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rfmcdonaldEarly one morning a couple of weeks ago, as I waited for my turn at the shower in my house's the second-floor bathroom, I was looking at cats. Three in particular: two, poised on the two separate levels of a black wooden side table, and one, on the floor adjacent the stairs leading downward.
I haven't had much contact with the cats, owing to a schedule that keeps me outside most of the day. That morning, though, as late night turned to early morning, I knelt down and looked at the cats. The cat by the stairs--a young kitten, newly-born--skittered away, claws scraping on hardwood floor. The cat on the side table's upper level, a large red-orange haired cat, stretched its neck out to lick my finger. The cat on the level below, the kitten's sire, nipped my right index as I stretched it out towards its face.
These three cats have very different personalities, if I can apply this word to animals. One is basically an infant; its sire, an excitable cat that once escaped for two days, is energetic to a fault; the third and oldest is satiated to a degree that reminds me at times of Garfield. They react, to me and to other people, in a variety of consistent ways, demonstrating their confidence or their timidity, their friendliness or their hostility, towards different people. I think that they might recognize me; certainly, as I get up early in the morning, I disturb the cats as I walk frequently enough. These cats, in short, are individuals.
You should know that I agree almost entirely with the spirit of Eat an Animal for PETA Day. That animal-rights organization might have good intentions, but comparing slaughtered animals, to, say, the six million dead of the Holocaust, or to the victims of British Columbian serial killer Robert Pickton, is massively counterproductive. Put simply, animals are not people, and comparing slaughtered humans to slaughtered animals is a massive insult. (To say nothing of the motives for the slaughters.)
That does not mean that one should be free to do what one wishes to animals. There is the old, wise insight of the Puritans that tormenting an animal is wrong, not necessarily because the animal's rights are being violated but because the act of tormenting encourages a base strain of human behaviour that should be discouraged by all moral people. As we have come to realize with scientific precision in our era, though, many animals have selves. I have, on Prince Edward Island, a copy of Masson and McCarthy's When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. That book makes a very good case through multiple examples that many animals--particularly but not exclusively higher animals, from reptiles up--constitute beings with their own interiority, their own emotions and their own desires. Researchers have popularized the chimpanzees which master language, the gorillas which grieve, the cetaceans which make friends. The more time that we spend, though, the more time that we realize that all manner of animals share in this trait, to whatever degree. Cephalopods--squid, octopi, and kindred species--are one overlooked group of animals, sometimes as intelligent even as my house's cats for all that they lack vertebra or solid bones.
I'm not going to become a vegetarian, or a vegan. Humans are omnivores if maladapted ones, and I like the taste of different meats, and I wear a suede jacket to and from work (bought used, granted). I have not yet felt a crisis of conscience that compels me to stop my consumption of meat and related products; I might not ever. It does me well, though, as I suppress a curse when I barely manage to avoid tripping over a cat curled up on a (high) stair early in the morning, that it's not only people who live in this city, and that these others are worthy of whatever consideration we can give them. And, perhaps one day, more than we might want.
I haven't had much contact with the cats, owing to a schedule that keeps me outside most of the day. That morning, though, as late night turned to early morning, I knelt down and looked at the cats. The cat by the stairs--a young kitten, newly-born--skittered away, claws scraping on hardwood floor. The cat on the side table's upper level, a large red-orange haired cat, stretched its neck out to lick my finger. The cat on the level below, the kitten's sire, nipped my right index as I stretched it out towards its face.
These three cats have very different personalities, if I can apply this word to animals. One is basically an infant; its sire, an excitable cat that once escaped for two days, is energetic to a fault; the third and oldest is satiated to a degree that reminds me at times of Garfield. They react, to me and to other people, in a variety of consistent ways, demonstrating their confidence or their timidity, their friendliness or their hostility, towards different people. I think that they might recognize me; certainly, as I get up early in the morning, I disturb the cats as I walk frequently enough. These cats, in short, are individuals.
You should know that I agree almost entirely with the spirit of Eat an Animal for PETA Day. That animal-rights organization might have good intentions, but comparing slaughtered animals, to, say, the six million dead of the Holocaust, or to the victims of British Columbian serial killer Robert Pickton, is massively counterproductive. Put simply, animals are not people, and comparing slaughtered humans to slaughtered animals is a massive insult. (To say nothing of the motives for the slaughters.)
That does not mean that one should be free to do what one wishes to animals. There is the old, wise insight of the Puritans that tormenting an animal is wrong, not necessarily because the animal's rights are being violated but because the act of tormenting encourages a base strain of human behaviour that should be discouraged by all moral people. As we have come to realize with scientific precision in our era, though, many animals have selves. I have, on Prince Edward Island, a copy of Masson and McCarthy's When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. That book makes a very good case through multiple examples that many animals--particularly but not exclusively higher animals, from reptiles up--constitute beings with their own interiority, their own emotions and their own desires. Researchers have popularized the chimpanzees which master language, the gorillas which grieve, the cetaceans which make friends. The more time that we spend, though, the more time that we realize that all manner of animals share in this trait, to whatever degree. Cephalopods--squid, octopi, and kindred species--are one overlooked group of animals, sometimes as intelligent even as my house's cats for all that they lack vertebra or solid bones.
I'm not going to become a vegetarian, or a vegan. Humans are omnivores if maladapted ones, and I like the taste of different meats, and I wear a suede jacket to and from work (bought used, granted). I have not yet felt a crisis of conscience that compels me to stop my consumption of meat and related products; I might not ever. It does me well, though, as I suppress a curse when I barely manage to avoid tripping over a cat curled up on a (high) stair early in the morning, that it's not only people who live in this city, and that these others are worthy of whatever consideration we can give them. And, perhaps one day, more than we might want.
