I’m a “cat person”. I like cats and have liked them all my life. But I am now in the possession of two cats who are so awful that they are, by their very existence, arguing me out of my inclination.

By chance they are both females, which I have since heard is a bad idea. In these cats’ case it certainly is. One is a tortoiseshell, the other is a calico. Both beautiful, both crazy-making. The tortoiseshell is overweight, blind, and psychotic. She will bite and scratch family, friends, and guests without provocation. The calico is spastic, scratches all the furniture, knocks things over, yowls, and picks fights with the other. They vomit everywhere. Our entire house is a patchwork of light brown stains. Neither one of them are affectionate and they rarely purr.

The last good cat we had, a male blue tabby, was gregarious and affectionate. Unfortunately he was hellbent on being outside, and met an ugly fate at the hands of the coyotes that travel in the wildlife corridor just beyond our back yard. The tortoiseshell, who survived him, is afraid of being outside, but more because of the voices in her head than of any rational understanding of the danger.

The spastic calico, on the other hand, is dead set on getting outside and killing things she finds there. In another life she might have made some farmer a good mouser. The only things she has killed in our environs are kangaroo rats, the gentle desert ambassadors who are pests to nobody, or else leopard geckos, beautiful translucent once-living gems.

She finally made herself permanently unwelcome in our house by crapping outside the litter box—not just a little bit outside of it, but in our bathtubs and finally in a bookshelf. Game over. I made her a permanently outside cat, moving her food and water outside and refusing to let her inside the house anymore. This move has caused the tortoiseshell to relax somewhat, and the barfing seems to have stopped, which adds credence to the theory that female cats are worse together than individually.

I don’t know what to do with the calico now. I dislike the idea of putting her in a shelter where she will be even more confined than she was in the house, but she is now in danger of running afoul of the coyote gangs. Tonight I heard the wild whooping of the coyotes advertising some kill they’ve made, as I often hear. One of these times it’s going to mean that my problem has resolved itself.