Photo: New Africa / Shutterstock
There's more to it than you think.
By Amanda Hartmann — Written on Jan 02, 2022
A woman went took to Reddit's 'Am I the A—hole' subreddit, worried that she was in the wrong when she refused to give someone back their cat.
In most circumstances, you should probably give someone their cat back.
However, there is more to this story than that.
The woman took in an abandoned kitten.
The woman details in her post that she found a lost kitten that she felt compelled to take in because it was very young, loud, and did not seem feral.
Though she took care of it herself, she tried her hardest to locate the original owners.
In her post, the woman writes, “I did everything I could to find her owner, contacted shelters, put it on social media, but no one claimed her, so I kept her for myself.”
Regardless of her efforts, no one spoke for the cat — that is, until recently.
The original owner asked for the cat back over a year after this woman found it.
After over a year of this woman raising the kitten, her original owner reached out, saying that “she had been in rough financial shape and going through a toxic relationship, and her now ex-boyfriend dumped the cat.”
Apparently, the other woman had been seeing her posts for a while and knew she had the cat, but she couldn't take her back yet because she could not afford a cat at that time.
The woman asked the Reddit poster if she could have the cat back now.
The new owner refused to return the cat to the original owner.
According to the post, she told her she “was obviously very sorry for everything she went through but that she had had the opportunity to claim her cat and it was more than a year later now.”
The original owner did not take this well. According to the user, she broke down on the call, saying that the cat was her only reminder of the cat she had lost to cancer in the past.
She also accused the user of being “awful” for keeping her cat after she had been going through difficult times.
The new cat owner didn’t feel it was right to give her the cat after she had cared for it most of its life.
On the other hand, she felt guilty and thought maybe she should just return the cat to her.
Most of Reddit, however, was on her side.
The verdict was: “Not the A-hole.”
Almost all of the commenters seemed to immediately side with the woman who posted her story and urged her not to return the cat to the original owner.
Several Reddit users suggested she call the old owner’s bluff and hold her accountable for the cat’s cost for the duration that she had taken care of it, as the tab obviously ramping up quite high after a year of expenses.
Some of them questioned the other woman’s motive entirely, warning the user that posted that it might not be a completely true story.
Overall, it seemed that almost nobody in the comments section found the original owner’s claim to the cat as particularly legitimate, all things considered.
As the thread is only a few days old and there are no apparent updates, it is not yet clear if she stuck to her original feeling of keeping the cat.
Although, if all she needed was support in her decision, she certainly found it.
Amanda Hartmann is a writer and editorial intern at YourTango who writes on various topics such as entertainment and news.