Feeling catty

While tooling around the Garden State Cat Show this weekend, the inevitable question (to me) is:  are pure breds better than mogrels?  Answer:  Jake, the one-year-old street cat that my husband fell in love with.  First cat to the right on entering the cat show, Jake is a rescue cat, a big ole russet colored tabby who looked us in the eye and dared us to move on.  The whole first room of the conference center was filled with good-looking cats that had their stories posted on the cages:  found wandering the street in a severe thunderstorm; found with two kittens begging for food.  Two little girls fell in love with one of them and the father was saying to the shelter representative, "but I don't want to take on a cat with a health problem," and the shelter representative said, "It doesn't have a health problem, we took care of it!" and I had to leave before I heard the verdict.  Our back-yard neighbors J and S are cat rescue people.  "Our cat wouldn't be alive if we hadn't taken it in," S said when we came back. S has a soft heart and had to leave a blueberry festival in Bethlehem because she couldn't bear to see the goats in cages.  Our cat, Einstein, was a stray too.  He was a persistent devil, tagging along with an older neighborhood cat, Louie, until finally Einstein got big and bested him and that was the end of Louie as a running mate.  Einstein was in.  So, I love the persistence of the winner and rail against the unfairness of animals in cages and yet, I eat meat, wear leather, and take Einstein to the vet in his cage while he cries the whole way to Alburtis as if he's going to the guillotine.  And then, in the cages for judging was a blue abbysinian who had a shorter face than most of its breed.  He looked me in the eye and said something and licked my finger and I lost my heart.