I admit it, kids, I do have a favourite: a smart, bold cat named Leo

To favour one of your children over the others is a terrible thing. Luckily, my kids are so radically different, apple-and-orange distinctive, that I can honestly say I adore them both equally, just in completely different ways. If they dispute this, each insisting that I prefer the other, I say I love them both infinitely, which is an amount that cannot be exceeded. And you can’t argue with maths.

My son has always felt that we should love all our pets equally, a hard ask when the family menagerie included stick insects. But even if you take the arthropods out of the equation, he was still unhappy with my performance, due to the flagrant favouritism I showed one of our cats.

We originally adopted a pair of sibling kittens, Leo and Nala, and while Nala is a sweet little thing, she has remained a mere cat to me; an ultimately unknowable creature who happens to live in our house. Leo, on the other hand, became my adored favourite. And I never tried to hide it.

When he was four months old, Leo slipped out the front door and disappeared for several weeks. After a long and fruitless search, I resigned myself to the idea that he must be dead, him being so small, and it being the middle of a fierce winter. But to our absolute delight, he was found again, several suburbs away; skinnier, but with a mischievous look in his eye, which spoke of all the adventures he must have had.

Leo’s brush with disaster only increased my esteem, and my love. Smart, bold and resourceful, yet always gentle, I could see he was an exceptional cat. I joked to friends that if he were human, I’d date him.

My dog Benny also favoured Leo. Even today, Ben and Nala remain suspicious of one another. Which, for Benny, expresses itself in his occasional confused attempts to hump her. Leo, by contrast, had Benny figured out. When he felt like it, Leo would sidle up and let Ben groom him, licking around his ears and neck, until Leo had enough, at which point he’d give the dog a whack on the snout, to let the him know who was boss, then stroll casually away.

Putting aside the random feline violence, I found it incredibly moving that these two animals had forged an interspecies relationship. And that was Leo’s genius. He had the ability to connect.

Then, last year, between two of our many lockdowns, Leo was hit by a car and killed. I know it’s the sad bargain you enter into when you adopt a pet; that their lives will be relatively short, and more precarious than your own. Yet it’s nearly eight months since Leo died, and I still have trouble accepting it.

We own a new kitten now, an adorable, affectionate little troublemaker who I also love. But if I adopted him in the hope that he might replace Leo, I’ve been bitterly disappointed. Because Leo’s passing still feels raw.
I saw someone post about the death of their pet rabbit, who’d been in their life for only a year, yet had made a huge impression. He was the “sweetest and boldest of funny little bunnies”, the owner wrote: “Everyone joked I loved that damn rabbit more than the other pets.”