Pimp My Kitten

Of course your cat is special — to you. The way she jumps on your head while you're asleep, or how she's scratched her name into your leather sofa, or how you weaned her from the litterbox and now she hogs the toilet. But when it comes to showing off your cat, impressing the neighbors, shutting up your friends who insist that having a cat instead of a dog makes you totally gay... then your cat's not worth so much. She's insolent and apathetic, and if you die alone in your home, with no one around to open up her Whiskas, she'll only wait about twenty-four to forty-eight hours before eating your corpse. This only one of many reasons that dogs, who'll go hungry for about a week before postmortem predation, are superior to cats. Another reason is, of course, after a week, since the cat's already devoured you, the dog will eat the cat. Your whole apartment-slash-death chamber turns into a Looney Tunes cartoon, and it sucks that you're too dead to enjoy it.

But what if there were some way to prove to everybody, quantitatively, that your cat is awesome? Enter niche breeding outfit Lifestyle Pets, tapping into the market of crazy, but rich, old cat ladies out there. While there are plenty of adorable cats out there in dire need of adoption, you can buy an Ashera, a feline genetic freak and — it's a hypoallergenically-bred cat — abomination of God with a tiny twenty-two thousand dollar price tag. You might want to keep that price tag on the cat so everyone who meets it knows that it's worth more than their car.

According to the press release, "Lifestyle Pets, Inc. developed the Ashera by way of the proprietary blend of the exotic bloodlines of the African Serval and the Asian Leopard Cat," like it's a cup of coffee, "subsequently bred with a domestic cat." I know that's what breeders do, make new, better animals while evaporating the gene pool by inbreeding: "Ashera cats are highly intelligent, very affectionate and have great temperments," and to be honest, I don't trust any animal that would make a better boyfriend than I would, "...and unusually for cats, the Ashera takes well to being walked on a leash." So if you're into S&M, and you can't find a boyfriend, well have we got the substitute for you.