Four cat mutts here - 2 Siamese mixes, 1 black Persian mix, 1 orange Persian mix. Three rescued from shelters, one from an ad in the paper. They are all indoor cats, with extremely different temperaments; age ranges from 9 months to 11 years. The upsides are endless love and warm furry bodies on the end of the bed - downside is all the cleaning up. Wouldn’t change a thing, though. One can never have too many cats - a sentiment that luckily our 9-yr old Doberman agrees with. 
If you REALLY enjoy dogs you will never REALLY enjoy cats and the reverse is true. Well that is my theory any way. I could be wrong…it happens often.
I grew up with cats and dogs, so I was exposed to both. When I grew up I realised I was a dog person.
Alas I am a dogless dog person but I have 2 cats (rental situation and I have a child who is a total cat person). I could never live without a pet, a house without an animal just isn’t home to me. But if you are a real dog person cats just seem lacking in some way…and probably in ways that say something about you! 
I have tried conversations with the moggies I live with. I find them inattentive and disinterested. Dogs listen no matter how much shit you spout and they wag in an understanding way.
Dogs wag and bark and jump around excitedly when you get home. You feel the love :D. Cats point out that it was about time you got home because they want to be fed. Then they show you where the kitchen is in case you forgot.
When living with dogs you must learn to whisper. Casual words like; walk, car and bath will provoke strong reactions. Cats will stare at you like you are speaking Martian (they only seem to re-act if the mood strikes them).
By the same token cats don’t seem to care if you are there when they eat. I can leave our boys food and stay away a night…or even 2 and they will just remind me to fill the bowl when I get home. Dogs are piggies and would scoff 3 weeks supply in 10 minutes and then pine away till you got home.
Cats will want to sleep ON you or very close (winter has just finished). They care not a jot if you don’t want some purring thing on your pillow and in your earhole. Dogs will sleep where you tell them to. They are far less whim driven.
When you want dog love you summon the dog. The dog trots up and delivers kisses and adoring looks. The cat feels no such obligation and may even run in the opposite direction JUST BECAUSE.
Cats sleep more then they don’t! Want a cat? Sorry he is asleep, and he isn’t the light sleeper your dog is. Well he may open one eye and look at you, then he will decide his need for sleep is far to important. In the mean time your dog will have forgotten he wanted a sleep and will be wagging and looking for love.
When you call your cat he will come if it suits him. He is just as likely to have someting more imporatnt to do (sleep). Your dog will come and wag and probably cover you in kisses.
You and your dog will have fun in the park with balls. The cat will be asleep at the time.
Cats just don’t do kisses like dogs do!
And you know those doggie moments when you have thrown the ball a million time and the dog comes and rests his chin in your lap and you can almost hear him say “I’m sooooooo tired but that was heaps of fun and I loved it so much” and you give his ears a scratch and he just collapses for a sleep?. Yeah well cats don’t seem to do that.
Of course dogs have a myriad of drawbacks. I’m just saying cats are not what you expect if you are a dog person. I like cats. I love dogs.
Ain’t this the truth! If we get another dog I am just going to name it " My Therapist."
Great observations, CalmKiwi.
Not to alarm you, but if that drinking out of the faucet thing starts to become an obsession, you might mention it to the vet. That was what tipped me off that my boy Whitey had kidney trouble.
Shirley! You just named my next dog.
Sigmund will love me I know it!.
I have a horirble habit of naming pets after tv programmes (Murphy was a lovely lab, Chico the canary was 12 when George ate him…ok George was a cat and named after no one, see why I don’t have the cat love thing!)
My next puppy will be Shirley/SDMB inspired.
I love doggy kisses…Sigmund that! Sigmund will be a golden reteiver pleeeeeeease
My friend Lawrence “Bear” Beals is not a celebrity, but he is a cat lover and in fact has three cats at this time. He also writs poetry. Bear is retired from the United States Marine Corps where he spent his career as a sniper. He currently works for the Navy in some capacity with their nuclear program (he never says a lot about it). He is connected with the VA State Police and the local police in Hampton Roads where he lives. His connection is, for lack of a better term, “sniper-on-call”. Last year he rode his motorcycle, a '94 Honda CB1000 with no windshield, from the Atlantic Ocean (Hampton Roads) to the Pacific Ocean (Los Angeles) in less than 50 hours. He runs 5 miles every day before breakfast.
I’d call him manly for sure and he can have all the cats he wants too!
Mine will sit and listen to me and blink slowly the entire time. When cats slowly blink at you it’s a friendly way they have of saying that they think you are the greatest. The best way to introduce yourself to a new cat is to look at them and slowly blink. They will blink back and accept lovings (unless they are too shy).
My cats greet me at the door. They don’t get fed for a couple of hours afterward, so I know they are thrilled to see me. Raiju has this funny way of holding her tail straight like an exclamation mark and trembling it just a bit which means she is * very* glad to see me. It makes me feel so appreciated!
They both know their names, and know where their toys are. You can’t open one drawer without having two inquisitive noses peeking over the edge. Also they know what their leashes sound like and if you touch them they will come running. The same with their food bowls and windows and other toy closet.
I read in another thread about a cat that wouldn’t eat unless her owner was petting her.
I know dogs that will howl until the wee hours of the morning unless their owners let them on the bed. My kitties generally stay at the foot of the bed and out of the way. They are such warm lumps that I put my feet next to them if they get cold in the middle of the night.
JUST BECAUSE they are being ornery and want you to play tag! Both of my cats come when called and then chirp a couple of times to see what I wanted.
Oh, but kitties sleep in such charming ways. They sleep with their bellies in the air and I can rub them. They sleep in sunbeams with blissful looks on their faces. They cuddle and sleep in my lap.
Like I said, both come when I call and chirp.
We have fun with Azzy and her ball fetching habit. We also take our kitties outside for walks in the back yard. It’s so much fun to see them run and try to catch falling leaves. Adorable!
True. Cats kiss in an entirely different way. Instead of putting slobbery tongues all over your face, they sniff you. They stretch their little heads out and sniff your nose. If you sniff back, you are kissing back Very cute.
My kitty Azzy does. After she’s tired of running after the ball she will collapse on the floor in front of me and look at me like “I’m tiiiired. Whew!”
Just the same, but a little different You just have to know the right kitties and know the kitty language. It’s more of a body language, more silent and restrained.
Yeah, you’re wrong. I adore them both. Some folks bond more strongly with one species than the other, or are incapable of bonding with one species at all, or outright dislike one species. Those are dog people or cat people. Dr.J is a cat person. He loves our dogs. But he LOVES the cats. He “gets” them on some fundamental level where he doesn’t “get” the dogs. Some of us, though, are just animal people. We bond strongly to all of 'em. They’re all wonderful, just in different ways. We’re like the bisexuals of the pet-owning world.
This guy sounds way cool. He needs to be a Doper.
our cats have always been mutt flavored.
mostly taken from “free kitten” fairies, though one was definetely a rescue from a moving military family who left the half abby at the pound.
I’m going for breed next time (Havana Brown or Abby) because Ramit isn’t much of a cat person and has some allergy issues - these seem to be the best bets personality wise, etc.
Plusses:
Automatic warming pad whenver they lie on you. Those babies can put on a lot of heat. I turn my furnace down to 58 at night because the bed gets toasty warm from Kitty Thermodynamics.
It’s nice to have a small furry creature to take care of.
WAY WAY less work than a dog. You can leave them for a day or so all by themselves (my limit is 36 hours; after that I get someone to come in and feed them).
They’re funny - you can make them run endlessly after a laser pointer that they will never catch. Hilarity ensues. You can hold them upside down or make them dance (certain cats only, unless you’re a masochist). You can put little reindeer horns on them for Christmas and take cute pictures.
If you keep them indoors, the vet cost is usually minimal (comparable to a dog’s vet costs), at least until they get quite old.
Much easier to train a cat to use a litterbox than to housetrain a dog. You just plop the cat in and he knows what to do. Try that with a dog, ha.
Minuses:
Dealing with the litterbox. But I’d rather scoop every day than have to get up at 5:00 AM to walk a dog, then repeat 2-3 more times a day, summer and winter, blizzard or thunderstorm. With a cat you just stay in your cozy warm house.
Hairballs.
They die eventually. It is heartbreaking.
Oh, I must disagree. I only had dogs growing up - my mother did not like cats - and I loved my dogs. I LOVED them so much I can’t describe it. We had one PTS in 1987, one died suddenly in 1993, and one PTS in 2000, and we all still talk about them as if they were here yesterday. I never had a cat until I was an adult, although I liked them very much, and now I can’t imagine not having one for the rest of my life. So at least in my case, your theory is wrong. I’m an “all-animal” person I guess.
Re purebred vs. shelter: a purebred has no intrinsic advantage over a shelter cat, and is much more expensive and prone to genetic defects. If you are really set on a particular breed, at least check the shelters first. At my very tiny shelter, we have had Persians, Siamese, Maine Coon, Havana, Himalayan, and many more, many with papers. All dumped by people who “couldn’t find” an apartment that would take cats or whose boyfriend of the month was allergic or who had some other ridiculous reason. Whatever. Anyway, you can probably find a purebred without going to a breeder. If you let the shelters know what you’re looking for, many will keep you on their notification list.
Also, if you treat your cats right they will be dog-like. I have five cats and they all act like dogs: they know their names AND their many nicknames; they know which names are NOT theirs (that is, they know if I’m calling another cat besides them); they know a certain whistle means “come here”; they are waiting for me by the door when I come home. They follow me around and if I’m missing for a while, they come and investigate where I am. They love to snuggle and they seek affection just as much as any dog I ever had. I cannot have possibly had by mere coincidence five cats with this type of personality: it has to be the way I raised them.
If you treat them like dogs - and don’t have the attitude that a cat is a solitary creature who is only interested in food and will leave you in minute for a better meal - then you’ll have dog-like cats.
None of ours are purebred.
Three are barn cats, from the same barn on a friend’s farm. Nothing fancy about them, and they are probably all related in some way. Two came from the pound, but they are nothing special either.
Although the vet calls them Domestic Shorthairs, we think of them as Just Plain Cats. I don’t know if it has anything to do with their genes, but I’ve always had Just Plain Cats, and find them to be generally pretty healthy, and fairly even-tempered and easygoing.
Just have to add this:
Neither Hemingway nor Twain the manliest of men because they were writers? A war reporter who enjoyed deep-sea fishing and a former riverboat pilot, both of whom were hard-drinking, cigar-smoking guys? To each their own belief, I suppose. Say, wasn’t needlepoint a favourite hobby of football star Rosie Grier?
I love both dogs and cats, and have owned both, but I came in here specifically to talk about the allergy problem.
I strongly recommend finding out if any regular visitors to your house are allergic. I know many people who are allergic to cats who simply cannot stay for more than a few minutes at any cat owner’s home. For me, this would mean that my twin sister and my best friend would be unable to visit my house. Therefore, I have accepted that I can’t have a cat as long as I want both of them to came over to my house.
This is by far the major downside to cats. 
All my kitties have been mutts. I got my first cat (my first personal cat, my family had always had three or four at a time) 18 years ago when the stray cat I fed occasionally limped up with a rear paw swollen to three times its normal size. I took one look at him, sighed (I hadn’t intended to get a cat at college), and took him to the vet. He was a great cat but since I got him as an adult cat, we were more like roomies with a cordial relationship.
That kitty died of kidney failure about ten years ago and I was desperate to get a new kitty. I got my big cat, “Cat”, at a Petsmart adoption because the shelter was out of kittens at the time. I got my second kitty, “Kitten”, about three years ago in a futile attempt to get the big cat to exercise. He’s really the big cat’s kitten and I got him from a local vets office that had some free kittens.
I’ve never seen the point in getting a purebred cat unless you’re just jonesin’ for one of those freaky ones. (I do think the Munchkin kitties are cute) Cats are cats.
Also, to add my two cents on the whole cats/male dynamic: Like other posters have mentioned, in my experience, most guys are more against the idea of having a cat than the cats themselves. I know plenty of guys who “didn’t like cats” who now babble on about how great “their” cats are.
We have three rescue kitties in our home. Neutron was originally my cat, resuced from the streets of Seoul, south Korea when she was just a little ball of lfuff. Charlie was a castoff from a friend’s litter, and our youngest, Jinny, was found hiding in the hood of car belonging to one of my bf’s co-workers.
All three are very affectionate and loyal. Neutron iand Ginny are very much “my” kitties, showing a distinct preference for being with me over my bf. Charlie, OTOH, is very cuddly with me, but she sleeps on my bf’s side of the bed.
And I’m also a cat/dog person, but the bf is allergic to canines, so I must remain dogless.
Does she have an accent? 
Re the “mutt” question, my cat was free from a neighbor of a friend. The mother was the house cat; the father was the wandering neighborhood tom. The interesting thing is, the mother was a hairless, so her kittens wound up with extremely soft and silky coats, more like rabbit than a typical cat. Also my wife’s allergies aren’t triggered by him the way they’re triggered by some other cats, especially longhairs.
pulll pulll pulll
Oh, but kitties sleep in such charming ways. They sleep with their bellies in the air and I can rub them. They sleep in sunbeams with blissful looks on their faces. They cuddle and sleep in my lap.
And don’t forget sleeping under the covers. “Where’s that cat? All I see is this lump and it’s purring?!” Good fun.
As to pure bred vs. pound kitties, my vet gave me a big discount on everything their first year because my cats came from the pound. The best solution to the issue was to get one pure bred if you just had to have one, and then adopt a good buddy from the pound. Balances things out a bit.
Oh yes, my family is definitely like this. Growing up there were always scads of different animals about the place and it’s not like we lived in the country either. The list includes dogs, cats, ducks, gerbils, hamsters, budgies, rabbits, a turtle, a guinea pig, and a mynah bird. My mother grew up on a farm and is one of those people that animals and small children seem instantly drawn to. Although I didn’t inherit that quality I do have her love of animals. Cats are the ones that fit best with my life as it is now though. My work hours are odd and the kitties can be left to their own devices for fairly long periods if need be. I’d love to keep birds again but I’m somewhat afraid they’d be viewed as appetizers by my roomies.