I’ve just finished The Power of Babel, which was a book about the benefits of owning a cat, preferably black with white spots.
Okay, it’s not, it was a very interesting book on language that ended rather abruptly, leaving me with mild disappointment, but I had to finish it at some point.
It did make me want to get a pet cat, however, which I’ve also been wanting for a long time but have objected to for what one might call “absurd” or “disproportionate” moral reasoning.
Simply, the issue deals with the act of neutering a cat, putting a definite end to its lineage and causing the extinction of its genes, which I find unbearably hypocritical towards a creature I claim to love—if I love it so much, why would I do to it one of the most cruel things one could do to any living creature by intentionally ending its lineage under the pretense of love?
While aware of all the “benefits” of neutering, though mostly benefits to us more than them such as caterwauling, marking territory with urine, reducing the overpopulation of stray cats (if you could ask a cat’s genes what it would like the most, “completely taking over the world” would not be off the table, to the detriment of humans, of course), reducing the need to roam and indirectly controlling the amount of cats allowed outdoors to satisfy this need, which can endanger local animal populations such as birds, I still cannot find a way to morally justify doing it to a cat—or anyone—I love for that matter, fully knowing that any creature exists and lives to this day—survives—in order to carry on its genes.
To keep it as a pet despite putting it in that state and still claim to love it would be, again, too hypocritical for me to live with. Even though all creatures think in terms of proximate causation, my being aware of the ultimate purpose of their behaviours prevents me from being able to rationalise my behaviour as consistent with the attitude I claim to have towards these creatures. Perhaps I could find a way to freeze its genetic material, at least ensuring that I have potentially fulfilled its needs, even if I never take the genetic material out and use it for new offspring, but I do not know of any viable way to do this as of now (or at least, I don’t have the capital to indefinitely freeze a cat’s genetic material in order to fulfill my sense of responsibility towards it).
The alternative, one might argue, is that a city would be overrun with cats, most of which will die, but they might, perhaps eventually reach an equilibrium where the stray cats are in such a destitute state that they’re literally dying at the same rate they’re born, “littering” the streets with dead kittens instead. Not a very pleasant sight, one might argue, and that the heartbreak we imagine a mother cat (queen) would have might have been avoided had she been spayed, but yet it would be immoral to do the same to humans—should we neuter humans in third-world countries to save them from having to suffer potential heartbreak from seeing their children die from starvation and disease? If it strikes us as categorically immoral when done to humans, I see no reason we should have different standards when treating other animals, unless of course we don’t regard them as our equals—that, when faced with a difficult moral quandary, we would always side with our own species first.
But this is difficult to reconcile with notions of love and care, especially towards a pet cat: I struggle to imagine living with a cat, claiming to love it—perhaps genuinely loving and caring for it, and yet not see it as an equal—an equal I would apply the same moral standards and rigor on, treating them the same way I would treat a loved member of my own species.
Some solutions
As mentioned earlier, perhaps the sense of having fulfilled a sense of responsibility or at least being morally coherent by freezing its genetic material first before neutering or spaying it, ensuring I haven’t completely eliminated its chances of genetic survival, might be a potential future alternative, indefinitely leaving the fate of its lineage “in stasis” as opposed to irrevocably extinct.
Another solution is to shift the blame: to adopt a cat that has already been spayed or neutered, leaving the weight of moral responsibility on someone else instead. It might work, and it is easy to morally justify for myself, but something about it that I can’t explain just doesn’t feel right—something about knowing that this is what I’m doing doesn’t feel right… like intentionally adopting only “victims”. In addition, I doubt that one really chooses a pet cat in this manner, what I find a cat that I really like, who also seems to like me, but isn’t neutered or spayed yet? What would I do? Turn a blind eye, leave it in a shelter, come back after a few months hoping someone else has shouldered the moral responsibility for me?
At the moment, there are no easy solutions: I don’t derive enough justification from the personal, arguably selfish, satisfaction of taking care of a cat in spite of knowing what I did to it, almost like taking in an orphan and caring for it with love after being the one who killed the parents in the first place, naively hypocritical to the nature of the actions and justifying it on “but the child is happy, and that’s all that matters, right?”.
Closing
This all really boils down to my insistence on applying the same moral standards I have towards humans as well as my knowledge of what really constitutes their survival (their genes more than them), which anyone might argue is unnecessary and overdoing it.
I cannot get over the hypocrisy of loving something after I’ve just done the most cruel thing to it, pretending that everything I’ve done was morally consistent with my attitude towards it and not merely for my own selfish satisfaction of owning such a cuddly, cute creature and taking care of it while enjoying its companionship—I cannot neuter or spay a cat out of “love”, for “love” would entail that I fully respect everything about it, including its natural desire to have offspring. If it is a female cat, I would be depriving it of experiencing what one might describe the joy of motherhood, though many activists would argue against this and describe it as a kind of suffering. I’ve yet to interview a cat to find out if this is true, as they don’t seem to be able to speak, but after having seen many mother cats caring for their young, I find it difficult to believe that their suffering is any more different from that of humans—human mothers may complain about the difficulty of giving birth to and raising children, but none barring extreme cases would willingly give their child up even if you tried prying it away from them; a “good” or “necessary” kind of suffering, if you will.
And female cats “suffering” in heat? Should we sterilise humans who are unable to find mates in order to prevent their suffering by terminating their desire? On the internet, especially, there are several communities I shall not name that can be described as gatherings of said people, supposedly incapable of ever finding a mate, commiserating with each other in order to cope with their feelings of suffering. Yet, it would be utterly inhumane and unimaginable to say that we should sterilise these people in order to put them out of this suffering, though I can see that some might just advocate for it out of spite as these communities can be rather despised by the public. That said, the point is about treating the cat as an equal, and thus with the same moral standards used for other equal creatures, including those from the same species as mine (it bears emphasis that not all suffering is necessarily bad; some, in fact, may be the result or consequence of something good, like the ability to reproduce at all).
Anyway, there’s not much else about this post; just another inexplicably-peculiar quandary I’ve found myself in yet again, holding cats to absurdly high, human-level moral standards instead of one that’s more realistic and practical, given that, at the end of the day, they are not humans—they’re cats.