I probably would be happy with a felis catus in my life, but I live alone, and I travel often and even where I stay, including things like the continent change, which are valid reasons not to get one. Plus, I've come down in the world. Significantly. I'm extremely hard up, make just about enough to barely eke out an independent survivalist life—you know, the usual hand-to-mouth, bread-line fare but without the strangulations.
Animals are way better than anything an unmedicated or genetically unedited homo sapiens can hope to be, especially cats; they don't pretend. They've retained that wild, unchained attitude towards life that sort of reflects my own in a way.
Of course, I don't have the "righting reflex"; if you throw me from the top of a bookcase, I'll land splat, with injuries that'll last a lifetime. It'll put me in diapers, or I might just die. I also can't jump five times my height; I can't jump at all. I have too much respect for gravity. And a compressible spine that aids running? Nah, I don't have that either. If you compress my spine, I thank you, and I die promptly; no running around is needed. I am really a simple stationary man, like a stationery item, for example. Just good enough for very few things. Limited. Not as versatile as a cat.
But I love all animals, including insects. I think they have equal rights to exist. We sapiens are with our livestock now at almost 97%, with the wild at only 3%. If we let this carry on, the joke will be on us. Naturally. No pollinating insects, all the major cycles lost, and in the end, no crops, no fish, no birds—just us fighting each other over hairy imaginary men who don't agree with each other and used to fight over other hairy imaginary men and so on ad infinitum men and hair all the way—religion.
Unless we can chew plastic, homo hemlock starves along with all its various types of invisible gods and goddesses and bullshit. In India, the textbooks have cut evolution and the periodic table along with the mughals. While my parents were Hindu, I never really got indoctrinated. I fail to understand why we have to feel proud by exclusion, by forcing ancient dregs that just can't float on the surface anymore because we just know more and know better.
It's really sad that all the ministers eat moghlai parotas and send their kids to schools and universities abroad while they cripple and sabotage the education system, which would create billions of unprepared minds who'd grow up confused. Perhaps luddites, perhaps Hindu fundamentalists, they hope. But egregious omissions create unemployable and depressed youth that won't know how to decipher reality. Why can't we be just humans, like cats, dogs, and pinsorms? Why Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, or this or that?
I'm sure LinkedIn will cancel my account again. I really should shut up. But I can't; the cat in me says meow.
