Equinimity

Horses.
My wife loves them.
Then again, she also loves cats, so I may not have to feel so bad.
But I do. Sometimes. When she starts waxing for those days when she would go out to the barn and groom her steed, or the time she went fox hunting. No fox was involved, of course. She loves all living creatures equally, so chasing a fox across the countryside would be an ill-advised avocation for her. Galloping about the green fields and into the woods holds more than just a little attraction for her. Stuck here in Oakland, the opportunities to ride the range are a little few and far between.
This means that it takes some effort to get out and enjoy a little equestrian experience. There are stables in the hills above our town, but unless you happen to be the owner of one of the pampered ponies housed within their temperature controlled stalls, it can be more than a little expensive to just head out for a little canter. And yes, there are places around the bay where you can rent a horse to meander up and down a stretch of beach, but it's not the same as hopping aboard your living breathing conveyance and just riding.
As mentioned earlier, I have not great love for horses. We had one of those rubber ponies attached to a stand by springs and one of my more unpleasant visceral childhood memories is getting the webbing between my thumb and forefinger stuck in one of those springs. And in a family of three boys, it was only a matter of time before all four springs had been sprung and we were left with a big, lame rubber pony that would not support our weight.
And there were some real horses too. The ones at the Y Indian Guide Camp. The ones we took for seemingly endless trail rides that consisted primarily of shifting your weight back and forth uncomfortably as you pondered the back end of the horse directly in front of you. There were also a few occasions when my younger brother and I went along with our godmother and her daughter to a stable that would take us out for a very similar experience to the Y Camp, but at the very end, the guide would let us run our patient mounts back to the corral.
That's the part I get. That, and the relationship one could have with a big animal. Like Sunny, the tired old Palomino who lived in the vacant lot behind our house. There was just a chain link fence between us kids and all that horseflesh, and initially it was more than a little intimidating to feed Sunny a carrot or a fistful of grass. I was pretty sure he would just keep gobbling until he got past my elbow. But that never happened. I know that Sunny probably only lived over the back fence for a couple of years, but in my childhood memories, he was a fixture. He became my horsey archetype.
I have no such example from the cat world.
So it's probably just a little more likely that we'll be converting the front lawn to pasture before we have a litter box in the kitchen.