In posh Princeton, a kitten from the wrong side of the tracks

The decrepit complex of 50 year-old Quonset Huts off Harrison Street known as the Butler Apartments is rightly infamous for providing some of the least luxurious accommodations in Princeton Township. The ramshackle Butler bungalow that I am now happy to call home, however, does have a number of important virtues — virtues, moreover, well beyond those attributable to my girlfriend's almost supernatural abilities in the field of budget-minded interior decoration. With rent cheap enough to allow grad students to save enough each month from our meager stipends to afford such luxuries as Nutella and socks, the Butler Apartments are also the only university-subsidized grad housing to allow pets. And given the wholesome, suburban vibe of the complex, virtually every twenty-something couple here that is putting off procreation until after tenure soon finds itself in the company of a furry substitute for actual human offspring.

Both my girlfriend and I are unapologetic cat people, so shortly after moving into Butler we began looking into procuring a kitten. Answering the ads in the "pets" section of the local classifieds merely led us to a number of awkward encounters with a number of very odd little old ladies, each of whom was trying to give away only one or two of the fourteen or more cats in her house. The cats in question tended to be as eccentric and as elderly as their owners, so we decided to try a different approach.

Jotting down the addresses of all the local animal shelters in the phone book, we set aside an entire Saturday for finding the perfect kitten companion. Little did we realize, however, that we were also going to find yet another cruel illustration of our society's sharp division between the haves and the have-nots.

Our first stop was Princeton's local, "no-kill" animal shelter, a private institution funded entirely by the legendary generosity of local donors. Located in a sprawling house off Route 206, the shelter consisted of a number of small, immaculate rooms of cats and dogs, carefully segregated by age, gender and species. Yet it also included a small office where we were surprised to find ourselves spending almost an hour of our time, filling out an elaborate application form to be granted the privilege of adopting one of the shelter's pampered cats. Demanding to know everything from our mother's maiden names to our previous histories of pet ownership, the form even insisted on the phone number of two references (family members excluded) who could vouch for our kindness towards animals. (I could just imagine what my friend Alex would say when he received his call from the shelter. "That Frazer? Yeah, he's an infamous cat-torturer. Get a couple of shots of Jack Daniels in him, hand him a Swiss Army knife and a turkey baster, and goodbye Fluffy!") If we were lucky, maybe, just maybe, we'd be allowed to come back and get a cat in a week or so.

We decided to head to a shelter that we hoped might be a little less exclusive, the municipal (and presumably "kill") facility in Trenton.

On the other side of the tracks, adopting a pet works rather differently. In a giant, cinderblock building surrounded on all sides by vacant lots, one find dozens of kittens scampering about a large room. The employees did the best they could to make things cheery, putting together a makeshift bed for the cats, and leaving on a half-busted TV showing "Animal Planet." (Patriot Media was apparently kind enough to donate the municipal shelter basic cable.) Tearing itself away from the tube — not to mention from the 10 or 12 other kittens with which it shared its bed — a long-haired little fella (later revealed by a vet to be a little lady, though no one at the shelter could tell one way or the other) leaped into my girlfriend's arms. This was the kitten for us, and within minutes we were driving it back north on Route 1.

Sure, the attendant admitted, there was supposed to be an approval process involving calls to one's landlord and employer (both the University, in our instance), but he liked the look of us, and thought we'd treat the cat fine.

Since then, life has been swell with our little proletarian kitten. Admittedly, she seems to be mute and tends to wheeze strangely from time to time, but she loves her new home in our low-rent corner of the land of privilege. The day we picked her up, I'm ashamed to admit, was the first time we had been to Trenton in our all-too-many years as grad students here at Princeton. It's easy to forget about the socioeconomic divides that mark Mercer County, but now I find myself with a constant, feline reminder of their reality, one which is sitting on my lap and attempting to meow as I write this very sentence.