As demanded - a word on Kittens.

Recently, Paul D ran a survey. This survey asked what would the ever-tolerant, long-suffering reader(s) of A Word on Failure like to see me blog about next. With an enthusiastic response of 12 participants, an overwhelming majority suggested that they would like to see me blog about Kittens. So despite the fact that the Congo has decided to collapse on itself, Barack Obama is thinking of making Hillary Clinton the person-in-charge-of-making-the-rest-of-the-world-like-America and New Zealand's rugby league team are world champions today's post shall be about my own personal opinions on the offspring of cats.

It's a good thing I like Kittens. They are cute, they play with wool (or yarn), they are soft to touch and nice to pet. Recently a kitten was born in Western Australia that had TWO heads, and I didn't think 'AARGH mutant' - I thought 'Awwww, it can miaow out of both its mouths'. (See for yourselves).

On the other hand I also like meat (I realise this is an unconvincing segue, but bear with me). Ham sandwiches, bacon, kebabs - it's all good really. I realise that on the whole, humans eating meat is bad for the planet (it takes a whole lot more land to grow cows than grain, which means that land is being used inefficiently PLUS having cows burping, farting and polluting is worse for the environment than a whole lot of grain grown in a field. Grain doesn't burp, or fart or cause global warming. It just exists.) And, in a victory for the forces of obviousness, eating meat is also bad for the animals. I don't want to know the number of cows that get thrown out every day at a single Burger King because they make far more burgers than they need. We will kill and eat the mothers of a litter/nest/whetever of baby animals just to gain some short term fufillment and fleeting sense of yum. But despite knowing that eating meat is bad, its also tasty. So while I will freely conceed that I am a worse person than someone committed to a vegetarian diet as of yet I have been unable to ween myself off the idea of spearing chunks of hot,dead animals into my mouth.

Where am I going with this? Well, although I love the taste of meat, there are limited number of animals I would eat. I would eat a sheep. I would eat a cow. I would eat a pig. (But I would not eat green eggs and ham, I do not like it Sam-I-am). But I would not eat a horse. Horses are for riding, not for snacking. And nor would I eat a kitten. Kittens are cute, and are for petting, not for baking into a pie.

But even if I wanted to eat a kitten, I'm not sure if I could in New Zealand. My friends would shun me, and would no longer come around to my house for dinner parties. A local newspaper may even take a picture of me, and tell people that I am unstable. After all, eating a kitten is just objectively wrong, isn't it?

And yet, I think my most vivid encounter with feelings of cultural superiority as a child was being told by my Year 3 teacher (I think it is the equivalent of 2nd Grade) that 'they eat dogs and cats in Asia, you know'. I was horrified and appalled. Eating pets seemed disgusting, unclean and savage. And when I was also told that 'Muslim people don't eat pork', I couldn't work this out either. Everyone ate pork. Pork was yummy, especially with apple. And pigs were things that were just begging to be eaten, from one gross little thing that basically existed to consume the family compost, we were able to extract delicious ham and pork and bacon.

The animals that different societies have chosen to eat seem to have developed along culturally specific lines. One man's household companion is another man's shishkebab. There doesn't seem to be any way to determine which animals should be eaten, and which should not - our own Western society eats animals big and small, feathered and furred, wild and domesticated. Even if we extend this idea away from the eating of animals to the usage of animals in general - a popular Chinese aphrodiasiac is ground-up rhino horn, a practice that again is wholly alien to how Westerners concieve of the rhino, as a beautiful, wild beast to be protected. So with no innate objective rationale to determine what animals are ok to eat, and what animals are not, the best (and still unsatisfactory) conclusion we can reach is that 'all animals are equal - but, in a culturally subjective sense, some are more equal than others'. (apologies to George Orwell)

So I guess my post on kittens isn't really about kittens at all. If we distil it, this post is about whales. My country, New Zealand, is one of the world leaders in the fight against the hunting of whales for food. And on the surface, this seems a decent fight to have. Whales are awesome, they sing, they splash and are the focus for some of the coolest myths and legends of many cultures. But just because my culture finds whales kinda awesome shouldn't be a reason to impose our culture's values upon the Nordic and Japanese cultures. Provided that whales are being hunted in a way that is sustainable and will not lead to the extermination of the species New Zealand's argument basically amounts to a kid petulantly stamping it's foot and screaming 'BUT I DON'T WANT YOU TO DO THAT' without any sufficiently well-grounded moral or economic philosophy to support an arbitrary distinction between why eating beef is good, and eating Pods (see what I did there) is wrong.

If someone can give me a reason why the animal rights claims of whales are superior to the animal rights claims of a sheep, I'd love to hear it - because like I said, whales are awesome. But until then does anyone know a cafe where there do a real good blubber and eggs?

Alex