My job as a columnist is to intellectually challenge readers. Just like William Safire or Robert Novak, I do this by taking on controversial topics including abortion, the role of religion in politics and cat poop. I didn’t realize the last one was contentious until a few weeks ago, when I wrote a column suggesting, in a deliberately cautious tone so as not to offend anybody, that cat owners are idiots.

The cat people were not happy about this. They mainly aired their grievances on The Daily Illini’s comment boards (“I think I’ll keep the cat and get rid of you” was a typical response), but there was even a letter to the editor published the following Monday pointing out that my column included a logical fallacy. This upset me because, in the process of writing a serious and dignified piece about cat poop, I’d never intended to dishonor the legacies of Plato and Aristotle.

But my favorite response, in the sense that it was the only one that did not refer to me as a “scum-sucking scumwad,” was an e-mail from concerned reader Jessica Kubo. Jessica, a senior in Engineering, took issue with my complaint that cat-owning friends of mine have a smelly apartment. “I know a family with young kids whose house smells like diapers,” she wrote. “Should they get rid of their baby? I’ve come to the conclusion after reading this column that if cat owners are psycho, so are baby owners.”

My initial reaction, as I’m sure it was for many of you, was to wonder if Jessica Kubo was available. My second thought was that she might be onto something. Cats, unlike babies, don’t make their owners pay for four years of a state college for a degree in a made-up field like Rhetoric, Cultural Studies or Engineering. Cats also don’t move back in with you after realizing the best job openings in the political science field involve working a deep fryer.

Jessica also felt slighted by what I wrote about Cat Genie, a product that eliminates your feline’s various emissions without you having to touch anything. “I would like to point out a similar product, also on Amazon, called the Diaper Genie,” Jessica wrote. “Like the Cat Genie, this product (which is intended for the disposal of dirty diapers) appears to have its share of problems; reviews on Amazon describe it as ‘smelly’ and easily broken.”

According to Diaper Genie’s Web site, the garbage can-looking product is easy to use. You just remove your baby’s diaper, roll it into a ball and push it through the lid, where a magical elf spins it into gold.

Jessica couldn’t figure out why both the Cat Genie and Diaper Genie are designed to clean up waste. “I don’t speak French,” she wrote, “but I’m quite certain ‘Genie’ doesn’t translate to ‘cleans up crap.'”

So the great poop debate rages on, and will probably remain unsolved until somebody invents a product to clean up after both cats and babies. It can be called “Nettoie La Merde” (French, meaning “Cleans Up Crap.”)

But life for cat and baby owners consists of more than just toilet-related cleaning. For example, there is the occasional luggage-packing mishap. This comes from the Associated Press, who reported in January that 24-year-old Kelly Levy’s cat accidentally got packed in her husband’s suitcase, which was accidentally picked up at the airport by someone else.

“I went to unpack and saw some of the clothes and saw it wasn’t my suitcase,” the AP article quotes Rob Carter, the man who wound up with the suitcase, as saying. “I was going to close it, and a kitten jumped out and ran under the bed. I screamed like a little girl.”

The cat, Gracie Mae, was returned to a tearful Levy, and everything turned out ok, with the exception that Levy still has to live with a cat. My point here is that babies never put their owners through this kind of distress. They are always trying to eat things they find on the ground and screaming their heads off at three in the morning, but they never, ever travel in suitcases. No, they fly in the plane’s cabin, for the same ticket price as a full-sized adult.

So I have to disagree with Jessica Kubo and declare baby people saner than cat people. It was a close call, but there are way more baby people in the world than cat people, and The Daily Illini only has so much space to publish letters to the editor.

Scott is a second-year law student. He is a goldfish person.