User:Cmmatheny

Note: The following essay was assigned so the students could practice their editing and also consider biases, which is part of their Wikipedia assignment. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:25, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

A time I learned to like something

Felis Silvestrus Catus, or the common house cat, is a small carnivorous mammal usually weighing between seven and ten pounds and, for many years, the bane of my existence. My extreme dislike of cats stemmed from one two week period of my childhood. I was an only child until the age of eight and my parents and I spent the first years of my life living in apartments that did not allow pets, so I had never come into contact with any animals other than friends' dogs and the ones I ate. When my family finally moved into a house suitable for pets my parents decided to find out what it would be like to have one so they volunteered to take care of a coworkers cat while she was on vacation. Unfortunately for me, her cat seemed develop an immediate hatred for me within minutes of our first meeting. It chewed on my cords, knocked over glasses, and it especially seemed to enjoy waiting under my bed, or the living room couch, or my dining room chair, just to tear at my ankles with its claws and teeth when I got up. Two weeks of terror at the mercy of an evil cat was more than enough to cement the opinion within me that all cats are evil and should be avoided at all costs.

My aversion to cats only continued to grow as I did. By freshmen year of high school my distrust was so high I began to avoid all animals. I would tell people at any opportunity I had about how much I hated animals. An article in the New Yorker[1] gives a good explanation for why my opinion of animals did not change at all through the years. It talks briefly about confirmation bias which is the tendency for someone to assume their anecdotal experiences are the norm and make conclusions about them in the future. My initial negative experiences with cats led me to assume that all animals were that way, even though im sure I interacted with some nice animals.

It wasn't until my second year of college that I began to have a change of heart. My roommates at the time decided to adopt a kitten. I was very vocally against the idea but I lost the vote in the end, so we welcomed Garfeild the orange kitten into our improvised family. He annoyed me at first, always scratching and chewing on things but I found the more time I spent alone with the cat the less I disliked it. After two or so months of owning Garfeild my roommates started to care for it less and this led to me having to feed and wash it, out of pity at first, and later out of habit. After half a year we gave the cat to a friend, but I no longer hated cats. I did not enjoy them, but I did not attempt to avoid them anymore. My second opinion changing experience came last year when I spent two weeks staying with a friend in Minnesota. There was not much to do in the town she lived in so I spent my time at her house with her cat, Teluse. This cat was one of the most friendly animals I have come into contact with and he wore me down over the time I spent with him. On the first couple days I tried to make him leave me alone and by the last day I was letting him sleep next to me at night.

After that visit I had finally let go of my hatred towards animals. I started to see them as individual entities, each with their own quirks and personalities, and not just mindless automata hell bent on making time miserable. It took nearly half of my life and two cats basically forced upon me but now I can say for certain that I don't hate animals, I am in fact learning to love them.