We have waaaay too many damned pets around here. We have:

• Two dogs: Billy and Suki
• Four cats: Natasha, Gable, March, and Sparkle
• Two fishtanks: one tropical, which is overrun with algae and is dying a slow death, the other a freshwater bowl with a googly-eyed goldfish

Like I said, we have way too many damned pets around here. And we recently dodged a furry pet-shaped bullet from my close personal co-worker Gavin, who had to give up his two cats and a dog when he moved and I insanely offered to take the cats as his “absolute last resort” … and he almost took me up on it. Whew.

So I’ve been approaching this animal population thing with a MacArthuresque strategy, fighting a war of attrition by trying to limit the influx of new pets while I wait for the existing ones to die. It’s maybe a little heartless to look at it that way, but it’s really just simple math, and besides: we have waaaay too many damned pets around here.

So you can perhaps guess how thrilled I was when Beth sprang a bit of news on me over dinner last night: Sparkle the cat is pregnant.

Fucking hell.

All our animals are “fixed” … except Sparkle. She was a wee little kitten when we got her (as a replacement for Zoe’s favorite cat Alice, who was hit by a car, and don’t even get me started on how that doesn’t fit in with the whole attrition thing) and she was too young to be spayed, so we put it off until she was old enough. And then someone — and I’m not naming names here, but I’m certainly looking hard in the direction of the other adult in the household who brought Sparkle home in the first place — kinda sorta never got around to taking care of that. And now the damned cat is pregnant.

I’m no math wiz, but I’m pretty sure this sort of thing doesn’t add up to fewer pets. We maybe have a battleground typo thing going on here — it’s supposed to be a war of attrition, not addition.