Many, if not most, people cannot relate to cat owners finding preciousness and other qualities in their beloved pets, including a non-humanly innocence, that make losing them someday such a horrible heartbreak.
I grew up around cats and sometimes their kittens, including feral/stray felines, and developed a life-long appreciation and affection for cats in general. I’ve long felt that God’s lovingly graceful and artistic side definitely went into the feline creation. So, as a young boy, finding them slaughtered the first thing in the morning — they were lost to larger predators, perhaps even a cat-killing human — was traumatizing and bewildering.
Almost five decades later, I can read anti-cat complacency and contempt publicly expressed by some potentially influential news-media professionals. For example, I came across a newspaper editor’s column about courthouse protesters in Sarnia, Ontario, demanding justice in 2014 for a cat that had been cruelly shot in the head 17 times with a pellet gun, destroying an eye. Within her piece, the editor rather recklessly declared: “Hey crazy people, it’s [just] a cat.” ... The court judge might’ve also perceived it so, as the charges against the two adult-male perpetrators were dropped.
In a follow-up column, the editor expressed surprise at having then received some very angry responses, including a few implied (ultimately hollow) threats, from cat lovers and animal rights activists. Apparently, she couldn’t relate to the intensely heartfelt motivation behind the public outrage, regardless of it being directed at such senseless cruelty to an innocent animal; therefore, the demonstrators were somehow misguided.
The same editor had also written about how disturbed she was by an opinion poll’s results revealing that more than a third of surveyed adults “would, under some circumstances, choose to save the life of their dog over the life of a human being, if they could save only one.”
She was astonished and dismayed by this, regardless of the hypothetical other person being a complete stranger. I, on the other hand, was/am surprised the percentage wasn’t much higher! Of course, I wrote to her that, to me at least, it makes perfect sense: Especially with their pets’ non-humanly innocence, how could the owners not put their beloved animal’s life first?
… Then there was the otherwise progressive national commentator proclaiming in one of her then-syndicated columns that “I never liked cats”. In another piece, she wrote that politicians should replace their traditional unproductively rude heckling with caterwauling: “My vote is for meowing because I don’t like cats and I’d like to sabotage their brand as much as possible. So if our elected politicians are going to be disrespectful in our House of Commons, they might as well channel the animal that holds us all in contempt.”
I search-engined the internet but found no potential reason(s) behind her publicized anti-feline sentiments. I also futilely asked her via her Facebook page. Still, if her motives were expressed, perhaps she’d simply say, ‘I just don’t like cats’.
Perhaps her inexplicable anti-feline attitude might help explain why the city (i.e. Surrey, B.C.) neighboring mine, as but one shamefully serious example, allowed/s an estimated 36,000 feral/stray/homeless cats to fester, very many of which suffer severe malnourishment, debilitating injury, illness and/or infection. That number was about six years ago. I was informed four years later by the local cat charity that, if anything, their “numbers would have increased, not decreased” since then.
Their trap/neuter/release program is/was the only charity to which I’ve ever donated, in no small part because of the plentiful human callousness towards the plight of those cats and the countless others elsewhere. Thus, I was greatly saddened when told by the local non-profit charity via email that, “Our TNR program is not operating. There are no volunteers that are interested in trapping and there is no place to recover the cats after surgery until they can be returned to a site with a feeding station.”
The city's municipal government as well as too many uncaring residents have done little or nothing to help with the non-profit cat charity. And then leave it to classically cruel human hypocrisy to despise and even shoot or poison those same suffering cats for naturally feeding on smaller prey while municipal governments and many area residents largely permit the feral cat populations to explode — along with the resultant feline suffering within!
Human apathy, the throwaway mentality/culture and even a bit of public hostility toward them frequently result in cat population explosions thus their inevitable neglect and suffering, including severe illness and starvation. With the mindset of feline disposability, it might be: ‘Oh, there’s a lot more whence they came’.
It’s likely that only when their over-abundance is greatly reduced in number through consistent publicly-funded spay/neuter programs, might these beautiful animals’ soothing, even therapeutic — many owners describe them as somewhat symbiotic — presence, along with their non-humanly innocence, be truly appreciated rather than taken for granted or even resented.
Many non-cat-fans don’t care for the innate resistance by cats to heeling at their masters’ command. And their reptile-like vertical-slit pupils and Hollywood-cliché fanged hiss when confronted, in a world mostly hostile toward snakes, cause cats to have a seemingly permanent PR problem, despite their Internet adorable-pet dominance.
As for the human species, along with our ‘intelligence’ comes a proportionate reprehensible potential for evil behavior, e.g. malice for malice’s sake. With our four-legged friends, however, there definitely is a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait. While animals, including cats and dogs, can react violently, it is typically due to reactive distrust/dislike or necessity/sustenance. But leave it to us humans, with our higher capacity for intelligence, to commit a spiteful act, even if only because we can.
