Surrey, BC – Señor Peanut Justinian Handsome Pants the Great, a local orange tabby cat, just found out he was adopted.
“I’m just devastated,” says Peanut, wiping away either a tear or a particularly wet eye booger. “I mean, sure, my accent is different from theirs, and nobody else in the family is a ginger, but I just thought I was their special boy.”
Peanut made the discovery after using a container of his parents’ important papers as a litter box on account of his dinner being seven minutes late. While he was bracing himself for his post-pee zoomies, the words “adoption certificate” caught his eye.
That sent Peanut down a rabbit hole, and after he was done trying to hunt rabbits he continued his research. In addition to his biological parents, Peanut discovered he has four siblings, fifty-four half-siblings, and approximately one trillion cousins. Unfortunately, none of them were interested in meeting, as they are all cats who hate other cats.
“I even tried pitching an Our Father-style documentary to Netflix, but they weren’t willing to meet my demands,” says Peanut, whose demands include petting him, not petting him, and every type of food except the one that you bought.
Peanut’s revelation has also impacted his adoptive parents. “We planned on telling him, honestly,” says his adoptive mother Carolyn, dabbing at her watering eyes from the allergies she’s in denial about. “As soon as we found out we couldn’t have cats of our own, we knew adoption was right for us. But once we got him home, we became so obsessed with his wittle ears and his wittle nose and his wittle toe beans that it just sort of slipped our minds.”
Peanut, however, can think of nothing else. He is refusing to eat except when he feels like it, and down to sleeping only twenty-two hours a day instead of his usual twenty-three.
“I tried talking to a therapist about it,” he says, “but after I finished trauma-dumping all he said was, ‘Woof.’”
At press time, Peanut was hard at work with his neighbours Bear, Piggy, and Gopher starting a support group for cats who just found out they were, in fact, cats.
