I have been thinking about the ethics of keeping pets. (I saw on the PETA website we shouldn't use animals for entertainment. No more cute cat videos on YouTube then?) People love their pets. How can it be wrong?
Sometimes when my cat is sleeping, I think "Now is the time for me to gallop across the bed, making a graceful leap over him", like he does at 4 o'clock in the morning. However, I never do.
He comes to the door whenever I come home, and though I pretend to myself he's welcoming me back; I suspect he is really looking to see if he can escape out onto the driveway. When he does make a mad dash out onto the driveway, he then lies down purring whereupon I pick him up and carry him back in.
I keep a chair next to my computer because he likes to sit next to me. Pretty much every day he sits on my computer mouse until I get up and let him sit in my chair. Then I pick him up and put him on his chair and he goes to sleep.
When he sees me carrying a coffee cup up the stairs, he runs ahead of me and jumps out at my ankles. Only when I'm carrying a coffee cup.
He has a dozen toys but much prefers to bring in leaves and gum nuts which he then puts in my shoes for safe keeping.
He won't eat raw meat so we buy a super expensive dry cat food for his teeth and gums. He hates tablets so we buy the super expensive worm and flea liquid treatment.
I send photos of him to my husband when he is at work. There one million photos of the cat sleeping on our iCloud.
We got him as a rescue kitten and I can't help feeling he's having a better life with us; rather than as a feral animal full of worms and fleas with no safe territory, or euthanised. We get the pleasure of living with him, he gets a good life - it seems like a perfectly ethical arrangement.
I wonder if vegans are being a bit too self-denying and overly rigorous?
Another day I want to talk about the vegan attitude to cheese.