly pet custody case, should take be put above affairs of the heart. Dee’s new house had only the smallest of gardens. Could we really relocate our wandering black moggies, Janet, The Bear and Shipley, from the lush hillside where they lived and foraged for a variety of tasty rodents, to cramped suburbia? Probably not. And then there was Ralph, our high maintenance tabby: Dee had handpicked him from the same litter as Shipley – the one cat who could very much be counted as mine from the start, and whose destiny required no lengthy discussion - herself back in 2001, but he seemed to be in the midst of some kind of race war with Pablo, and could probably use a break from it.
Do I think the two thirds to one third split we eventually decided upon is fair? No, but that’s mainly in the sense that I don’t think pet custody cases can ever be fair. It’s also clear that we’ve sorted the situation out more amicably than most. A friend of a friend, Steven, recently told me a story about the two expensive pedigree Bengal cats he and his ex-girlfriend had owned. Steven saw himself as “the main cat owner” in the couple, chiefly because he had been responsible for nursing one of the Bengals back to health when, as a kitten, it suffered from a rare virus his local vet had told him it wouldn’t recover from. “One day, a few weeks after my girlfriend and I had split up, I got home late at night after being away on a business trip and found that she had been back and taken both cats,” he said. That was over a year ago, and he hasn’t seen either cat, or his ex, since.
It’s perhaps also a good thing that Dee and I have sorted our pet custody issues before divorce proceedings loom. In 1995, the England Rugby Captain Will Carling and his wife Julia had much difficulty reaching an agreement on who got to keep their pet Labrador, Biff (Julia eventually won custody). In 2002, a woman called Jan Moriarty spent £30,000 attempting to get custody of Bella, a border collie she’d owned with her ex-partner, Hilary Bloom, only for a judge to rule that the women should share Bella, even though they lived almost 200 miles away from one another. Leading divorce lawyer and pet custody specialist Rodney Hylton-Potts talks of one case where a couple were ordered to stand apart in chambers, leaving their dog to come in and “choose” his favourite spouse. The dog chose the husband, who was later discovered to have smeared dog food on his trousers and put treats in his pockets (the decision was overturned on appeal).
“When a husband loses a wife, he tends to say ‘I will fight to see my kids,’ often asking for more than he really wants. The same applies to pets,” says Hylton-Potts. “Each member of the couple tends to assume the family pet is theirs. Levels of pain and stress can be high. It’s not always so much the value of the pet or even emotional attachment but more ownership and pride.”
 Is pride an issue for me? I don’t think so. Do I still think of myself as the owner of Pablo and Bootsy, now they live with Dee? Well, yes - at least I do in the way that anyone can ever be the “owner” of a cat. I also hope Dee feels the same about The Bear, Janet, Ralph and Shipley - although at the moment visitation time is minimised by the natural space any couple needs in the aftermath of a relationship. I can’t see sharing as an option, especially having witnessed the pitfalls of that, to an extent, nine years ago, when, for a couple of months, The Bear – a somewhat intellectually tortured cat at the best of times - was passed unceremoniously between the flat where Dee and I lived, and the one belonging to her ex-boyfriend.
Dee felt the full force of The Bear’s ire during that period, not least on the first occasion I ever visited her flat, when he chose to empty his bowels, with evil genius accuracy, inside the pocket her freshly laundered dressing gown. I, meanwhile, couldn’t help feeling responsible for his upset. As he looked deep into my eyes, seeming to blame me for his itinerant existence, it was hard to convince myself that he was not just Dee’s ex’s cat, but a human emissary from the past, assuming feline form.
The Bear is the most intelligent of all our moggies, and has a notoriously long memory, so neither Dee nor I would have wanted to put him – or ourselves - through anything like that again. He is not a child but some might think that, in the amount of consideration he’s been shown during our break-up, he’s been treated like one. He and I are close now, and have long since put our differences behind us. In fact, he’s by my feet right now, purring away knowingly, as I always seem to when I’m writing anything that adds to his infamy. But I can’t deny that I find it slightly odd that, with no arguments about the matter on either side, I’ve ended up as the owner of the favourite pet of my ex’s ex. I don’t feel certain about much in my future right now, but I feel certain about one thing: if or when I do meet someone else, and she comes over to meet my cats, it’s going to be one heck of an interesting introduction.
Tom Cox is the author of Under The Paw: Confessions Of A Cat Man. His new book, Talk To The Tail, is published by Simon And Schuster in January, 2011.
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