Cat Recovering, Boy Claims Responsibility

A child owning up to a controversial act, a stray cat rescued, recovering, and finding a home. What do I find so illustrative about this particular story? What does it tell us?

The boy and his father claim they were "protecting quail," which means they are likely quail hunters, and wished to protect that population from other predators for their own use. After all, if they were acting out of humanitarian concerns regarding animals, they would hardly have shot a cat in the head with an arrow. Quail are not songbirds, or endangered, which describes other bird species whose protection advocates have targeted cats as the cause of their dwindling populations.

The irony here is that cats are not the cause of dwindling bird populations. One study, Removing cats to protect birds backfires on island, discovered: "But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode...". Cats are far more hunters of rodents than they are of birds. In turn, rodents, who eat both bird eggs and the vegetation birds need to survive, are far more a danger to birds than cats are. So this child acted on a "truth" that turned out to be a myth. What is true is that cats are our friends. And, despite the occasional poultry dinner, cats are friends to birds, too.

The other part of this story I found troubling was the debate about what law the child broke. In Gem County, Idaho, it is illegal to shoot at pets with a bow and arrow. But without an owner to come forward, this cat could be considered a stray; and the law does not speak to that. It moves into a grayer area of "animal cruelty." While it seems indisputable that getting an arrow through the head qualifies as "cruel," this loophole in the law illustrates a difficulty. One which humanitarians, who fight to enforce animal cruelty laws, run into all the time.

This law was designed to protect pet owners from the loss of a beloved family member. There's nothing wrong with that. But they do not consider the feelings of the cat, for whom getting shot hurts the same whether they are owned, or not. That is the other myth in this story; the one about creating, and enforcing, animal cruelty laws. This myth is about how animal cruelty can seem a lower tier concern to people; that an animal's suffering is somehow less, because they are not a human being.

The truth is that animal cruelty laws are really about people. It is about our capability for empathy; cats are living, feeling beings, too. Anyone who receives love from their pet cat knows this is true. To be a living, feeling human being means we should have compassion for other living, feeling, beings. Sadly, human history records grave atrocities committed against other human beings, on the rationale that these people were not really "people." This lesson should teach us that is is always better to err on the side of compassion.

There is not just a philosophical side to animal cruelty laws. There is a practical side, too. Science has established that those who would prey on humans, the serial killers of a thousand horror movies, start with animals. This article, Cat Killer, describes the case of the United State's "most punished animal abuser," Barry Herbeck. He would answer "free to a good home" ads with his children in tow for cover, only to torture and kill these animals. His children knew that. They were too terrified to speak up. His girlfriend found evidence of his crimes and turned him in. Would he have progressed to people? Psychiatrists are certain of it. He was caught, and incarcerated, before he did so. But the suffering he had already inflicted on his children was certainly reason enough to remove him from society. Isn't the suffering he inflicted on other, even more voiceless, creatures, enough to incarcerate him? The state of Wisconsin thought so. I agree.

So this is both a happy story, and a sad story. That a young boy, acting out of false assumptions about the world, committed a cruel act. Perhaps he sees the world differently now; I hope so. True sportsmen, after all, pride themselves on inflicting as little pain as possible upon their prey. That is a good lesson to learn. There is the same lesson here for all of us.

It is that humanitarian concerns are not about what they say about the creature we rescue. It is what they say about the creature who does the rescuing. That is what puts the "human" in humanitarian.

By Pamela Merritt from The Way Of Cats