Can supporting a cat ever be ethical?

[averagefolk]

I will start with a confession: I adore cats. I am always happier and more calm when they are around. Given this fact, many friends have wondered why I have not adopted one already. The short answer is that I cannot square my veganism with cat adoption.

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I sometimes describe myself as a naive consequentialist. I'm not especially well-educated on the topic, but I find the arguments of Peter Singer to be compelling. I want to act in a way that reduces overall suffering, even if doing so requires me to suffer or be inconvenienced. I'm skeptical that happiness and pleasure can negate suffering and pain, even though I can't exactly explain why. I'm open to having my mind changed about that.

My challenge is this: for one cat to live, many chickens, turkeys, fish, and other animals need to suffer, perhaps immensely. There is clearly more suffering on one fork of the trolley track and it is not the fork with the scratching post. Therefore, how can anyone support feeding a cat? Would the world not be better off if most cats were euthanized, as heartbreaking as that might be?

Further, if one believes that the happiness of the cat and the happiness that the cat brings to others negates the suffering that the cat's life necessitates, could one not use the same argument to justify a non-vegan life if it brings them a sufficient amount of pleasure?

[Red]

I can understand your concern, but it's possible to feed female cats vegan cat food and give them all their nutritional requirements. For male cats, the best solution is a mix of vegan cat food and freegan meat, until we can develop vegan cat food that's adequate for male cats too.
https://vegieworld.com/
(Warning website seems to be under maintenance)

Hypothetically, if we lived in a world where cats cannot be fed vegan (and freegan meat was just as unethical as regular meat), I would agree it's probably not a good idea to adopt cats; it isn't really very effective altruism to adopt animals from shelters, so the best thing to do is advocate for spaying/neutering cats (including the ones in your neighborhood). The happiness given to some people for having cats around I do not think would negate all the deaths that would incur just to feed the cat.

[thebestofenergy]

Welcome to the forum!

Would the world not be better off if most cats were euthanized, as heartbreaking as that might be?

Yes, it would be much better if cats weren't there.
It's estimated that cats kill tens of billions of animals (birds and mammals) every year - it's a figure that it's almost in the same ballpark as factory farming. And they don't do it quick, they torture their pray sometimes for minutes or even hours, because they have a hunting instinct that urges them to play roughly with the prey.

That said, euthanizing cats in mass would not be practical.
The situation doesn't have to be solved with drastic measures, when it can be done through less villain-ish means that can actually be done in the real world.
A few things to observe with cats would be:
1. Try your best to feed them a freegan diet (i.e. get the discarded meat from a butcher for free, instead of buying it), or vegan diet + needed supplementation if possible.
2. Keep cats indoors more frequently, especially during spring when baby birds are born and often killed by cats - so as to reduce the amount of killing that they do.
3. Do NOT buy bred cats, as it increases the demand and therefore the supply of cats, increasing the amount of cats, and taking care of a bred cat instead of a stray cat that could have done a lot better with some care.
4. Neuter your cats. This should be mandatory.

Following these steps, the cat population will slowly decrease without having to harm them, and feeding them a diet that's as possibly close to cruelty-free as it can get (freeganism) while it decreases.

If having a cat would make you really happy, try to set-up a way to feed them freegan (meat that would go to waste otherwise), and adopt a stray cat that you can then neuter.
This way you'll
1. have your cat around that you love,
2. have them not impact the demand of animal products,
3. potentially stop multiple generations of cats - by neutering it - that would have been born from that cat and probably would have had a miserable life (depending where you live), and would have killed a lot of animals.

By adopting a stray cat, feeding it freegan meat, neutering it, keeping it from killing other animals, and being happy yourself, you'll very likely have a net positive impact.
The alternative would be to leave the stray cat be, which would then kill more animals by hunting, suffer from disease and infections because of no care, likely be fed bought meat by random people, and likely reproduce continuing the cycle - and of course suffering yourself from not having a pet that you really want.

Sometimes the solution is there to get what you want and not have it be a net negative, but we have to look further than just seeing it as dogmatically good or bad, and see if different contexts would change the moral outcome of it.

[Red]

Yes, it would be much better if cats weren't there.
It's estimated that cats kill tens of billions of animals (birds and mammals) every year - it's a figure that it's almost in the same ballpark as factory farming. And they don't do it quick, they torture their pray sometimes for minutes or even hours, because they have a hunting instinct that urges them to play roughly with the prey.

To the extent that they live in the wild and outdoors, I agree. Owners need to be more responsible and make sure their cats don't go on their rampages.

Cats did help humans a lot as a domesticated companion, apparently though they were viewed as bad luck in the middle ages so they killed them instead of having them around, which could have helped prevent a lot of deaths. But it's hard to quantify unknowns like that.

But as you said adopting feral, feeding them vegan, and spaying/neutering them is the best option, as well as getting the ones in your neighborhood spayed/neutered.

[teo123]

Oddly enough, I started the same discussion on another forum slightly less than a year ago: https://textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/v ... 12&t=69844

[Your_Construct]

Hi averagefolk,

You bring up many excellent points. I don't believe it's ethical to own pets period. However, I do realize people yearn to control another conscious being or at least have another conscious being for companionship. A predator does cause suffering. Something has to die in order for the predator to keep living, there's no way around that. You can't be vegan and have a pet that eats meat... philosophically. Your last paragraph summarizes perfectly why a vegan should not have meat-eating pets. I don't have pets myself, but I understand the need some people feel. If you adore cats, the best way to appreciate them is to leave them alone as part of the natural world. It does appear that dogs can be vegan, but I take it you aren't a dog person. You could try looking into other types of pets. I hear rabbits are actually becoming quite popular and they can be house-trained. While other types of pets aren't as appealing as cats, I too can appreciate the allure and mystery of cats, you would be complicit in the suffering that the cat causes. The best case scenario for cat "ownership" would be for you to live in a rural area and develop a friendship with a cat that is feral and feeding and sheltering the cat would not be your responsibility.

[Kwashiorkor]

I'm both a vegetarian and a cat lover but as a moral relativist also I accept cats are predators and need meat to survive. I'd rather give meat to cats than blacks. You have to accept other animals are not ethical in their dietary choices.