Like doing the invoices at the end of the month. Like reading philosophy books and papers. Like throwing the scrunchy 'Grumpy Cat' bananas to be fetched or the pick pig to be tug-of-warred with. Like not using precious diesel. Like Netflix and Amazon Prime (found a new ballet drama - the ballerinas are far wickeder than vikings).
The cats approve of bad weather.
Now, the cats. A dog can live on a vegan diet. A cat can with supplements. This kind of worries me though. The good animal co-citizen guardian-companion must a) protect her cat from cars and dangers and b) protects birdies and mousies from her cat. So the cat is either inddors (like mine) or 'supervised' outside. This is already quite a lot to ask of a cat without expecting him to eat soya and nut roasts. So, the ethical answer? Bye bye pussy cats???
Seriously, my life would not be worth living without them. I mean, dogs are great... but cats are... cats. Rats are cool but pee all over the place, else a rat would be fine. I cannot be an ethical animal person as I advocate for the deaths of creatures to feed my cats. This is troubling.
You see, I can't envisage a world I'd want to live in without non-human friends. Fuck, it would be a world where I had no friends. The cats sleep with me. Under the covers in winter. They are warm and alive and they love me - whatever love means for them. They are soft and seldom smell bad. We communicate. I know what their faces and they sounds mean. They have a pretty good idea about my face and sounds. We have a mutual emotional attachment. We understand touch and bodies and togetherness. We inhabit a world together. Our lives are intertwined.
Cat food aside, I remain puzzled by certain aspects of animal ethics... there seems a tendency among the pro-animal brigade to see other animals not as they actually are but through the lens of a pro-animal human. This means they seem to see them as either too like us or too separate from us. They are different from us and from each other. And they are all individuals.
For one thing, other animals respond to the world as it appears to them not the world as we construct it among ourselves. If you live with animals, you can co-construct parts of the world - my cats and I all see the bed as a very fine place to be and toothbrushing means that bed is what comes next, so toothbrushing is the thing that signals a very good thing is about to happen - but you can't explain freedom, ownership or the mind-body problem. I own my cats, yes, but what matters to the cats is HOW THEIR LIFE GOES. No, they are not free to go and live next door. But they have no conception of next door so that option isn't closed, it's non-existent.
I think this is one root of it: philosophers think choices are either open or closed but they are not. Some choices just don't exists in a subjective sense.
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