It's a Cruel World

I'm all for the natural cycle of life and everything, but that doesn't mean I want to watch my cat noisily eat a still-alive mouse that he's tortured for the last half hour.

What is going on? We have seen more mice in the last four days than we have seen in 10 years at this house.

At first we thought it was a nest of baby mice whose momma took a wrong turn and ended up in our house at a bad moment. But I've begun to think differently since watching our young vital cat triumphantly burst through the (new) cat door with a live mouse in her jaws. Uh, for the third time. Hmm. Thinking, thinking... Could it be? She must think she is doing such a good job, and maybe that even our grumpy older cat (to whom she often relinquishes the half-dead mice, after she's had her fun) might even start liking her.

The cats make humans look kind.

It makes me want to track down the cashier at the Food Coop who sneered at my wild swine sausages (how could she?!) and predicted that "someday the animals are going to rise up against the humans". And torture us to death, and possibly eat us alive?

Or perhaps they will all become vegan.

This is not to excuse the crueler aspects of the industrial farms by finding even worse cruelty in the natural world. I imagine 19th century farmers proudly thinking out that that's what makes us human -- the ability to deliver a swift and humane death to our prey. Or so we would hope.

I've got to do something about that cat door.