A man has taken to social media to reveal that he swapped his wife's old cat for a more well-behaved one after it kept scratching him.
Taking to Reddit's 'TrueOffMyChest' section - where users can anonymously share stories with other Redditors about issues in their life - the husband titled his post: "Six years ago I switched my wife's cat with a more well-behaved lookalike."
Writing under the handle 'throwawaycatswap', the husband explains that his then-girlfriend's cat was "extremely aggressive."
He added: "It scratched everyone, hissed at everyone, and didn't use its litterbox half the time. My wife insisted she could get it to behave better. One week she went out of town to visit her family and I was supposed to go to her apartment and feed it."
Despite his now-wife insisting that the cat's behavior would improve, things came to a head when she went out of town to visit her family for a week.
"I was supposed to go to her apartment and feed it," he writes. "The first night I went over, it scratched the s**t out of my arm. I joked to the cat that it's not special and I'll replace it if it scratches again. The joke stuck with me until I had thought about it enough that it wasn't a joke."
The following morning, the husband says he went to the local animal shelter and found an "identical cat who was already litterbox trained and acclimated to people".
Despite being "a little skiddish", he says "it was a lot friendlier and better behaved, and the skiddishness would help it resemble the original cat".
So - you guessed it - he says he adopted it. After taking it to his wife's apartment and getting the new cat settled, he then "drove her original cat to an animal shelter a town over".
'Why a town over?' I hear you ask. Well, he was "paranoid" his wife would find out if he dropped it at a local one.
In an update to the post, he had clarified that the shelter was a no-kill shelter.
"It's been 6 years since then," the husband writes. "We got married 4 years ago. We still have the swapped cat. It answers to the original cat's name. My wife knows nothing. She loves this cat and brags about how much better behaved it is. Every time I see it, I feel like a total piece of s**t."
The post has since amassed over 69,000 'upvotes' on the platform and received more than 7,000 comments from other users.
There were several comments regarding the legitimacy of the man's story, but for those willing to believe it was true, they responded with comments that were both serious and hilarious.
"If this is real, under no circumstances should you EVER tell her. You will completely destroy her trust," one person commented.
A second added: "How do y’all lie to your spouse so easily? I can’t keep anything in for more than a couple minutes without cracking. Feels so fundamentally wrong."
A third joked: "Best of luck if y'all have kids. Finding a look-alike child is WAY harder."
And a fourth asked: "What episode of Seinfeld is this?"
Regardless of whether or not this man's story is true - and this should go without saying - but please don't swap your partner's pets with more well-behaved identical ones without their knowledge.