Snowball. One of the strangest rental applications I ever received was for a 1-bedroom apartment on McAuley Street in Oakland from a well-dressed, middle-aged woman. She walked through the apartment, filled out an application form and handed it to me. The first thing I noticed was that after ‘Name of Applicant:’ she wrote ‘Snowball.’ I said to her: “Is your name Snowball?” She said: “No. Snowball is the name of my cat.” I said: “But you wrote Snowball after ‘Name of Applicant’.” She said: “Yes. I did.” I was befuddled by that answer, so I read the rest of her application before asking any more questions. It turned out that all of the information on her application form was about her cat. She provided no information about herself, not even her name. For example, after “Occupation:” she wrote: “Companionship.” I said to this woman: “I don’t understand. Do you want me to put the lease in your cat’s name?” She said: “Yes.” I said: “I still don’t understand. Do you plan to live here or is it just your cat?” She said: “Oh Yes, I’m going to live here too.” I said: “Well, why do you want the lease in your cat’s name?” She said: “Well, as I understand the law, if the lease is in my name, then I’d be responsible for paying the rent.” I said: “Yes. That’s right.” She said: “Well, that’s why I want the lease in my cat’s name.” I nodded my head to indicate that I understood her line of reasoning. I thanked her for her application and told her that I would call her if I decided to rent the apartment to Snowball. As you probably guessed, I rented the apartment to somebody else.

Can A Cat Rent An Apartment? You may find this hard to believe, but people do sometimes rent apartments just for their pets. I saw an interview recently with a man in San Jose who is renting a 2-bedroom apartment for his daughter’s 2 cats. Just the cats live in the apartment. The man’s wife is allergic to the cats, and the apartment is next door to his house. Here is a story about it: Apartment Rented to Cats. However, no landlord is going to rent an apartment to a cat. All landlords require that a human being take financial responsibility for paying the rent, even if no one (no human being) is going to live in the apartment. That is because a contract with a cat is not enforceable in court. (You probably already knew that.) However, things may change if Wayne Hsuing wins the Berkeley mayoral election next week. He has some big-name endorsements, including our former mayor. Hsuing is running as an anti-speciesist. Anti-speciesists believe that all animals should have equal legal rights. Hsuing says that his goal is to pass a constitutional amendment granting all animals ‘legal personhood.’ If the Constitution was amended to say that animals are people, then cats would have the right to rent apartments, just like ‘human animals’, which is what anti-speciesists call human beings. I can foresee a long list of problems if I had to rent apartments to cats. For example, how would I get a cat’s signature on a rental application or a lease? How would I run a credit check on a cat? Cats don’t have Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. Credit bureaus require that sort of information to run credit checks. And how would I verify a cat’s income?