8 Tax deductions your cats can claim

Ah, tax season. The time of the year when we scramble for a year’s worth of receipts, print pages from QuickBooks, and begin spouting off fun words like dependent

Cats love to take advantage of anything that might work in their favor. What if they could file taxes and claim deductions? You better believe they’d be all over that. What exactly would they claim? We’ve got some ideas.

1. Grocery deduction

A cat could claim a portion of the cost of the groceries that once occupied the bag. The amount of the deduction is figured by using this formula: Percentage of bag area occupied times the number of minutes spent in the bag divided by the cost of the groceries. Don’t spend too much time analyzing the validity of the formula — it’s pretend.

2. Therapy deduction

Cats should be able to claim monies paid for any therapy occurring as a result of having to wear silly outfits. The deductions would substantially increase for those felines whose shame is shared via social media outlets. In case of an audit, they must save all receipts and screenshots of photos shared online.

3. Subscriptions deduction

Newspapers and magazines are favorite surfaces on which kitties love to lie, particularly when their people are reading — or preparing to read — the material. Humans get to deduct work-related subscriptions, so why shouldn’t cats enjoy the same benefit? After all, napping is their job.

4. Energy-savings deduction

Masters at conserving energy, cats would get to reap the benefits of helping save the planet. They’d log their sleep hours and, using a specialized formula, claim accordingly. There would also be a unique tax credit for cats who log a certain number of hours while lying in a sun puddle. It would be called the Solar Cat Tax Credit.

5. Charitable donations deduction

Kitties are excellent gift givers. They drop toys into our empty shoes, leave expired creatures at the back door, and greet our bare morning feet with cold piles of vomity hairballs. It’s about time they received credit for those charitable donations!

6. Casualty deduction

Unfortunately, cats must deal with a multitude of casualties each year, primarily lost toys. Balls are batted under the refrigerator, cloth mice are drowned in the water bowl, and feathered birdies are ripped to shreds. Mourning the loss of vanished toys is tough, but the load can feel a lot lighter when they can write those losses off and experience true closure.

7. Entertainment deduction

It takes a lot of energy to entertain humans. Cats subject themselves to a fair amount of embarrassment in order to please the human with the can opener. As a way to help them feel their hours of performing for humans are not in vain, an entertainment deduction would be available to kitties.

8. Paid interest deduction

Sometimes cats just want to sleep, birdwatch, or curl up and stare at a bug on the screen door. However, humans may have other ideas: “Kitty, kitty! come sit on my lap!”

The human is the bringer of the food, and so cats sometimes placate her whims. They really should receive credit for showing interest when really they’d rather flick their tail and go back to sleep. And most times, they do just that — some deductions just aren’t worth it.

What deductions would your cat claim? Tell us about them in the comments!

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