Sometimes I look back on something I bought a few years ago and ask myself “why?” But today I hit a mental block that stumped both myself and my wife- we own a baby gate that neither of us could make sense of.
The gate in question
The gate itself is perfectly normal: nice enough, well made albeit missing some parts now. Altogether a gate I’d definitely see myself buying if I needed such a thing.
The problem
Both Irene and I remembered the gate. We even remember opening and closing it. What we couldn’t remember is why we would have purchased such a thing in May of 2022.
Such a gate would make sense if we had a dog to contain. Most but not all dogs respect a gate, and even if they could jump over it they generally won’t. But Finn didn’t come into our lives until November of 2022: he wasn’t even conceived at the time the gate was purchased, so there goes that idea.
Cats are not particularly containable by such a gate. Unlike dogs, vertical jumps over obstacles like a gate are something even small cats can master- and they have almost zero respect for such obstacles. A gate could act to slow down the cats a bit, and that sounds like a logical intention- buy why?
Neither of the dog or cat related explanations fit in time with what Irene and I could remember going on in the house in May of 2022. The why of it was a thorn in our mental sides, and I started digging for some kind of logical relief.
The solution
I finally figured out the “why” of the gate after burrowing though emails and this blog plus talking with Irene about what was going on in May of 2022.
It finally ‘clicked’ when I realized that there was at least a full month during which we couldn’t access the space over the garage while new stairs were built to that area. We had initially placed two of our cats, Samira and Parushta, in the room over the garage so they were isolated from the rest of our cats. This was necessary as there was serious friction between our cats at the time.
Paru and Samira were placed in the guest room downstairs in the main house during the construction. This room is further separated from the main house an adjacent laundry room which has a doorway but no door. The gate was deployed in the laundry room doorway as a way to slow reduce the likelihood of a cat getting close to the guest room unexpectedly. Any such interloper would first have to leap over the gate, which would at least slow them down a bit.
So there’s the solution to the mystery: we acquired the gate so we could better accommodate our “garage” cats in the main house while the garage stairs were being built. The funny part is that both Irene and I forgot the whole reason we had the gate to begin with.
Looking back with clearer memories, I also think there was a side hope that we might have been able to use the gate as a way of the garage cats and house cats safely interacting a bit. Sometimes a bit of shared scent and so forth can calm down long standing grudges. It didn’t work: Samira in particular remained recalcitrant, and to this day is isolated in the room above the garage.
But at least the mystery of the baby gate is solved now, and I can rest easy in the knowledge that at one point it made sense as something for us to have. Now if only I could find the missing expansion bolts so we could use the gate again four years later…
