Late Saturday night, my housemate and I were retelling crazy Halloween weekend stories at our kitchen table when we were greeted by a new friend–a mouse. We screamed like little girls and stood on top of our chairs as he scurried out from beneath our fridge to underneath the oven. Perhaps we could have never met our new friend had our landlord allowed us to keep our cat, which lived with us for the first two months of school.

Even though our rental contract explicitly stated that pets were not allowed, when a friend gave me a kitten for my birthday, I graciously accepted for the mere fact that I had seen several mice in our house this summer. Even though I’m not really a cat person–and I am definitely not a mouse person–my housemates and I warmly welcomed the new addition. After several visits from the landlord’s maintenance crew, word got out that we had a kitten living in our house, and unfortunately our kitten, Omelette, had to go.

Did we really have to get rid of Omlette the cat? (Caroline Pearsall)

Apparently, the landlord would rather have mice invade our house than have an innocent kitten roaming around.

I don’t know if other landlords allow animals, but on my block I’ve certainly seen several. Little Bo Peep, the Shih Tzu puppy, lives two doors down from me. I frequently see a little black kitten sleeping in the window across the street. Either tenants are secretly housing animals without consent from their landlords, or it’s just my landlordwho doesn’t like animals.

It’s important for students to have companionship that animals provide, especially those who live by themselves. Understandably dormitories can’t allow certain kinds of pets, but maybe off campus landlords and campus officials should reconsider their reasoning for banning animals. There is evidence that pets are stress relieving and morale boosters, two things that every student on this campus could use. And, from my own experiences, animals, specifically cats, keep the disgusting Philadelphia mice at bay. These ugly and dirty rodents are everywhere, both in on and off campus residences. Surely, one little kitten can’t be worse than a house full of disgusting varmints.

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