BOB HOLT REPORTING
K as in Kennel
It comes as a shock to read my favorite newspaper the other day and to realize that I am within half a cat of being tabbed as a kennel operator.
The issue came up at a meeting of the County Planning Commission, where Planner Don Sperling informed the commissioners that county law defines a kennel as five or more dogs or cats.
Commissioner Carla Bard was quoted as saying, with an astonished look, that “we’ve had a kennel for years.” She and her family have three dogs and two cats. At our house, we have one dog and three and a half cats, thereby edging about as close to the quota as you can get without going over. In fact, if they count the mice that I suspect live in the garage, we are over.
That we have half a cat needs a little explaining. He is a large and friendly gray and white animal, still growing, who at our house goes by the name of Henry Aaron. Next door, at the home of Larry and Debby Durham, where he spends the other half of his time, his name is Bobo.
Double names are actually nothing new. History is replete with them. The Civil War struggle that the north calls Shiloh was known in the confederacy as Pittsburg Landing. Antietam here was Sharpsburg there, and so on.
Sometimes, I hear the Durham’s sweet and pretty little daughter, Darlene, about 2 ½, calling “Bobo, Bobo” at the gate. And presently, Henry Aaron slips out, assumes his Bobo expression, and trots up to the Durham back door to be taken in.
How he spends his time at the Durham house I have no idea. At our place, he mostly sleeps, with his feet thrust out at odd angles, sometimes on high places, like the clothes dryer, from which he seems in perpetual danger of falling. He also eats. All the cats eat, and, like the Symbionese Liberation Army, demand only quality food.
Sometimes, the demands grow quite insistent. The other morning – it was Saturday – my wife was recalculating our income tax on a paper plate, and the cats were circling her, yowling. I remarked that if we could make the cats a tax deduction, our troubles would be over. She made no reply, but quit figuring, filled the plate with food, and placed it on the floor.
I should perhaps explain how Henry Aaron got his name with us. It starts with the fact that another black and white cat, owned by our daughter, Mrs. Debby Larkin of San Diego, was named Ruth. But when Debby and husband Tom found that the cat was actually male, they changed it to Babe Ruth. Then, last fall, when they were paying a weekend visit to our house, the similarity in markings between the two cats was noted. At that time, Henry Aaron was closing in on Babe Ruth’s home run mark, so the name seemed more or less a natural. [Daddy suggested both of the names.]
How he got the name Bobo on the other end I have no idea. There was a major league pitcher with the nickname of Bobo, the much-traveled Louis Norman Newsom, who got it because he called everyone else “Bobo.”
What does it mean to have a kennel, if that is what we have? Or almost have. We ought to put up a sign, I suppose. There is, I think, a kennel fee, which may be a sneaky way for the county to extract a cat license. Cat licenses have never been popular. You may remember Gov. Adlai Stevenson’s veto of a cat license bill in Illinois. A classic of whimsical writing.
Some kennel owners get to endorse pet food on TV, but I don’t suppose we would be that lucky. We might be subject to surprise inspections by the health department, though.
I was comforted by Sperling’s remarks to the planning commission that the county isn’t out to crack down on people who have unknowingly assembled a kennel, but rather act only on neighbor’s complaints. I have reason to think that our cats, in particular, are well liked by the neighbors.
