We love our pets; all of them

A kitchen tableau last Saturday afternoon pretty well summed up life with pets at Horsefeathers Farm.

Halle, the alpha female cat, stood guard over the two cat food dishes. She wasn’t hungry: She just didn’t want any other cat to grab a bite to eat.

Her sister, a tortoise shell named Amy, paced the kitchen floor, rubbing against corners and looking slightly out of sorts. She’s the sweetest cat, and the one most prone to disappear for days on end.

Nellie sat in an empty cardboard box, used to bring home supplies from Costco earlier that day. Her eyes roved the room as she sat still for a rare moment.

She’s a restless soul usually flitting from room to room, a tabby that hates to be petted anywhere below the neck. When I look in her eyes I see ancestral links to cats in the wild.

Perched on top of a kitchen cabinet was Riley. He’s Nellie’s son and the most wary of the four. Halle treats Nellie like prey, a constant menace to him. Riley resides in the basement exercise room or garage most of the time.

And then there’s Jake, the old black lab, whose muzzle is blossoming with white whiskers. He’s my faithful companion and a dog who lives to eat, take walks and, well, eat some more. Just as important, he doesn’t bother the cats. He even lets Nellie sleep on his dog bed in the living room whenever she pleases.

There you have it: the last horse left Horsefeathers Farm more than two years ago, but four cats and a dog have been entrenched in the household ever since my partner moved in with her two cats (Nellie and Riley) in September 2010, joining me and my two cats (Halle and Amy) and Jake.

We’re a blended family with two or three too many cats. But what are you going to do? Ship some of the cats back to the animal shelter from which they were rescued several years ago? I don’t think so. You just make the best of it, and hope some day that Halle makes peace with Riley.

All this personal pet trivia is a prelude to some information I want to share with you from the 2012 edition of the U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook published by the American Veterinary Medical Association. It’s chock full of pet data that this son of a veterinarian finds interested, and I expect other pet owners would, too.

The national survey shows that Washington state ranks fifth in cat ownership with 39 percent of the households owning a cat. About 11 percent of those households were like ours, with four or more cats.

The state ranks 27th in dog ownership at 36.3 percent of all households. That’s pretty close to the national average.

Add in all pets, including birds, horses and exotic animals. Then Washington jumps back to sixth with 62.7 percent households owning a pet.

Are pets family members, companions or property? We consider our pets companions, but 63.2 percent of pet owners consider them members of the family.

Slightly more than half of all pet owners let some of their pets sleep in their bed. If that means under the covers, count us out. But if it includes pets — in our case, cats — on top of the covers, we’re back in the game. Rarely does a night go by without one or two cats paying night-time visits to the bed.

Nationally, the trend in trips to the veterinarian is a mixed bag. Veterinary visits for dogs are up 9.2 percent since 2006, while cat visit are down 4.4 percent.

Total veterinarian expenditures in 2011 were about $28 billion, with dogs accounting for about 68 percent of the total.

Pet ownership is highest among those who are employed full-time and own their own home, but starts to decline as education levels go up. Pet ownership is on the rise among singles. For instance, 26.8 percent of single-member households owned a dog in 2011, compared to 19.7 percent in 1991.

Pet cats outnumber pet dogs in this country — roughly 74.1 million to 70 million. And in the case of Horsefeathers Farm, the pets outnumber the people more than 2 to 1.

Sometimes, when all four cats are in the kitchen, eating their dollop of canned cat food in the morning, it feels like they rule the roost.

Sometimes, when Jake won’t leave me alone, nudging me with his nose when I’m preoccupied at the computer, it feels like he is the master of my destiny.

But the purr of a petted cat and the unconditional love of a dog reduces stress, lowers blood pressure and keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously.

I really can’t imagine our household without a pet. Make that five.

John Dodge: 360-754-5444 jdodge@theolympian.com