My Catch and Release Cat

[John Bessa]

I recently adopted a cat who is still a kitten in many respects and is sweet, but was homeless and had to survive much of the winter by hunting. She is incredibly affectionate, makes herself loved, and wherever she goes, she gets taken care of. When we were first getting to know each other, showed up with a bird she had just caught. I went to get my camera to document what was she was doing, but when I got back absolutely nothing was left of the bird except claws and a few feathers. And then when we were playing a little later she sank her teeth and claws into my hand, and she would have torn it apart if I let her. As a hunter her "sweet" nature had given way to her predatory nature, and while we were playing, her "motor memory," kept her hunter nature alive as we played.

So she is a bit bi-polar, and plays very rough. She is an incredible running back, and a master of the "fakey" when she wants to get out of the door. She caught a mouse one night, then another the next night another, then another.. until I figured out it was the same mouse over and over. She has changed her hunting style and become a catch-and-release cat, showing concern for the life of the mouse: her empathy. Finally the mouse stopped visiting.

Her two natures are completely different. The first nature is how life lives in a social environment, and the second is how life survives in a hostile natural environment. We humans have an alternative; traditionally we garnished grains with goodies that included meat, but meat was historically rare. Sometime during the past few thousand years, people in the Far East solved the meat problem by domesticating and evolving the soy bean, which completely replaces meat. Buddhism may have started in India, but its basic principles lived so long in Eastern Asia that a culture was able resolve natural life's primary contradiction by collaborating technologically not just empathically, but with empathy as a goal.

From Spiritual Darwinism :
In the Native cultures of the New World the hunter would pray for the animal's soul in a form of the hereafter as an apology, and the prey would be offered tobacco, considered by New World tribal Natives as a psychological medicine. In stark contrast, the typical American hunter kills from a historical perspective of colonialism: exploitation. As capitalism absorbed Native culture, native hunters collapsed morally, transforming into cold killers as they lost their spiritual connection to their prey.

This is part of my writing The End of the Age of the Predator, which was originally written by request Op Ed News, but was rejected.