One hellishly hot October morning while I was cooking liver for breakfast, I saw a lithe alleycat with a red cardinal crushed in her pink little maw slinking out across my backyard toward the eruption of sickly trees which divided the neighborhoods. The semi-feral fiend glared at me through my kitchen window, the twisted wing of the bird making a sort of red mustache below her ghostly green eyes. A second later, the vagrant darted out back into the liminal streak of undergrowth with her ill gotten prize. That image would not leave my mind as I went about the rest of my morning rituals. As I opened the doors of the shrine sprouting from the north corner of my room, the golden eyes within its blackness seemed to glimmer a touch more than average.
The angular black face they were set within echoed this, seeming to look more quizzical than I remembered from a thousand previous prayers. As I mumbled a brief prayer and lit incense before the jagged idol, the cat would not leave my mind, even as I rushed out of the house.
When you walk most places around town, like I do, you get a very different sense of a region than people who drive everywhere, even if they’ve been living there much longer. There are an ungodly amount of feral cats crawling around this town. Some days I have seen tribes of what must be twenty, easily, lounging in piles amid the shade at the edges of the lot behind the building where I waste my work, somehow at once fat and lithe, haggard and conceited, indignant and furtive, as they scurry to the treeline, or down a storm drain whenever someone opens the back door. Despite being so ubiquitous, I had not thought much about the cats until I had heard about the birds. I don’t even remember where I came across the factoid first, but cats kill four billion birds annually in the United states. Yes you read that right, yes I wrote it right, yes it’s true. They’ve exterminated certain species, in certain regions, entirely. Housecats and strays shared the blame equally. I had heard this at some point long before I saw her with the robin in her mouth, but had not really digested, or considered the implications of it until I saw a case of the phenomenon play out before my eyes.
Armed with the new knowledge which had been provoked by my breakfast visitation, my habit of walking allowed me to become consciously aware of the truly staggering number of cats in every corner of town. Seeing the slinking flea-bitten forms leering lazily from every cracked alley of the burg, the seed planted by the rumor of America's birds slowly falling silent began to grow as the months bled by. It grew into a quiet, cold, contrarian hate. The cats came into these lands the same way that the cars, the computers, and the smokestacks did. Removed from their ancient homeland in darkest Africa, they were a technology, and an obsolete one at that. The smokestacks might be boiling the world alive but at least they kept the lights on. The cats were brought over here to keep the rats in check. Rats could barely scratch the surface of our eternal 20th century’s concrete jungle. The geometry of dead-end industry had sealed those old plague-priests into tombs of refuse beneath the streets, and out of mankind's concern for good. However, the cats were doing a lot better for themselves here up top.
A cat can scratch her owner on a regular basis and still be loved, unconditionally. A dog will wait a few days before eating its master’s corpse. A house cat will do so when dinner is overdue for an hour or two. There's articles online about some quintessential cat- lady who was dead a day or two before anyone found her, and by the time they did she was missing her eyes, along with most of her hands.
That brings my mind back to dinner, which is what gave me some idea of a practical solution, if not to the broader ecological problem of cats, at least to my personal frustration with that problem. I had been cooking cow organs when I saw Old Green Eyes murdering that cardinal. This entire issue was one of who eats who, and who has the right to eat who. Why do people think it’s right to eat certain animals, but wrong to eat others? If you are found to mistreat a cat you may find yourself in serious legal trouble. You can treat millions of pigs and chickens, much worse and make a thriving business of it. Those hells of mud, screaming steel and streaming blood that kept the bankers, garbagemen, and prostitutes of the free world fed had caused more than a few to reject the taste of flesh altogether once they saw that was its source. After all, Animal Planet raised them on TV shows dedicated to shaming and prosecuting people who had done much less to their own house cats.
You know, I have always found it funny how those people who complain about mankind's treatment of our neighbors base their complaints upon how human-like a given form of life happens to be. Even in their attempts to debase man’s position as the center of the living world, they can’t help but re-affirm his place at the center of it. God is dead but Adam is still naming the animals regardless. Even though people claim that their sympathy for other creatures is determined by the human virtue those creatures exhibit, this is also a complete lie. Even a cursory study of animal intelligence reveals the fact there is basically no correlation between the degree of “intelligence” exhibited by a species, and social taboos regarding their slaughter and consumption. Pigs are just as intelligent as dogs, and dogs, left to their own devices, are just as filthy as pigs, but dogs are given a higher status, even lionized as “man's best friend”. I submit that, like the cat, it is because they were adapted from animals into a beneficial technology in the distant past. No sense in eating something that helps catch a thousand other meals. Very rarely do cats and dogs serve their real purpose in the gilt-glass cage Adam has built for himself but some vague memory of it still stimulates affection in his mind. Recent research, which is too convoluted to dissect here, also suggests that plants are capable of cross species communication between each other and fungi. It has even been suggested by credible scientists that they are aware of humans as a third group, and have attempted to communicate with researchers. Something to think about when re-digesting nutrients that carrot siphoned from dead things in the dirt.
Living or bled, meat can never be anything but murder.
Adam might not be dead just yet but he’s senile and needs machines to breathe. I killed and ate my first animal when I was a boy, so I’ve always known the new glass Eden was just a performance, but it didn’t make navigating the hall of funhouse mirrors any easier. It had never occurred to me to try violating the assigned roles of “pet” and “food” animals.
I decided I would murder that green-eyed cat, skin her, cook her, and eat her. I have always prided myself on intellectual consistency, almost above anything else, and there was no material difference between breaking the neck of a stray cat, and eating at McDonalds, besides the obvious fact that the former benefitted local bird ecology. I would have one more thing to prove I was more sane, real, and ruthless than my neighbors with their second hand Sunday school spirituality, their third hand Wikipedia worldviews.
I wanted to make an offering to the space where socially ingrained impulse stopped mattering, to the ground on which civilized constructs a built, to the slithering atavisms beneath conscious thought an offering of blood from one such slit-eyed alien who would happily eat the helplessly beautiful birds until suburban mornings fell silent.
If I got enough of them, maybe birds would bounce back around here.
I had decided that I would start by skinning that greedy green eyed cat. Twist her head all the way around till all she could do was stare at the tip of her tail. Tie off her velveted throat into a bloody bulging knot to shut out and spare the birds so the rising sun would never go unannounced in this road-rusted valley.
I had decided that I would eat that cat, cut through the fuzz and peel away the skin from her boney little back, and bite down while her lean morsels still bled. I would only cook her enough to kill the worms. I would twist her bones into a stinking, scabbed effigy with spent shell casings shoved into its eyes, and leave the horrid thing standing in the middle of that coughing creek of runoff where schoolgirls who should know better sometimes smoke and fail to skip stones.
“Young lady ANYBODY could be out in those crooked woods!”
I began to leave slices of salami out back where she would sometimes stretch out in the sunlight. Cats are nothing if not good at figuring out a good deal when they find one. A few days later, she was sitting straight up by my car, waiting for me as I exited the house. She mewed a long, whining cascade of petitions, and I awkwardly unlocked the front door to dart back to the kitchen and retrieve the bait I had hooked her on.
Her eyes locked on to the morsel, and her petitions doubled their pace. Her previous canny demeanor was totally overcome by her greed now, and she tried to jump up my leg as I made my way to the space between two cars parallel parked on the curb. I sat down on the tarmac and flopped the meat down in front of me.. She approached and her whines cut off with a digital abruptness as she began to eat greedily, paws pressed tightly together under her chin, back etched into a horseshoe, eyes blinking every second. There were no clear views of us from any of the surrounding houses. When I put my hand on her head she didn’t even finish her last meal before nuzzling it. It would be trivial to gently pet her head, and mid-motion, wrap my fingers around the sides of her skull, before twisting with my arm’s full force and range of movement.
I smiled. I felt evil slither out of my heart to the tips of my extremities. I felt like a murderer. If I was a character in a story, doing this would upset the reader more than if I committed a murder.
Out of the eater came something to eat.
The line from Samson’s riddle oozed through the folds of my brain.
Out of the strong, something sweet.
And here I was giving the strong something bitter. If evolution is the only force propelling life upwards, and that force only has one tool, and one fuel: extinction. Why then were those who believed themselves the rarified products on the sequential extinctions of evolution, so down on the concept of creatures going extinct? Isn’t that for the best, whenever it happens to happen? Conversely, why are the ones who believe every spiral of deoxyribonucleic acid was handwritten by Yahweh not only not seem to care about preserving their lord's work, but universally sneered at anyone who pointed out it was being defaced? And here I was, someone who believed in neither view, trying to prove how much I didn’t believe in either view by conceding to the rules of both! I had always defended man’s place in the world, not by any divine favor to man, but by divine favor to those who played by the rules divinity placed over the world.
The powers in the world love a winner. At least, that's what I like to tell myself.
The divide between nature and artifice dissolves when you look for it for any extended period, as does the line between extinction and evolution. Why was it so bad that the birds were going silent? If they had been outmoded by new blood on the continent, blood spread here in service of my own race’s machinations no less, who am I to deny such conquest? In less than a week of self righteous introspection I had become like those sated old men who kicked the legs out from under my generation, a movie star writing his kids out of the will and giving it all to orphans in Africa, inflicting hardship on that which once served me “to teach a lesson”, but really to expunge an artificial and wholly self imposed guilt. Unlike the cat killing the bird, I had nothing real to gain by killing the cat, other than masturbating a reflexive contrarian impulse.
Perhaps that observation is what glinted in my idol’s eyes.
The cat rubbed against my leg, and mewled.
It struck me that I had never, even once, liked it when the bird's morning choir woke me up.
-- IHJ is a local cultist.