Editor, The Times:
“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
Perhaps that Emmanuel Kant quote partly explains why Man’s justice system dropped the charges against the two men who shot a domesticated cat (later named Joe by his saviours) 17 times in the head with a pellet gun, destroying an eye.
Similkameen Spotlight editor and column author Andrea DeMeer finds troubling that more than a third of surveyed adults “would, under some circumstances, choose to save the life of their dog over the life of a human being, if they could save only one.”
I’m surprised the percentage isn’t much higher!
Maybe the courthouse protestors demanding justice for the brutalized feline Joe—those to whom DeMeer declares, “Hey crazy people, it’s [just] a cat”—feel the same way as I, that it’s understandable for one to save the life of their beloved pet over that of a stranger.
It seems to me that DeMeer can’t relate to the heartfelt motivation behind such public outrage, regardless of it being directed at such senseless cruelty to an animal, therefore she perceives them as being somehow misguided.
Such people, perhaps unlike those who grew up on an animal-food production farm, may not see pet animals in a subordinate manner but instead cherish—therefore protect—their pets as indeed family members.
To be clear, along with human intelligence comes the potential for maliciousness for the sake of malice. While, being of notably lower intelligence, animals can react violently it’s typically due to distrust; however, leave it to humans to commit a spiteful act, if only because we can. Thus, I find, with animals there’s a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait.
Hence the jerks who, maybe with nothing better to do, gratuitously assaulted Joe.
But what particularly annoys me about such rather reckless commentary is that, rather than being just about a viciously assaulted cat, or any another animal, it’s about the very serious matter of the needless torture of an animal by two creeps, who (besides plain not liking cats) likely justified it to themselves with the lame typically-human line, ‘Hey, it’s just a cat, after all.’
As far as my pet cat (Simon) goes, he’ll never be just a cat. Everything from slightly whining like a small child when wanting something, to having much to say via loud trilling or an adorable combination of meow and trill, or refusing to eat food dropped to the floor while everyone else eats at the table—he’s quite the very loved family member. And I don’t consider myself at all crazy for it.
Frank Sterle Jr.,
White Rock, B.C.
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