“If cats could talk, they wouldn’t” - Nan Porter
I am writing this in a moment in ourstory when an unprecedented proportion of the humans from Earth are confined and restricted to some extent beyond their usual circuits of movement. As we suffer this, or anything, we feel more compassionate toward others, so say the experts.
“One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.” –Pam Brown
Animals are people too. My kitty is confined to the interior of our large communal house, even though he is sometimes curious about what else might be out there. What is out there would like to kill him. Foxes, coyotes, bears, and cougars roam just outside the door. Then there are all of the diseases and parasites he avoids by not going out, some of which are a danger to us other animals. Also, he is a danger to the birds who live there. Indoor cats, on average, live twice as long, and I can say, quite happily.
He is like a naive child, oblivious to the perils I know too well, having lost several pet chickens to the local predator community. A young child may want to run into the street, but no sane parent would let them. So, like a loving parent, I meet his needs to socialize, play, and pretend stalk, and feed him food that is as close as I can get to harmless to others. So, he is a veganish cat. We get him food that is organically grown, non GMO, all plant based, taurine fortified and so on, formulated just for the dietary needs of cats.
(We have this. Housecats as well as pet foods are somewhat human-contrived.)
I say veganish, because after all, there is no pure vegan anything. The food travels on roads that have cut through wildlife habitat. Getting and burning the fuel needed for delivery degrades the climate and pollutes the air, water and soil. The packaging, the truck, even growing the plant food, all cost the environment as well. Though to be fair, all of these functions can be done way more sustainably if we change out to more ecofriendly ways of doing things. Ways we already know.
All of our cats have been veganish, since 1995, when plant based cat food first became available. All have made it to at least age eighteen, and always in good health. Two of them were age nine when they started on vegan cat food, and the interesting thing is, their personalities also transformed with their diet. They stopped hunting! These were suburban cats who had been mouse and bird hunters, and they just lost interest in hunting. They stayed on the deck or just by the house and didn’t roam far.
Only after stopping the so called obligate carnivores diet, one cat first began to be interested in always sampling a little of whatever food I was eating, and, oddly, also liked to occasionally dig in ant hives and lick them up as they came pouring out.
The other one, who could effortlessly pull a bird right out of the air before, now ate her vegan food out on the deck, then sat back and enjoyed sharing it with her own fan club of bird friends every day, who came just inches away to partake as she passively watched. In the days before she died, the enlightened gaze she wore literally gave darshan, the special blessings of an Awakened One, to all who saw her.
My present young pet is very nice, but he is no saint. He gets very excited when he sees birds out the window, and his jaw quivers, leaving little doubt about what he would like to do. And he can, and does, bring down and eat any house fly that happens into the house. But he gets just as excited when I bring out the cat toys.
Like my kitty, and like all of the humans who might dream of going and doing things they can’t do now, we are all confined to some sphere anyway, all the time. My cat sees the window bird; a monogamous happy partner appreciates seeing an attractive person walk by; a teen sees a fast sports vehicle that they can’t have go by; a person considers a big pile of cookies, but decides, nice, but not today. A young athlete dreams of someday scaling Everest, but finds it works for them to just do some elevation hikes now and then. A kid says they will fly to the moon when they grow up, but gets into studying astronomy instead, and decides that too much pollution is made in actual moon trips. I personally would love to fly, but I am waiting for a far more advanced mode of doing it than our present day crude, dirty, noisy, rude, intrusive and dangerous flying technologies. Perhaps it will not come in my lifetime, which is OK.
I think we are all evolving. There is a famous case of the pet lion in the 1940s, who became a vegetarian on her own, and refused to touch meat for the rest of her life, even when they tried to sneak it into her food. There are millions of vegetarians in the world who still hunt, but now they do it in clothing stores, or online shopping, or with cameras, or by adding the names of bird species to their life list.
I think the whole predator and prey psychology is evolving. Those who project their own struggles onto their pets use words like “obligate carnivore”. They think their pets need to go kill something, because they are not all that far removed from this urge themselves. But hardly anyone kills people anymore; the murder rate has been falling for centuries. And literature, culture, and movies provide a format for those urges to be considered and reconsidered without harming anyone.
May the same soon come to pass with the completely unnecessary and cruel murder, enslavement, and torture of animals. May it soon be regarded as we do murder and slavery, as a thing of the past. No one with a beloved pet would want to treat them that way, yet they blithely trot off to the supermarket to buy a can of death to put in their pet’s food dish. A can of chopped animal bodies, stolen from the child of some mother animal that loved them. It is exactly the same as chopping up your pet and eating them.
Thieves have the habit of always looking over their shoulder and worrying that someone will steal from them. It is like that with the meat eating syndrome of denial, guilt, blame, and defensiveness, and the psychological need to project, and conveniently ignore. There is another way. One can deal with it honestly.
And it hurts to give out hurt. What sane person would ever want to needlessly inflict harm on others? Yet our system is doing just that, inexorably, every day.
You can choose to shift, to evolve, to respond consciously to a natural preprogrammed evolutionary urge, but with an action that fulfills your need in a more elegant, tantric, and harm reduced way. It even feels good to do good. Usually you will find it is even more satisfying!
“Animals are my friends … and I don’t eat my friends.” –George Bernard Shaw
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