[CAT] "Fur in all the wrong places"

[rfmcdonald]

The National Post's Colby Cosh writes about the good sense in neutering--or spaying--housecats.

Cats don’t have concepts or opinions — just a perceptual apparatus radically unlike our own, and a set of complex instincts. You can learn to predict a cat’s behaviour, and do things that will please it, but you can’t really “think like a cat”; you can only build a clumsy model for the cat’s mind. Anthropomorphizing them is irresistible because they’ve been bred for 10,000 years — think about that: ten thousand years, on a Darwinian clock spinning through generations much faster than our own — solely to be amusing, useful and endearing to humans. They have been designed, by a force much more cunning than mere human ingenuity, to trick us into regarding them as family members.

Thus is the tragedy of the domestic cat. I frequently run into people who like to have cats around, but who think it would be cruel to neuter or spay them. I’m not saying I run into any smart people who think this way, mind you; but it’s not as though there is some IQ qualification for owning a cat. If there were, we wouldn’t have to euthanize somewhere around 100,000 unwanted cats a year in Canada.

Why would anyone think it was cruel to have a pet cat surgically prevented from reproducing? Mostly, it’s pure anthropomorphism. We humans have affectionate, satisfying primate sex, designed to promote pair-bonding and investment in the raising of energy-expensive children with overgrown brains. We don’t want to deny to our cats a capacity that is so essential to our own lives; we think of them as sharing our most complicated emotions, and we hesitate to deny them the “right” to go have “fun.” (This thinking is especially typical of people who don’t know any other way to have fun.)

[ . . .]

[T]to own a cat is to succumb to sentimentality in the first place, and it only takes a few soft-hearted cretins in a city to keep the numbers of stray cats larger than the capacity of humans to care for them. We can expand the niche, but as long as non-neutered pets are allowed to roam, it is almost inevitable that they will outbreed our efforts, Malthusian-fashion. Which forces humane societies and shelters — run by the people who care for animals most — to euthanize them in myriads. Evolution is crafty, but it respects no higher law, and can create some pretty miserable equilibria.</blockquote<