Killing kittens is heartless and cruel, but it doesn’t even make it into the quarterfinals for subhuman brutality:
Father crushes newborn’s skull with a cinder block because he couldn’t afford another child.
Has to jump in and tell why we (rescue people) will spend so much money for one critter instead of having it put down and saving many others…
I can’t speak for all of the other voluneers, but I can speak for myself. I do this out of love. I spend my extra money and PTO for rescue. I trap feral cats and have them fixed, knowing that they will just be coyote food.
We can’t save the world, we can only save one dog/cat at a time. We know this. Saving one abused kitten that we can see makes us feel like we are making a difference. We do know that our money could be better spent if we just sent it to the Humane Society and went back to our mundane lives.
I’m pretty sure this wasn’t clear…so…what would make you folks feel better…to stop on the street and pick up a homeless kid, turn his life around and watch him graduate from college…or just send money to a homeless shelter?
Wait, what happened to the first kitten - didn’t anyone check on it to see if it really was dead?
I don’t think that’s the real question, and I would argue that with all due respect for the fact that your intentions and impulses are good no matter how they manifest, the truth is that it’s not love, it’s self-gratification that drives your choice to save the kitty in front of you. (Which is certainly nice for that kitty or that kid!)
If you really and truly want to do the most good, as opposed to personally observing and experiencing the direct emotional rewards of doing good, you need to harden your heart to the individual cases, because expending limited resources on individual cases reduces the resources available and will potentially have a negative effect on MORE animals dueto the lack of available resources to meet those needs.*
But you want to SEE your efforts pay off because it pleases you personally, so you make the decision to save that particular kitten by paying the $2000 vet bill vs. spending $2000 vaccinating 1000 anonymous cats against feline leukemia: you won’t ever see the kitties who end up suffering and dying from feline leukemia that you could have saved, you do get to see the kitty who got bashed up heal.
If general love of all suffering kitties in need was your real motive, you’d love the kitty you see in front of you that’s all bashed up by lovingly assisting it in peacefully shuffling off this mortal coil instead of putting it through the extended pain and suffering of weeks of healing which may not work in the end anyway or which may still have lingering effects. Then spread the love to a thousand other kitties who need it by taking the rest of that money and applying it to their needs.
*Although in the cases that are widely publicized, the net good of healing particular animals may do greater good for more animals because the individual stories prompt more people to give more money for that particular animal, and there ends up being extra, more than there would have been without the notorious case. But that extra should go to the 1000 kittes, not to another one or two kitties in the same kind of extreme need that famous kitty was. It’s PR value, and it’s a matter of balancing those calls. Patrick was a good call, because saving him was relatively cheap and certainly not hard on him directly, and I’m sure he’s responsible for a lot of extra money. Dragging various dogs and cats that have already been tortured nearly to death through weeks and months of rehab without any larger benefit… no. Kinder, and smarter, to let them go and focus on the big picture.
Oh dude, wanting to kill a human being for killing a kitten, you’re sooooooo gonna freak when you find out what humans are doing to these guys and these guys. You’re going to want to kill millions of us. Oh sure, we have our rationalizations and justifications. We can’t survive without killing living beings with lesser brain function (but without furry tails). We have no viable alternatives. Killing living beings with lesser brain function for sustenance is so much better, morally, than killing a kitten seemingly for sport, even though functionally it’s the same from the animal’s perspective: it’s still dead.It’s these moral relativisms that allow us to decry the evilness of killing a kitten while savoring a succulent roasted lamb dinner. Would you find it acceptable if I killed a cute, fuzzy little kitten with the intention of eating it for dinner? A kitten provides sustenance like a chicken or cattle, right? Maybe that’s what the woman in the story intended. Like plains lions, she was teaching her young to hunt. Sometimes the lesson is the greatest reward and the lions don’t even eat the catch.
For the record, you’re against the death penalty for killing a human being but for the death penalty for killing a kitten?