As someone who's owned two very old cats with very unique personalities (the cats, not me), I can't imagine a harder pet related business than being a cat sitter. But maybe I'm just too limited in my perspective.

Unless you're fortunate enough to be owned by a cat, you cannot understand the quirkiness these pets. They have absolutely no sense of self-humor, meaning they are incapable of appreciating their own foibles. They cannot appreciate irony and they can sometimes seem downright mean.

Our current cat, Tigra, is coming up on 15 years old in a few months. She recently suffered a health issue that had us afraid we might have to put her to sleep, and I don't mean bedding her down for the night. She has some sort of cancer that causes inflammation of her bowls. This led her to stop eating, almost stop drinking any water at all, and she ended up severely dehydrated.

When we finally got Tigra to the vet, she told us the cat might not survive much longer. She gave Tigra a steroid injection of some sort, some antibiotic liquid, and instructions to her owners (us) to feed her soft canned food only -- after she's had a lifetime of eating crunchy dry kibble.

The cat now has to be fed three to four times per day, and sometimes when she does her usual 20-22 hours a day of sleeping, I'm tempted to walk over and gently shake her to make sure she's still alive.

Enter a cat sitter to watch Tigra when we're out of town for a few days? I don't think so. The vet says she might live a few more months, maybe as long as a year. I suspect we'll just stick around home and avoid turning her fragile health and quirky lifestyle to a cat sitter. We owe our dear Tigra the most comfortable life we can give her in the time left.

Our son, by contrast, has two cats. Both were neighborhood strays, generally pretty feral, that sort of came around his house and hung around because he's widely known and loved among all creatures great and small. No kidding. The guy's an engineer, but he probably should have been a small animal veterinarian in a perfect world.

His problem, though, is that the smaller and younger of the two cats is so very feral it doesn't get along with ANYONE, human or animal, but our son. And the older and larger of the two, a very big white mostly Persian, is cranky and mean to the smaller younger cat. As long as our son's the only human around them each day, they do fine. But if he were to go somewhere and leave a cat sitter with them -- well, hey, the cat sitter would need to imitate the white settlers making their way through Indian territory and "circle up the wagons" to survive that happy pair.

Cat owners, care for your pets. All you cats out there reading this -- why not just try to get along?? And you cat sitters or would-be cat sitters -- good luck to you!

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Gary Speer, who enjoys cats of all sorts, writes about pets, kids, furniture, and just about everything at his newest website, "Smart People Come Here," located at http://www.smartpeoplecomehere.com. It's a site where he says "You can learn a little something about almost everything."