Can I Tax Deduct My Cat?

As with all tax questions, the answer is a definite maybe!  Any tax expert will tell you that you can deduct anything you want, but whether you get a call later from Uncle Sam’s tax cat, well, that be another story.

The good news is, there’s a precedent for tax deducting one’s cat, if only one can discover the proper job title for the animal.  Case in point, artist Joan Brown, who was able to tax deduct the entire salary and benefits package of her cats simply by placing them in her paintings and claiming them as her feline muses.

For those of us who don’t happen to make our living as famous painters, there are other ways to slip kitty onto one’s Schedule C.  You could make kitty your company mascot, paste his face on all your business documents, or even name your company after your cat.  This may work better for some industries than others.  Fuzzymoto’s Funeral Home.  Fang Face’s Plastic Surgery Services.  Hairball’s Haircuts.  You get the idea.

But this is only the beginning of cat’s future deductibility, according to the Self Help for Cats plan.  As felines become ever-more-productive members of society, eventually the IRS will just have to accept their legitimate contributions and offer them the same income tax breaks and advantages that humans have enjoyed for decades.

Small print message: The writer is hardly a cat tax expert, so please don’t sue her.

A Bad Cat a Day

 The year may be almost a third over, but you still have time to enjoy the daily brilliance of the Bad Cat Page a Day Calendar by Jim Edgar.  If you haven’t seen it, Jim’s My Cat Hates You website has won the hearts and hilarious photographs of thousands of cats around the world.  In Jim we find the cat-human collaboration doing some of its finest work, even allowing him to go so far as to quit his day job. 

Every day is a little better with one of the 365 “not so pretty kitties and cats gone bad” on the Bad Cats desk calendar.  And that’s what Self Help for Cats is all about. Helping cats to help themselves to help everyone, so we can evolve, folks.

Don’t miss Jim’s site at Mycathatesyou.com.

Cats Provide Crucial Tax Season Aid

My cats love tax season.  Their human is around the house more, albeit attempting to focus on something, and there are always so many piles of receipts and paperwork to roll around in and chew on when the usual distraction techniques fail.  

But despite my cats’ apparent contract with chaos, don’t think they aren’t helping me do my taxes.  Their pressing demands for attention add a whole new urgency to the effort, if the April 15 deadline wasn’t enough.  

I just rest better knowing that even while I’m asleep, my cats are hard at work on all that crucial paperwork.  Sure enough, when I awoke on Sunday morning I discovered that Brody had been so thoughtful as to actually start “pre-schreding” some of my more delicate documents. 

Yes, I better get those taxes done in a hurry, lest there be little left of 2006 than some chewed up paper wads and small puddle of hairball.  You can’t buy that kind of motivation, people!

Cats Gone Night Crazy? Coping with the PM Feline Freak-Out

So we bring cat in from the wild and expect it to act all sophisticated and keep a decent sleep schedule like a normal person. Next thing you know, cat needs to be checked into a padded room at the stroke of midnight. If your cat transforms from love angel to whack devil about the time you want to go to bed, don’t start Googling feline funny farms. Probably the one who needs a metaphoric lobotomy in the situation is you, the human.

Yes, it’s quite a problem that our little furries with the sharp claws happen to be nocturnal by nature. In recent decades, as cats have made the big move from the barn to the bedroom, lots of people have discovered their sleep disturbed in one way or another by the nightly “kitty crazies.”

My own worst story was waking up one early hour to feel my adorable and wild-ish Maine Coon chomping deeply into the connecting tissue of my small right toe. Now if you’ve never awoken to the bite of an animal, well, it’s like being chased by a swarm of bees or confronting a mama Grizzly or having to escape from a fire – it’s one of those things that’s always best when it happens to someone else.

Why Cats Paint? Was That a Great Book or What??

Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics by Heather Busch and Burton Silver. If you haven’t read it what are you waiting for? There is no more mind-blowing book in the whole field or genre.

No one can or should prepare you for your first browse through this mind-blowing collection of cat artists at work. Suffice it to say, when you hand the concept of cat art over to the art snobs you might expect mixed results, but confusion over the authors’ intent is one of the most charming things about this volume.

My favorite artwork in Why Cats Paint aren’t the paintings at all, which I feel are somewhat contrived. Paint’s not the most natural medium for cats. However, some of the installations of cat sculpture done on “found” items, such as sofas and mini-blinds—these felt like true works of bad genius. Like when the cat artists interacted with his or her work, entering and exiting the giant hole they had gnawed in the sofa’s side. I really appreciate this kind of found-object sculpture if it has an interactive performance component, particularly when such works occur at other folk’s houses.

If you’ve seen/read Why Cats Paint, please drop a comment and let me know what you thought. And if you haven’t read it, you might even find Why Cats Paint at the public library, as I was able to, so well known and considered is this fantastically great cat book!

Cats: The 9500 Year Old Answer to Rats at Taco Bell

The rats at KFC/Taco Bell video points up the fact that cats have been alienated from their job-by-nature: The decimating of rodents attracted to human food resources. Normally, cats would have long ago vanquished that rodent population right out of Bell-ville.

In fact, a few enthusiastic cat volunteers saw the rat story on the TV news and said “Let us at those rat bastards,” in so many cat words.

But send in the cats and you contend with cat germs instead of rat germs, and regulation wonks with their anti-cat-in-restaurant laws have already shown that rat germs are clearly the policy-preferred. Rats in turn love us so much, they are practically domestic animals. Only they harvest off of us instead of vice versa. The nerve.

Yet if it wasn’t rats filling that niche, it might be something worse, like giant nasty spiders, so let’s go with rats, because rats keep cats in business – for now.

That’s right, even rats cannot last forever (no industry does no matter how stable). And the disturbing trend now is not to replace jobs or retrain, but rather a growing alienation between cats and work itself. Self Help for Cats, the book, offers alternatives to this latest human experiment-in-lives that has already played itself out in no doubt a lot of lost time and inefficiency on the part of some perfectly good and talented individuals – our list-less, goalless cats!