Berzerker
Deity
I guess thats NZ, even before we had vaccines our local vet would still take care of animals. They just didn't want people hanging around inside breathing on the staff.
Stray (?) Cat Advice.
- Thread starter Zardnaar
- Start date
I guess thats NZ, even before we had vaccines our local vet would still take care of animals. They just didn't want people hanging around inside breathing on the staff.
Zardnaar
Deity
We can still access vets they count as essential.
Can't go door knocking to see if anyone owns said cat.
Can't go door knocking to see if anyone owns said cat.
Zardnaar
Deity
Well the little fella came back and came inside. He knows how to use a cat door and turns up in the morning and 5pmish.
Basically around feeding time.
Basically around feeding time.
Sounds like he'll have you trained in no time!
There's insufficient evidence to believe that cats are sapient. From their perspective, their relative quality of life matters infinitely more than their life itself. This is terrifically hard for a sapient person to empathize with, because it's a state of consciousness we have a hard time attaining.
Of course, there's no specific reason to put it down. We leave animals to suffer all the time. In fact, we often pay people to cause animal suffering so that we can enjoy animal-derived byproduct. And rescuing a cat can be enjoyable, we derive a lot of joy from pets! Some people derive more joy from pets than I derive from my leisure consumption, for sure. The short-circuit happens when we use this charity to distract from our actual onus to charity or when we refuse to pay the externalities of our pet.
bernie14
Filter Manipulator
Geez. After looking into that cat's eyes, you offered a great example of how to intellectualize psychopathy
I've only offered feedback on how to find its owner.
You want psychopathy? Here's someone drooling over the idea of eating a mistreated animal that just might be actually sapient, an animal contributing to the climate crisis, and a bird that is probably factory-raised
how about candied bacon or a sweet (honey or brown sugar) bbq sauce, mongolian beef, honey garlic chicken? sweet, salty, spicy, fatty...aaahhh....i'm supposed to be on a diet
It's almost like cuteness evolved to short-circuit our moral centers.
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So they don't care if they live or die, but when they live, they want to live well?
How many dying cats have you observed (outside of a lab)? My first cat had cancer. Another cat had a stroke (I didn't see her die, but there was a bare chance we could have saved her if my dad had told me; it's not like she was the first pet in the family to have a stroke, though we saved the dog as I noticed it in time and we got him to the vet). Lightning literally died at my feet; she was close to 18 and I was expecting her to die, just not that night and not like that. But at least she didn't wander off somewhere; she stuck to me like glue, those last few months.
Not sapient? I guess you've never seen a cat try to work out a problem, or invent a new way to deal with a situation. Or maybe I've just been blessed with very smart cats.
You suggested killing the cat. You still haven't provided any valid reason.
Let's take chickens. Calgary allows backyard chicken coops. Suddenly the coyote population of Calgary zooms upward, with incidents of pets being killed, people encountering them on the hiking and biking trails...
Gee, I wonder why. Could it be that the free chicken dinners attracted the coyotes, who saw pets as an added bonus?
I'm not saying factory farming isn't cruel. It is, and there are better ways to raise these animals so they're not suffering. But do not sit there and judge people who eat meat. We can't all be vegan, and there are some people who tried and couldn't manage it. "Just eat nuts instead" doesn't help someone who is allergic to nuts but still needs protein.
Oh? I consider earthworms cute, but I'm more wary of them after having read the recent article on CBC.ca about how earthworms in the garden are a good thing but earthworms escaping to the forest are killing the forests and contributing to climate change. So if I'm ever again out in the forest and spot an earthworm, the smart thing to do would be to either kill it or put it in a container of dirt it can't escape from and release it into someone's garden back in the city.
bernie14
Filter Manipulator
Nah, it's just that empathy as designed, is not a long distance tool.
Oh, I don't believe in a Designer. I just believe that there are higher ethics that our base nature allows us to ignore, or that aspects of the world short-circuit.
bernie14
Filter Manipulator
Sorry if that was not communicated well, the design does not necessarily have anything to do with a designer.
EDIT if given a choice, I'd sooner ignore "higher ethics" than base nature.
EDIT 2. Sorry if i offended, I'm not looking to derail this thread into some "higher ethics" nature versus nurture nonsense. It's the context as i read the thread, @Zardnaar had clearly stated his concerns and options and you launched yourself in from left field with euthanizing the animal. That is dissonant to the conversation being had.
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We really have no idea what is going on in their heads. Can you really say we can objectively measure the difference between a non-human animal choosing between quality of life and life itself? Can we define sapience without referring to things we do? Could we detect it in cetaceans? Could we categorically say they do not have it?
I totally agree we put too much importance on the wellbeing of companion animals and not enough on that of pigs. They beat even chimps in some measures of intelligence, whereas cats and dogs do not.
Of course cetaceans have it. So do gorillas and elephants.
Why not just say that more importance needs to be put on pigs, rather than being judgmental of people who put importance on companion animals?
How do we know? I am sure they all have something very meaningful that could be called sapience, but I cannot prove it much as I cannot prove you have it, or you prove I have it.
My personal opinion is that most of the importance of any domestic animal comes from the value that people derive from them. People derive much more value from a companion animals than a farm animal, so they have more value in that sense and people are quite justified in putting a lot of importance on them. My argument would be more against those who would criminalise puppy farms for welfare reasons while happily eating pork.
I'm not just keeping it 'comparing pigs to cats', though. These animals short-circuit our sense of moral onus. We'll ignore/cause human suffering far away in order to fulfill some instinctive need here. If an obligate carnivore is eating unsustainably sourced fish, then we have to decide carefully if we want to subsidize it. We're not just subsidizing it out of our own pockets, but also from discount we get from its footprint being born by poor people far away.
And I'm not sure how to parse 'companion animal' (is it a class of animals or is it their current status?). If someone has a pet, they should treat it well (hopefully without going too far, which is basically impossible to measure until you see it). If someone derives benefit from their pet, I'll never gainsay that. The best I can do is ask them to do things that make their pet more ecologically or morally sustainable (which includes collaring it so that I don't waste hours returning it to you). Sustainably sourced fish or humanely raised meat or whatever. The best we can do is our best. We can't be perfect.
But I do have a direct problem with subsidizing a companion animal merely because we interpret it as a charitable act, especially based on its footprint or in terms of better uses for those charity dollars.
Sofista
Deity
There's testimony enough that cats can look into a human eye and ask for help in distress. They would not do that to a dog, a bear, another species. Sapience is a bit of a spectrum. How do cats come to expect people as 'friendlies'? They communicate with each other, but not how we would do. They don't pass down experience, of course, yet they're domesticated enough to know a sympathetic eye when they see it.
I disagree. Living beings will fight for their lives, especially when they're down the sapience ladder. You can find about a lot of suicidal people, but who has ever seen a suicidal dog?
First, I want to make it clear to Zard that I would never have thought him capable of killing the kitty.
Then, I'd say that there's a difference between pets and cattle (or pigs). The former are our friends and companions (originally they might have helped with hunting and pest control, but that's not the majority case anymore), the latter as species exist for our consumption.
I agree that if you can't pay for a pet, you should logically not get one.
"Fighting for survival" is better expressed as "behaviour that supports survival".
There's a broad difference between 'fighting to survive' and 'values its life'. As I said, understanding this difference is truly difficult, since we have a nearly impossible time attaining that cognitive state. A seedling fights to survive, driven entirely by activities selected for by natural selection. When it comes to non-sapient animals, it's their quality of life that matters to them. If we force them to suffer, we're not doing them any favors, it's just for us. The idea that their misery is justified by our pleasure is ... I just don't have words.
I only had one anecdote of a suicidal animal, the story of a dolphin that killed itself in The Cove. I'm not speaking authoritatively, because honestly the idea of a suicidal animal (in the sapience sense) would blow my mind. Not because it shocks any paradigms, but because it would be so earth-shatteringly significant.
I'd qualify "if you can't pay for a pet, you shouldn't have one". There are definitely layers of the human condition where someone's benefit from the pet overwhelms the damage that the pet does to other people, even if I cannot measure it. And since we live in a world where it's okay to mistreat animals for our pleasure, then the difference between a mistreated cat and a mistreated bacon buffet is merely one of proximity. I mean, I'd say neither is fine, but most people would pretend it's somehow different.
Oh, come on. Whales have language. They have families. They are highly social. They grieve their dead openly, and a mother whose calf dies is comforted by her female relatives.
Elephants are also highly social and grieve their dead. It's actually fascinating how these similarities exist between elephants and whales (I will admit that I don't know if elephants have much of a spoken language, though their body language speaks volumes if you learn how to interpret it).
And gorillas... are you saying you have never heard of Koko the Gorilla? Her story is fascinating.
I guess you're against me, then. I would definitely criminalize puppy farms (and kitten farms and I turned an ex-friend in once her guinea pig-breeding setup took over her living room and reached FOUR DOZEN of them all stacked up in cages; the City has no bylaws governing guinea pig mills, so I told them to think of it as a health hazard, which it was).
But I enjoy pork. I've got canned ham in my pantry, and my favorite pizza ingredients include pepperoni.
Gosh, I guess we can't be friends anymore.
So after wading through all this, I still detect a judgmental attitude that I donate to animal shelters (time or money as I can; I used to donate to the SPCA until they dropped their no-kill status; I am not going to subsidize killing healthy animals just because they weren't adopted in a certain amount of time) but not to a myriad of medical charities for humans.
Tell the medical charities to stop paying their executives 6 or 7-figure salaries and I'll consider it.
There are other ways to give to charity that don't involve money. Some women and girls donate their hair to make wigs for chemo patients.
Even when it's meant stretching the food budget, I set money aside in case Maddy needs the vet. And in any case, some of that money will go toward her euthanasia (if necessary) and cremation. I've also set some aside for my next cat, whoever it turns out to be - new litter box, dishes, and shots.
Some people don't really know what they're getting into with cats. The manager of this building had an elderly male who died, and then he got a couple of female kittens. Next thing, he's complaining about having to take them to be spayed, and when I asked how old they were, I told him he should have had it done a month earlier. Six months or first heat, whichever comes first. He hadn't realized they would mature so soon; he thought he had a year before having to worry about that.
There are actually quite a lot of people in this building who have cats. Dogs aren't allowed here, and neither are fish (not sure about birds; I've never heard of anyone here who has one).
Zardnaar
Deity
Thorgalaeg
Deity
There is not objective reason to say a cat is more or less important than a chicken or an amoeba... or a person.
Any animal or living being has the importance people put on them, because importance is nothing but a measure of how convenient is something for us. The universe is anthropocentric because it is anthropogenic. We create it when we perceive it. We perceive a cat as a pet, a chicken and a pig as food, in the same way we perceive other humans as our equals and therefore as superior to a pet or food, that is all.
There are evolutionary reasons under this way of seeing things, reasons we call ethics. Putting human life above other animals life is a requisite for us surviving as species, and obviously it is the same for any other species. There are individual cases where a human could considers his cat more important than other humans, or dogs considering its owner more important than other dogs, but such cases are deviations from the average, and we call them crazyness and domestication respectively. In fact giving more or less importance to animals according to how sentient we perceive them is nothing but giving more or less importance according to how similar to humans we perceive them, which makes some kind of evolutionary (aka ethical) sense, even if for the wrong reasons.
In resumen, (i am boring myself) people like cats.
Any animal or living being has the importance people put on them, because importance is nothing but a measure of how convenient is something for us. The universe is anthropocentric because it is anthropogenic. We create it when we perceive it. We perceive a cat as a pet, a chicken and a pig as food, in the same way we perceive other humans as our equals and therefore as superior to a pet or food, that is all.
There are evolutionary reasons under this way of seeing things, reasons we call ethics. Putting human life above other animals life is a requisite for us surviving as species, and obviously it is the same for any other species. There are individual cases where a human could considers his cat more important than other humans, or dogs considering its owner more important than other dogs, but such cases are deviations from the average, and we call them crazyness and domestication respectively. In fact giving more or less importance to animals according to how sentient we perceive them is nothing but giving more or less importance according to how similar to humans we perceive them, which makes some kind of evolutionary (aka ethical) sense, even if for the wrong reasons.
In resumen, (i am boring myself) people like cats.
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