Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Can't we change our cat's nature? | Way of Cats blog

I know this comment was meant well, regarding my article explaining why cats leave us presents of dead prey:

As interesting as I found this article I am a little bit shocked that you are encouraging the cat to continue killing, I am from Australia and as much as cats are pets they are also feral and what they are killing as a gift to us is native birds and wildlife, we should be teaching our cats that what they are doing is not okay by reacting negatively towards this act and encourage them in other fields so they are eventually conditioned to know that we will love them no matter what, and especially when they aren?t harming another living creature.

Despite professing a love for nature, the commenter is displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of nature.

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I certainly don?t encourage cats to hunt; my own, very strong, preference is to keep my cats inside. But not everyone does that; and in any case, cats are born to do it.

As solitary predators, cats don?t have the advantage of a pack. As a ground-bound mammal, they don?t possess the physical edge of flight. All things considered, cats might be the most amazing hunting animal on earth.

It turns out that cats actually protect birds by killing rodents, who are deadly menaces to birds; far more of a danger than cats, who prefer to catch and eat rodents.

My article does not ?encourage the cat to continue killing.? It simply explains the behavior of what is, after all, a beautifully fashioned working predator. We aren?t going to condition a cat out of millions of years of survival instincts. It?s not possible.

Every living being is a bundle of all that has gone before; millions of years of built-in brain templates that are still here because they got us here. Cats are as much a gift of nature as any other part of wildlife. Just as we are; predators, both of us.

It?s not that I?m not sympathetic to the humanitarian concerns involved in deciding not to eat animals. But as long as we take pills, use roads, and read books; we are using animal products. These search engine results show the difficulty of trying to live in a world without animal products.

There?s a good reason it is so difficult to avoid animal products, and why vegan diets are so tricky to stick with long-term. Civilization cannot exist without animals; they are part of the cycle of Life for all of us. This is why I think a better strategy is to encourage humane animal practices, because none of us are getting along without all of us.

The comment expresses what I call the Vegan Fallacy. It would be nice to think we can all live happily as vegans on a planet where even vegetables can grow in sterile soil that nothing has ever died in. But that is a fantasy; it is not reality.

Plants grow in soil full of nutrients that are based on animals returning their elements to the earth. Animals live by eating other living beings; plant or animal. On and on it goes, the inescapable cycle of Life.

Because the wishful-thinking alternative is a place where nothing can die; and nothing can grow or live, either. Just as magnets have positive and negative poles, and there can be no yin without yang, so there is no life without death.

A place without death is also a place without babies and puppies and kittens.

I don?t want to live in a world without babies and puppies and kittens.

    For more about how a cat?s survival instincts need support, see Are cats savage?

    Got here from a Link or Search?
    There?s more ways to understand our cat with The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my posts on WHY CATS DO THAT.

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Through her amateur cat rescue, she cured problem cats and placed them in new homes. Learn to maximize cat enjoyment!

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