Student journalist thinks cats are the new dogs... and he hates them
Awhile back, Joe Fox went out of his way to attempt to hate cats. According to the Ohio University junior, the "adorable little demons have to be stopped."
In a column in The Post, OU's student newspaper, Fox cited six main reasons that cats unnerve, anger, and annoy him. "I hate their cute little paws, their perky ears and the way they gracefully leap between pieces of furniture as if the floor was lava," he wrote. "I hate that they always land on their feet . . . and I hate the way they lie on their backs and look up into my soul as if by not petting their bellies immediately I am sending them into an inescapable spiral of depression. And most of all, I hate it when they rub up against my legs and emit coy meows. It’s unbearably adorable."
To be clear, Fox actually loves cats.
He has two pet cats right now, and a third deceased cat he still misses dearly. Their names: Proton (his parents both studied chemistry in college), Electron, and Jasper. He also owns three cat books and feels he would do well in "a feline trivia contest."
But in the spirit of quality journalism, he wanted to briefly take an opposing stance and see things-- and in this case felines-- from another perspective. It’s a tact he sometimes takes with his Post column “I’m Not a Doctor.” As he shared, "For my columns this quarter, I’ve tried to argue things that I don’t agree with a little bit. In this case, I thought it would be funny to try to write a column about why I hate cats for all the reasons that I love them."
In the Q&A below, Fox further outlines his love-hate relationship with the nine-lived creatures and discusses the popularity of cats within digital culture.
He also shares his top-five pets list.
Q:To be clear, what do you both love and hate about cats?
A: I really both love and hate the way cats will strive for your attention and then completely ignore you. One of my cats when I’m at home will just follow me around my house until I pet him. Then a couple minutes later he will just walk away, like I wasn’t even there. Cats are selfish and they’re mean and they’re adorable. I just can’t resist them even though they really just don’t care about people.
Q:As you note in your column, the Internet has been great for cats. What do you make of our digital feline obsession?
A: I don’t know what it is about cats and the Internet that just makes the two seem to go together so well. I was just sitting around with a couple other people from the paper and we just started watching cat videos, for no reason. The Internet is full of them. Maybe it’s just that the Internet is the perfect medium to express what cats are. Maybe it’s just that cats are the analogue of the Internet in that they are the next generation of pets. They are the most advanced version of pets. So they don’t really belong on radio or TV because they’re just too good for that. They just belong on the Internet. Also there is endless space for cats on the Internet, and cats like their space-- and laying claim to it.
Q:In a similar sense, why are cats so perfectly aligned with the millennial generation?
A: It could be that we’ve gone beyond dogs. I feel like dogs were a big thing in the ‘50s and ‘60s on TV. We’ve moved past that. We don’t need loyal followers anymore. Everybody on the Internet does their own thing. That’s what cats do too, I guess.
Q:How does this cats feature fit into your larger goal with the column?
A: I was fed up a couple weeks ago with people who ride really loud motorcycles. So I wrote a column that was from the perspective of someone who rides a really loud motorcycle-- just trying to get inside the head of someone who is obnoxious enough to drown out everything going on around them and figure out why they might do that in a funny way. I haven’t done that for all of my columns this quarter, but my favorite ones are those in which I take something and try to approach it from the opposite direction.
In between the motorcycle one and the cat one, I wrote a column advocating the return of overalls to mainstream fashion. What led to the idea? To be honest, my editor texted asking what I was writing about and I responded “Overalls” without having written anything. People told me it was hilarious. That one got more likes on Facebook than any of my other ones.
Q:What other pets do you love?
A: Let’s see if I can come up with a top five pets list. Number one is cats. Number two, hedgehogs, because if you put them in a container full of water they will float on their backs and that’s awesome. Number three, dogs. Number four, porcupines, because they are adorable and act like dogs, but don’t bark. And number five, I’d probably go with turtles. I don’t see how anyone could ever find anything wrong with a turtle.
Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, where he also advises The Minaret student newspaper. He maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.