Cat play circle

"kaeli" wrote
I guess I was just trying to put out the point that there is nothing
inherently bad about letting cats kill and eat mice. Predators torture prey.
That's the natural order of the world. It's our own human desire to think
mice, being cute and all, are somehow "better" than crickets.

To make a line of "better than" is very human. If you don't care when your
cat eats ants, but care when it eats a mouse, that's just you being human.
But it's not immoral for a person to let their cat be a cat and kill prey.
Maybe icky, maybe gross, maybe kinda odd, but not immoral. Equally, it's not
immoral for a human to bring prey to a cat. Mother cats bring prey to their
kittens to teach them to hunt. Most experts believe domesticated cats are
all
cute and cuddly and we love them because they retain so many kitten-like
qualities. Is is that much of a stretch for us to behave like a mama cat and
bring our kittens prey?
Not that I could bring them anything cute and furry, I'm just sayin'.


Agreed on all points. However, when faced with a human being watching a
well-fed cat torture a mouse to death, "What the hell is wrong with you"
will probably always be my response.

On 27 Oct 2004 08:53:31 -0700, (Steve G)
wrote:

"Mary" wrote in message . com...
(...)
If the goddamned cats have access to canned food there is no reason for
their owner to allow them to torture anything to death.

And the abbatoir is simply a haven of humane death, eh? That chicken
heading toward the knife in the abbatoir has no guarantee of a fast
demise.

A hungry cat will kill a mouse quickly, too.

Also, people buy crickets etc. for their cats to hunt and kill (Phil's
one, indeed). Cruel or attempting to give an indoor cat some real
hunting action?

Also also - are people who watch those nature programmes (you know,
the ones with lions ripping apart cute Norwegian pygmy marmosets, and
all that jazz) fuc'd in the head for choosing to observe this death,
albeit on a screen?

Steve.

We live in a world of contradictions on this subject. The bottom line
is that all living things die, and all living things need to kill in
order to stay alive until then. We didn't set up the ground rules; we
just have to live by them.

That said, I am not a vegetarian. I know that things die to feed me. I
do my best to see that they have a decent life and humane, painless,
and calm death. I rarely succeed I think.

I have pulled two mice and two birds from my cats. One mouse was too
badly injured to survive. Already bleeding and comatose. I buried him
at sea. The other was unharmed and I sent him to college. That is, I
live by a college, so I took him/her to the big lawn and set him free.
I'm sure he is dead by now so I only postponed the inevitable. Perhaps
he died that day when a bigger bird spotted him in the grass. Who
knows?

Of the birds, one died, and the other I got away from Espy before he
was seriously hurt. I left him alone and later he was gone fromt he
yard. I hope he got away.

I don't think that I could feed living things to my cats so that they
can have fun killing them, even crickets. They have plently of motion
toys and we play with various human activated toys pretty often. That
will have to suffice.

They do kill a variety of insects when they are out in the backyard.
Life goes on.

On 27 Oct 2004 08:53:31 -0700, (Steve G)
wrote:

"Mary" wrote in message . com...
(...)
If the goddamned cats have access to canned food there is no reason for
their owner to allow them to torture anything to death.

And the abbatoir is simply a haven of humane death, eh? That chicken
heading toward the knife in the abbatoir has no guarantee of a fast
demise.

A hungry cat will kill a mouse quickly, too.

Also, people buy crickets etc. for their cats to hunt and kill (Phil's
one, indeed). Cruel or attempting to give an indoor cat some real
hunting action?

Also also - are people who watch those nature programmes (you know,
the ones with lions ripping apart cute Norwegian pygmy marmosets, and
all that jazz) fuc'd in the head for choosing to observe this death,
albeit on a screen?

Steve.

We live in a world of contradictions on this subject. The bottom line
is that all living things die, and all living things need to kill in
order to stay alive until then. We didn't set up the ground rules; we
just have to live by them.

That said, I am not a vegetarian. I know that things die to feed me. I
do my best to see that they have a decent life and humane, painless,
and calm death. I rarely succeed I think.

I have pulled two mice and two birds from my cats. One mouse was too
badly injured to survive. Already bleeding and comatose. I buried him
at sea. The other was unharmed and I sent him to college. That is, I
live by a college, so I took him/her to the big lawn and set him free.
I'm sure he is dead by now so I only postponed the inevitable. Perhaps
he died that day when a bigger bird spotted him in the grass. Who
knows?

Of the birds, one died, and the other I got away from Espy before he
was seriously hurt. I left him alone and later he was gone fromt he
yard. I hope he got away.

I don't think that I could feed living things to my cats so that they
can have fun killing them, even crickets. They have plently of motion
toys and we play with various human activated toys pretty often. That
will have to suffice.

They do kill a variety of insects when they are out in the backyard.
Life goes on.