OP leaves out the linguistic power shift… In those poems the cats are referred to as 狸奴, which on paper means “wildcat slave”. The 奴 can mean slave/servant/low class person/impolite way to refer to any personage or it can be a way for a woman to refer to herself humbly, and by proxy it can have a general association with the feminine and the diminutive - the connotations of the name is more like “tame wildcat” or little wildcat.
In modern times 狸奴 has fallen out of popular usage and we just call them cats now 猫 (Māo) but cat owners are now called 猫奴 cat slaves, nothing diminutive or feminine in the connotation of 奴 here. Very inchresting who gets called a slave in this relationship now. How the turntables! They are now become emperors of their households and we their lowly servants, their official ministers of poopshoveling.
One thing that doesn’t necessarily come through in OP’s translation is that the verb for acquiring a cat (in the poem they translated as being titled Getting a Cat (it’s more like For My Cat but whatever)) is 聘, which is basically for a man to formally request a woman’s hand in marriage, because at the time getting a cat was metaphorically compared to getting a concubine. You had to court it! Entice it with salt and fishies! And give a brideprice for it to demonstrate that you value it and that you can provide and to thank it’s parents! Possibly give the previous owner or the breeder or the pet seller or whoever it’s worth in salt, or, extremely apocryphally, give a mother cat a string of fish for it’s child as proof of your ability to provide and in thanks. Having a cat was often compared to having a concubine or a daughter. Very gendered, yeah, lots to unpack, about the gendered terms and about how concubinage worked in ancient China, but. Man. Imagine caring so much about a cat that buying it is referred to as something akin to marriage.
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