Hypothetically, lets say you were walking around some abandoned house. From the moment you walk in the door, you can hear the weak, helpless cry of a kitten. It never stops meowing, so it’s easy to locate. When you find it, you see an orange kitten of about 10 weeks. (Okay I don’t know about kittens, but lets say it’s 30 percent full grown, if that makes sense)
Its hind leg is injured. There is scaring and scabs from some injury, and it is unable to walk on it. This leg just hovers. The cat has a very noticeable limp and looks to be in constant pain. His ribs are showing and there is no food around. You have no food to give him. He still has not stopped crying.
Do you kill it to end its suffering? Or do you leave it to starve to death or die from infection. Which is morally the better thing to do?
Take the kitten to the Humane Society or similar organization. The staff there will be in a better position to judge the kitten’s likelyhood of survival, and can put it down with minimum pain if that’s best for it.
A 10 week old kitten is old enough to be adopted, it’s almost certainly weaned. Some people adopt kittens at 6 weeks, but I prefer to wait until 8 or 10 weeks old.
Good response. I realize I left that part out of my scenario.
For this scenario, you cannot leave the building with the animal. There are also no local organizations around whom you could later contact to go pick it up.
You really have only two options. Kill it. Or Leave It. You possibly could give it something edible. You could give it some water. But that’s about it. You probably wont be anywhere near that abondoned house again in weeks–if ever.
But what if you had the foresight to see that nobody is coming for the kitten, ever. :eek:
The OP was fairly straight forward:
In this case, (and I’m not fond of killing kittens), the greater good is to end its suffering. Then there’s the question of “who are you to say what being is suffering?” But that wasn’t the question, and if asked, wouldn’t get a worthy response.
It isn’t much of a real word hypothetical. Those two options are rarely, if ever, the only two. I can’t imagine a situation in which I don’t have the time to or wherewithall to pick up a kitten and get it some help. Maybe if I were broke, crippled and feeble myself?
Would I put an animal out of its misery if death were imminent and relentless, crushing suffering its only outlook? Sure. Who wouldn’t? But a lame, starving kitten can recover with proper care. And in the real world, someone else could easily come along and care for it.
If the question is whether to end an animal’s suffering or prolong a miserable life, pet owners face that all the time. Most choose euthanasia.
Wait, I forget, is the kitten stuck in a burning car or isn’t it…
but seriously - if the question really is like Contrapuntal summed it up once you get rid of the absurdity of the hypothetical, then euthanasia is the way to go. But this assumes that you have a way of killing it relatively quickly and painlessly. I don’t think stomping its head in with your boot counts as euthanasia, for instance. But let’s say you have some poison in your pocket, shall we?
As humans, we have a moral obligation to take care of the people, animals and the world around us. This cat was someone’s moral obligation to take care of, heal, feed. They did not, for whatever reasons. It then becomes the responsibility of the larger community to take care of. As part of the larger human community, it becomes whoever happens upon the kitten to take care of. Seeing that you had no resources to feed, heal, or take the kitten with you, it becomes your responsibility to put the cat out of it’s misery.
Sure, it isn’t much of a real world hypothetical. But it was a hypothetical nonetheless in which the OP gave an A (end the suffering) or B (let nature take its course) option. Not C, lets disassemble the hypothetical to make it a possible real world hypothetical.
That seems like an assumption you can’t make, to me. Can kittens form such intricate thoughts? Like “I’m not doing so well, and it will only get worse, but I’d rather stick it out?” Giving human motivations to animals can work both ways - in that situation, I would probably be asking the person to kill me.
If I were in a position to know that the kitten could not make it, and that it also was not going to die quickly and painlessly, I would feel under a moral obligation to end its suffering. I’d hate to have to figure out the best way to do it.
(Actually, the “crush its head fast” idea isn’t too bad, given that I’m assuming you don’t have the proper equipment for euthanizing by injection there…)
It’s an interesting point. I’ve worked with animals a bit in a laboratory setting and to some extent, animals who are wounded badly enough that they need to be euthanized under protocols still actively resist handling/capture. It’s hard to draw conclusions from that behavior, but I often wonder if the idea that it’s better not to exist than to suffer is more of a human contrivance.
Right, they’re resisting handling/capture. They’re not resisting death, 'cause (it appears) they don’t understand it, nor do they understand you’re handling/capturing them to kill them. They DO understand that they’re in pain and that, generally speaking, big scary creatures picking them up when they hurt are likely to cause more pain, and they’d rather not, thanks.
Even in humans, I’m sure there are some autonomic nervous system responses that kick in when death is imminent and make it appear as if a person is “resisting” a death that they welcome.
Me? I’d boot stomp the poor little sucker.
IRL, of course, I’d bring it to **vetbridge **and ask what we should do. But (where’s don’tfightthehypothetical when you need her?) in the hypothetical as written, I’m just going to end her suffering, not to mention mine, as quickly as possible.
Yeah, that’s another (perhaps more plausible) interpretation of the same behavior. It’s hard, if not impossible to know whether animals really have a concept of death–but here, aren’t you essentially projecting your own concept of (1) animal awareness (2) death onto the kitten? Is the escape response of animals, in the absence of better evidence to the contrary, the closest analogue to them refusing euthanasia?
Of course, animals try to escape from even benign care, so maybe this is a stupid argument I’m making. Anyway, I guess the point is, humans do a lot of projecting and anthropomorphizing where it’s maybe not appropriate. I don’t know.
ok, so how are you supposed to kill this cat? Stepping on it? Twisting its neck? I am not seeing too many options for a quick death to this creature. The question then becomes can I kill this animal in a way less horrible than starving?
When coming across an injured, starving animal, I think the best thing to do would be to pet it. But first, you want to rub raw meat all over your hands and arms, so that the animal is soothed by those meaty smells.
And if it’s a cat, you could consider giving it a bath. But don’t use gloves, because gloves scare cats.
OK Fine. In his hypothetical, *I was unable to save it. He said nothing about letting someone else *save it. Better?
Look, seriously. The hypothetical is so unlikely that the question really boils down whether or not we should allow an animal to die, or end its suffering. As I pointed out in the post you quoted. The abandoned house and apparent inability to transport a terminally weak kitten have nothing to do with it.
