When you see a cat, you can pet it. It might be timid, or possibly even hostile, but the owner won't mind the least bit if you try to pet their cat, or even pick it up (so long as the cat doesn't mind). Cat owners tend to be sane, or at least not insane in the way dog owners sometimes are.

On the other hand, many dog owners apparently object strenuously to people petting their dogs without asking. They'll even claim it's like going up to a strangers' child and hugging him/her.

If this is a seeing eye dog, this makes sense. (Not the child analogy, but the 'no touchy!' rule.) Otherwise, however, these people are insane.

I'm sure there are nutty cat ladies who are the same way about their cats, but I don't think I've ever met one.

The good thing about cats is that they come in various sizes of litters. If it was one cat each time, you'd have no basis for the naming system, but when it's a litter of six, well, there aren't many choices:
Six simple machines (Good names, I must say.)
Six regular convex polychora (This is what I used. They can be long, though.)
The Big Six (I should re-read those books sometime.)

You can't name a litter of six cats Alpha, Beta, Delta, Tux, Tumbleweed, and Velcro, after all. They need to be consistent.

Similarly, if there's a small kitten named Qilin who vanishes, and later a very similar one is born to the same mother, but you're sure it's not the same one because it should be older by now, right? you can't just name it 'Bob'. It has to be Sabitun Sabintu.

So that's what I did. Shame everyone else refuses to call him that.