Stop cat euthanasia

Sometimes we get asked a simple question and then your answer turns into this avalanche of thought after thought after thought, jumping from an idea to another until you are talking about a completely different topic.

Take today for instance - a co-worker asked me how come I'm not mad at my cat when she destroys my furniture - I told her that ruined upholstery is just a natural part of taking a cat, or any pet for that matter, inside your home. You have a living piece of nature inside your house, a semi-wild animal, a feral born feline and expecting it to not follow its natural instincts is crazy and unreasonable. When you accepted an animal in your life you accepted all the consequences as well. You owe it to your pet to respect it and love it just like they love and accept you despite all your flaws.

But humans are not like that - they think they have the right to regulate what animals have the right to life and who to kill - just because they committed the crime of being born. They trap cats living in our cities and they kill them, as if those poor cats actually did anything to anybody. The way American cities are going, there won't be any more cats living here in a hundred years. Remember when you were a kid and you found a cute kitten on your way from school and begged your mom to let you keep her? Well, if things keep going this way, that won't happen anymore.

Just think of what cats do in our cities and towns - they eat our garbage, they kill our vermin and when approached by a human, they don't attack or growl or bite like dogs do - they run away. They are simply not threatening to us, not even a nuisance. And yet, just because they are seen as pets, or domesticated animals, we see the cats living in back alleys and fields as an abomination, something to be corrected, even though that's where most of us find our beloved pets to begin with, not from a kitten mill or your local Pet Smart. You wouldn't think to kill the birds in the sky, would you? Or all the fish in a sea? Or all the parrots that flew away from their owners' homes? Cats are also a part of nature, animals just like all others.

It breaks my heart to think of this, how these cats have no fault, they bother no one, they live on the fringes of our society, allow us an endless supply of loving pets when caught, yet they are being exterminated as if they were a danger to anyone. And don't even get me started on the kids who torture them, that's a whole 'nother group of people I would like to kill with my own hands.

I have gotten most of my pets this way, found them on the street, either abandoned or as kittens of a feral mother and I found the most amazing companions this way - in fact the one cat that I absolutely adore was hiding under my car as a skin-and-bones kitten. I took her in and she is the light of my life, beautiful, smart, playful, an amazing personality, quirky, spoiled, she makes me laugh every day and I consider myself so lucky to have her in my life. The luckiest pet owner in the world actually. All this happiness from a tiny white kitten hiding from dogs under my car, in a back alley in this town. I just hope that children in the next generations get to experience this for themselves as well; if not, our world will be much poorer indeed.