Knox,
Very impressive photography!
( Used to have a darkroom. Never had such beautiful pics in the bowl.)
Seems you are having a tough invironment there for cats.
... But maybe that´s just the normal case for cats, in this case only becoming so obvious because you observe it.
I read that cats leaving the house meanwhile in average reach an age of only two years. If people realized that cats are no cheap articles that you can just exchange or dismiss things would be different.
My cousin whom I talked to on Sunday mentioned that he had been doing homework with his little doughter. It was a little essay about dogs and cats. He said the source material was mentioning reasons for why cats so often were hated by people. ( You wouldn´t believe how many cat haters are around. I stumble over them all the time.)
The materail said cats were about the most perfect creatures on earth, with their sleight and versatility, and typically make humans envious.
I know of a couple more reasons from histrory like the god damn inheritance of idiotic church hound during middle age, which is still being unconsciously forwarded among people from generation to generation, but thought the above observation to be just as plausible.
Complex driven human perspective of envy on everything, even on unconscious animals. Can you believe it.
Ruphus
PS: JFlush, cute pic. Your cat looks very close to mine. Seems to have hair under the palms like a main coon, but no tuft on the tip of the ears. Is it a main coon?