But we weren’t lonesome, owing largely to thirty years of being unable to say no to whatever stray or otherwise in need of a home cat or dog crossed our path. We still had Pluto, an eleven year old Rottweiler mix, Jake, a huge eight year old Black Lab, and Brody, a five year old Bassett Hound. We also had eight adult cats and six eighteen month old “kittens”, five because the last adult we took in turned out to have been two days pregnant, and the sixth being dropped off two years later and two years old in the dead end beside our house.

Three months of only three dogs was all we could take. In March of 2009, we adopted a four month old, white, deaf Boxer we named Albus because my wife is a Harry Potter fan and Albus is Latin for white. He wasn’t all that much bigger than the cats when he came here and quickly became the seventh kitten.

Since then, Pluto and two of the older cats have passed on, and we got newer kittens. There was a stray white cat in the neighborhood that we tried to catch for two years. We finally live-trapped her and her two litters of kittens, all red tigers, about six weeks after the second litter was born. Iris returned to the wild after eight months – spayed and vaccinated – to join the one older kitten we never caught. They both come to the “cathouse” in our front yard every day to eat. The other eight still live here; one let’s us touch her and a couple others are thinking about it. A few months into their residency, when they were still uneasy about even being seen, I came into the kitchen about 2 am. When I turned on the light, I saw five furry butts scurrying from it under the china closet or down the hall or up the stairs, and I realized that these weren’t kittens, they were seven pound fuzzy orange cockroaches.

Everything they say about Boxers is true: they’re drooly, licky, silly dogs who still think they fit in laps at 65 pounds. They’re also incurably social. Male orange tigers are somewhat odd and females, which are rare, are whack jobs at best. Two of the six “kittens” and all eight of the cockroaches are red tigers, half of them female. Albus is best friends with Ellie – the six year old red tiger. Buzzy, the one fully assimilated cockroach, prefers Albus to her seven resident brothers and sisters. Most of the rest have to say hello to Albus whenever they see him. They all flee when Albus runs, but I think that’s a justifiable fear of being trampled.

Waldo, the Maine Coon Cat who instantly adopted the five kittens the day after they were born in 2006, also adopted Albus, intermittently rubbing on him, bathing him and disciplining him with a smack in the butt. Albus responds to butt smacks with appropriate penitence even though he hasn’t the slightest idea what he did to get it.

So, yes, Boxers can get along just fine with cats. In fact, given the camaraderie and the shared penchant for laps, I sometimes think we have a 65 pound, deaf, white cat.