From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: Vegetarian Cats2: Morality
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 18:17:24 GMT



A.  THE MORALITY OF VEGETARIAN CATS

One poster wrote:
[. . .]
> I hear much talk about people wanting to place their pets on
>vegetarian diets.  This bothers me.  %I% would like to do this for
>my cats, but if I were to do so, wouldn't I simply be imposing my
>morality on them?

Are you are not already doing that by having your cat `fixed' so
as to prevent cats from becoming overpopulated?  Of course you
say that this is for the best interests of the cat and it is not
a question of morality but of prevention of a greater cruelty.
I agree, but some people have such a simplistic notion of purity
and "naturalness" that even birth control for animals is seen as
some kind of moral intervention.

Now, what about chasing, or otherwise sometimes preventing your
cat, from successfully catching and killing, say, a bird?  Are you
not here imposing upon your own cat (or somebody else's cat) your
own morality about minimizing or preventing the unnecessary death
of other animals?  I think you are but here the morality is
correct.

Some people would wave their arms about all the mice and small
birds that cats kill and that we are therefore indirectly
responsible of this killing by harboring such an efficient
predator and "killer".  With respect to the ethics of my cat
killing other animals, well, this not a serious moral concern for
us.  What animals do is really a matter of `Nature', but what we
do is, for better or worst, a matter of ethics.  Animals simply
"behave" but we are both endowed and cursed to learn how to
properly "conduct" ourselves with respect to each other and the
natural world.  Of course, cats have tethered their destiny to
ours and to some extent I guess we are responsible for their
behaviour.  I don't encourage my cat to kill birds and I have
taken some simple measures (short of putting a bell around my
cat) to mitigate the problem.

Pets are part of our mixed human-animal community and are  
coevolved social beings who share with us certain feelings
and capacities for interspecies sociability.  As Mary Midgley
in her fine book, ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER, 1983, insightfully
pointed out:

All human communities have involved animals.  The animals . . .
became tame, not just through fear of violence, but because
they were able to form individual bonds with those who tamed
them by coming to understand the social signals addressed to
them...
They were able to do this, not only because the people taming
them were social beings, but because they themselves were
so as well. (pg. 112)

Hence, we are joint members of a nested communities each of member
of which has different capacities and living but which all share to
some extent similar social capacities and feelings.  To the extent
we are different we may have different moral requirements.  Ours of
course is the more onerous moral requirement to honor our evolved
relationship with our pets, a relationship built on trust and
social feeling.  Our pets in turn only have to adapt to some
constraints of human society, like not defecating on the carpet,
and eating what nutritious foods we choose to provide.  

Providing nutritious and tasty vegetarian pet foods does not betray
our trust with these coevolved social beings.  I think we can,
however, easily think of some ways in which that trust is violated,
and it does not include providing vegetarian pet food.

					Happy Vegetarian Holiday,
						ted

Newsgroups: rec.food.veg