If you don't want to know more than you ever wanted to know about cats' butts, you need to leave now. I'll wait.

Ready?

All right.

Did you know that cats have anal glands? Two of them. If you look at your cat's asshole, they're at 5:00 and 7:00 respectively of the pucker. They make a very smelly goop. Many cat owners know about these glands; if you've ever seen a cat "scoot" across a floor, it's because it's got irritated glands. In extreme cases, the owner or vet may press on the glands to get the goop out of them. They're like human skin in a way--if the skin pores get clogged, a pimple may result.

What most cat owners may not know is that these glands can sometimes get so clogged that they explode and abscess. No, really. I'm serious.

At some point last week, I finally noticed that my mom's ex-feral had a second asshole. My ex-feral is a fuzzy tan beach ball who used to shove her butt in people's faces as a matter of course. Eventually she learned that this was unwanted behavior and stopped doing it as often, so I haven't been getting as up-close and personal with her rear end as much as I did in previous years. But this was an angry red Goatse of an asshole to the left of her real one. It looked drastically horrible, though she seemed to be acting fairly normally. I panicked, of course, but a few days later, she's almost entirely healed up and is doing all the things that kitties need to do. She's about 14 now and starting to decline, so surgery to simply remove the glands is out of the question (hell, just trying to clean the injured site earned me an editorial comment all down my arm that is just now starting to heal), though I read that many owners will do this as a matter of course. The glands aren't strictly biologically necessary, so can be safely removed if the pet can handle the operation.

How does this relate to ID? Simple: why the fuck would any God decide to make glands this susceptible to irritation and self-destruction? If my cat were an outdoor cat, she would be far more likely to get infected and die of such a horrific injury. I've read that anal gland situations are more common than I ever thought possible and I'm in shock that anybody could consider their design complete or perfect.

Apologists who think that some benevolent deity deliberately created feline anal glands can kiss my cat's healing butt for proof that there is no way that system was "designed" by anything loving.