Rethink the Domestic Cat?

I believe it is time to take stock and work out if we are actually making progress in our relationship with the domestic cat. Are things getting better for the domestic cat? My feeling is that some things are getting better while somethings are getting worse and somethings are the same but we are not progressing the relationship and a lot needs to be done to improve it.

There is and always will be a body of domestic cats that are ill-treated and become stray. As there are more people in the world and therefore more domestic cats, there are inevitably more stray cats. These are cats that have wandered away from inadequate cat owners who have failed to neuter their cats and failed to microchip them.

If there are more and more domestic cats becoming stray and more cats turned in to shelters to be killed (aka euthanised), is it not time to reassess our relationship with cats?

I have long believed that the whole concept of the domestication of the cat needs to be reassessed from the standpoint of asking the question: "is it a success?"

The smart people in the West have decided not to bring children into the world because the world sucks. It is wrong and getting worse. The unthinking ones are just breeding children and letting their cats breed as well.

We are going backwards aren't we? It seems we need to recapture some of what was good about 50 year ago for the domestic cat when there was more freedom and less traffic. Less cats. Less killing of cats at "shelters". The naturalness of the domestic cat's life in years gone by must be better than being imprisoned inside a someone's home all their life because it is safer.

For cats in the West life is becoming too artificial and in the East it is too brutal, too harsh. The more I know about the lives of domestic cats across the planet the more I see room for improvement and a total rethink.

The problem is we, the humans, have our hands full trying to solve our own problems. The ones we have created. The domestic cat is a victim and we tend to use the domestic cat as a comforter, a source of emotion support, which leads to abuse and which is not respectful of the cat.

I might be painting too black a picture but remember I have studied the cat for a long time and the more you do it the more you see room for improvement at a fundamental level.

Finally, there is one thing that is well documented: the demise of the wild cat species living in the wild. Their days are numbered.