Let me start off with some background:
I grew up with four dogs. They were all older than me, so they were pretty calm most of the time. We never owned a cat because of my dad's allergies, so I had always considered myself a "dog person" by default. Also, I was a child, and had no real concept of anything. When our last dog passed away when I was in middle school.
My little brother couldn't stand not having dogs around. Within two weeks we had two new dogs. They're both pretty big, over 40 pounds each, and they were both young about a year old when we adopted them.
Lottie, the lab, was hyper and uncontrollable, and jumped on everything and everyone. To this day she still likes to jump the fence and escape the confines of the yard, sending the whole family out chasing her down the street. She's a huge baby though, and is terrified of storms. She has destroyed the door to the basement because she has eated through it as well as the drywall.
Giselle, the weimaraner (or whatever she is!) is sweet, but jumpy. She is scared of everything and has no idea how much room she takes up on the couch. While I was always happy spending time with our senile, disabled dogs, I was nervous, almost scared, of our new family members for their sheer size.
Don't get me wrong, I love them, but they are very overwhelming. My brother will wrestle and play with the bigger ones with no hesitation, he loves to spend time with them.
My parents thought that getting a smaller dog would help bridge the gap between me and the huge beasts in our house, so a year later we got Wolfgang, a pomeranian. He was supposed to be my dog.
Wolife is a brat.
He loves my mom and will do anything to spend time with her, and my mom tries to convince me (and maybe herself) that he loves me just as much. But I know he doesn't, and that's okay. Just because I can pick him up doesn't mean he likes me.
Fast forward to the current day: my current roommate already had a cat, Noodles, and we recently adopted a second one. And holy cow are things completely different.
The new cat, Watson, likes to cuddle with me before we go to sleep. He does this unprompted, without my mom tucking him in with me and closing the door to my bedroom so he can't escape. He spends most of his time asleep, and is small enough that when he gets hyper he doesn't do a lot of damage.
With our dogs at home we keep them in the basement all the time because having them in the actual living area of the house would be disastrous. Lottie would figure out a way to open the fridge and eat everything, Giselle would chew up the entire couch. And my parents are gone most of the day at work, so they spend most of their time in the basement with each other, chewing up whatever they have access to.
They also pee all over the basement because if we don't get home in time to let them out they have no other alternative.
With the cats, though, they are out in the house 24/7. They have access to every room in the house unless there's a closed door. We leave scratching posts out so that hey have something to dig their claws into that isn't the furniture. Litter boxes are also 100% easier to clean up than having to mop the entire floor with bleach every time one of the dogs has an accident.
I also feel much more comfortable picking up the cats (because I'm pretty small for a person) and playing with them, because the worst they can do is scratch me. Lottie is big enough to knock me down and slip out of her collar if I'm trying to drag her away from something she shouldn't be into.
The cats can be trusted to run around and do basically whatever they like, with minor amounts of discipline. The only place they aren't allowed to be is the dining table.
While I love my animals back home, I feel much more content with the two cats sitting around minding their own business than I do worrying if the dogs are getting lonely downstairs even though I don't have the time to monitor them in the living room. I feel much more in control over two animals that are perfectly happy to do nothing all day.
And they are just as fun to play with as the dogs, and just as loving. We've only had Watson for a week and he knows when I am stressed and will come sit with me and purr. Also, a cat meowing constantly (as Watson does) has become much less jarring to me than a huge dog barking and waking me up two stories beneath me.
I mean, the labeling of people into the groups "dog person" and "cat person" is pretty arbitrary, but it does give you a small glimpse into their personality.
So maybe I was never meant to be a dog person. As I've gotten older I've become more and more introverted, and spending time with a dog has proven to be more and more exhausting. But with my cats I don't feel obligated to entertain them, and I don't feel guilty when I don't.
They are small, emotionally self-sufficient, and don't need to be with people all the time. In that sense, I am very much like a cat. So from here on out, I guess I'm officially a "cat person."
