Today something happened in our world that may easily appear trivial. On one level, I would quite like to ignore it; to go to work tomorrow and think about all the things coming next around the bend. I rather expect most would; perhaps the outwardly cruel among us who did not ignore it would choose instead to laugh about it, and the inwardly cruel - at one time or another almost all of us - might divide it away from themselves into that mental compartment where the entirety of the rest of the world is kept, and tended to with a different standard than we hold for ourselves.
Our cat, Rocky, was neutered today, a few days short of our estimate of his first birthday. If I have been thinking about it a lot - and had, indeed, thought about it a great deal in the months leading up to now - it is not because I need to, but because I have grown obsessed with certain principles. I am not a perfect person but there are principles I know to be true, principles that are incontrovertible to me, and a person is only self-actualized when they find themselves acting, unquestioning, upon the application of their own principles. Ethics is in doing always and everywhere what you are certain to be right.
He didn't deserve to get neutered, for he has only acted always and purely like a cat since the day we brought him home. He has been - I hope beyond hope - happy, and comfortable, and fulfilled of his needs. The toys we buy for him often have a wheel of "pet's needs" on the back, with pie slices for emotional and physical and health needs of all kinds. I did not see the need to procreate listed on a pie slice. But that is what a cat is built to do before everything else. Is it possible for a cat to be happy who cannot fulfill that need?
I suppose there is a lot that goes into answering that question, and I do not dismiss it, but I digress regardless, because I do not know how to answer it. We give him a lot - attention, consideration, and care. He is a member of our family. It hurts us when he is hurt, such as today, when he was so scared, and later, when he was withdrawn. The nature of cat contradicts the nature of a domestic home and a family around the edges, at such times as when he claws and bites me as I reach out of bed in the night, when he often hurts me.
And I suppose neutering is a compromise, an opportunity cost. We, the epitome of evolution, who created the wheel and God and the Quad Stacker, can be so brilliant as to assess overall emotional fulfillment with a formula of clinical and precise logic. The opportunity is that we will be happier, and he will be calmer, and we will need spray him in the face with water less often, and we will need clean off urine-soaked items less often, and our family will feel like a family practicing the human social theory of mutual respect.
Besides, it becomes academic without any good alternatives. I would always be too afraid - of myself, more than anything - to release him into the wild, although I have wandered through those thoughts in my mind more than once, wandering whether his fulfillment years from now, a life of uncertainty and fears and fleeting comforts and so many moments where he can be what he truly is, would have outweighed the happiness we feel with him by our side and equipped with all the measures of our safety, insulated in our world, and of course, his happiness, too, which we hope he feels here with us.
We love him, and he will have a good home, but it is simply and practically impossible to improve upon something's inherent nature, and he is deserving of that, and I wish it could have been his.
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