The Best School Year Ever

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty.

The Herdman family’s half-wild cat symbolically represents the unruly behavior of the Herdmans themselves, characterizing the children as animalistic. Beth explains that the Herdmans “always [have] animals around,” identifying the family with animals, and then she calls the cat specifically “mean” and “crazy,” echoing her constant criticisms of the Herdman children themselves. She goes on to say that the cat must be walked on a chain because it bites people. Because Mrs. Herdman works a double shift, she “[doesn’t have] much time left over to hang around the house and walk the cat” (8). Similarly, the Herdman children, who are inadequately supervised, both figuratively and literally bite the people around them. The cat is also dirty, as are the Herdman children. When the Herdmans try to wash it at the laundromat, Beth’s father makes a joke about the incident that explicitly ties the Herdman children to the cat and its uncivil behavior, when he says that the newspaper got it right in referring to a “WILD ANIMAL” at the laundromat (25). He does not specify whether he is talking about the cat or the Herdmans; this ambiguity conflates the two.