How fast can you tie your laces? Stupid question, yes? Perhaps not. We are taught how to tie laces when we are kids. There are many different ways of doing it. I think the way I was taught is a good one. A good friend of mine has a slower method; no blame on him. It is just the way he was taught. And we don’t question these sorts of things. We do them all our lives. What other things have we been taught that we don’t question and which affects us all our lives? What about cats!? That’s the point of the headline. A lot of kids are taught the wrong stuff about domestic and feral cats. And it sticks all their lives.
Worse, almost, is seeing trophy hunting fathers and mothers teaching their sons and daughters to kill animals for pleasure. These poor kids are indelibly indoctrinated into believing that animals are non-sentient beings. In fact, they don’t understand the word ‘sentience’ because their father doesn’t either. Nor their mother. The film ‘American Sniper’ has one sequence where the central character teaches his boy to shoot deer. Horrible for me. Good film though and influential.
This is me tying my laces. Can you do it this fast? Tell me in a comment. Feel free to express yourself 😉. I guess I was taught right but it was pure chance if I was. P.S. There is a positive side to this: good parenting which engenders a love of animals is incredibly constructive going forward. Humankind needs more animal lovers as the animals of the world are in general under great stress due to human behavior.
I have seen women gushing with pride, rifle in hand, standing over a rare giraffe which has been propped up for the camera shoot. Or a middle-aged, silver-haired man with pots of money proudly standing over a magnificent but brutally ‘murdered’ lion with a glorious mane. Ghastly, Disgusting for me. Totally normal for them. We are worlds apart. They can never understand that what they do it immoral, cruel and very much out of step with modern life.
The same goes for attitudes towards domestic cats. Father teaches daughter that they are dirty and evil. Or ‘independent’. That they bite and scratch and need to be exterminated. They teach kids in their early years, when their brains are like sponges, that feral cats spread disease or that they kill billions of beautiful song birds and cute, furry mammals.
For the rest of their lives, they dislike cats and some see no problem with shooting feral cats for sport. And they don’t mind if they occasionally make a mistake and shoot someone’s pet.
What we are taught in the early years sticks for the whole of our lives unless this training is challenged and even then, it can be very hard to change attitudes in adulthood, so firmly fixed are the ideas. People who are cruel to cats do so unthinkingly. They are convinced that they are right because they were taught it very early on in their lives.
I am sure that animal cruelty is confined to certain families in society. They ideas are handed down through generations for hundreds of years without change. It is the same families who persist in their cruelty. The cycle needs to be broken and they can start by asking, ‘How fast can you tie your laces?’. This will allow them to open their eyes to whether their thoughts and methods are good.
Below are some more pages on cruelty to cats.
