So now there’s a lady who believes that she deserves family leave because she has a damn cat.

“While my co-workers with kids walk out the door at 6 p.m., no one seems to care that I also have a child at home waiting for dinner,” Lindsay Putnam wrote in an article for the New York Post.

Hey, here’s an idea: Maybe no one cares about your “child waiting at home for dinner” because you do not have a child at home waiting for dinner. You have a cat, a creature who does not care what time you will be home from work because it is incapable of ever understanding what the word “work” even means. Sure, it needs to eat, but it’s not like it’s on some kind of special #FitFam diet where he has to eat a small meal every two hours to boost his metabolism until it’s time to crush at the gym. (At least I hope it isn’t . . .)

Before you think I’m a total jerk, I think I should mention that I certainly know what it’s like to love a cat. I have a six-year-old tabby named Cheens Timpf, and I love him (significantly) more than I love most people. He sleeps in my bed with me every night. I feed him organic food. I keep pictures of him on my phone that I sometimes force people to look at, and I talk to him in an obnoxious baby voice while I’m getting ready for work. You know what else I sometimes do? Leave him home alone — sometimes even overnight — with extra food. Why? Because I am a sane, rational person with a life and understand that that is a totally fine thing to do in order for me to live it.

#share#But Putnam still insists that, at the very least, new pet owners should get a week (!) off to stay home with their animals.

“When I adopted Jameson, he was six years old and had spent the previous year of his life in an animal shelter,” she writes. “He was suffering from several health problems after being neglected by his previous owner — and was skittish, nervous and uncertain about why he was suddenly being transported to a strange new home.”

“I couldn’t help but think that, just as Jameson was getting used to me, he feared I, too, was abandoning him,” she continued.

#related#Oh, come on. Look — before I rescued Cheens, he had been wandering the streets of West LA alone. He was five weeks old, underweight, and suffering from both a bacterial infection and a worm infestation. Times were no doubt tough, and I didn’t like leaving him to go to work. but it was perfectly fine to do so, and so I did. That doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It means that I am (not to brag) a fully functioning, emotionally healthy adult who was capable of understanding that a damn cat would be fine without me for a few hours.

Of course, sometimes things do come up. I’ve left work early to take Cheens to the vet, and I’ve arrived late because he puked everywhere right as I was leaving and I had to clean it up. But please, let’s be honest here: Cats require, on average, about 15 minutes of maintenance a week. You do not need a policy granting you paid time off to care for one — and you’re making the rest of us look crazy by suggesting that you do.