Your Cat is Harmful to You

Pets - not cars, houses, plants, or any other products - are currently the most replicated objects on social media. There is a rare consensus surrounding them that conceals moral distortion, hidden theology, and the satisfaction of dark needs that are no longer legitimate in human relationships

Meow_Too#  (Source)

Why - contrary to common concerns about smartphones - is critical attitude towards pets so rare? Both pets and smartphones are harmful habits, exploiting already limited human resources in the modern world, and using their owners' inherent neurological weaknesses to create addiction. In a sense, the animal is more detrimental to its owner's human connections than the smartphone. While the smartphone primarily works through the neurotransmitter dopamine, by creating false but constant interest and novelty, the animal works directly on oxytocin and the limbic system, being a mammal like us, and creates an emotional dependency that often surpasses the dependency in a normal human relationship, and can even provide a satisfactory substitute for it. We haven't yet heard of a smartphone serving as a substitute for a relationship with a child or partner, but we certainly know many cases of dogs or cats functioning as such.

Similar to a smartphone, the connection with the animal is more rewarding than a connection with another person. The love it gives is unconditional, it is dependent and never argues with us, and it is under our complete control, as no person in any moral relationship system can be. In this way, it fulfills a fantasy of absolute control over the object of love, which is no longer possible in the current world, neither in relationships between partners nor even in relationships with children. The connection with the animal can be more loving than the connection with humans, who frequently disappoint and may leave us of their own will, and it is, of course, much less challenging.

The pet resolves the conflict between love and power; it is the ultimate realization of turning a subject into our possession, as in slavery or a patriarchal family, and it will never tell us that it has fallen in love with other owners and is leaving us. We are its owners, and the use of the word is still legitimate. As the relationship with partners and children becomes less under our control, less stable, presents us with more demands and is more prone to disappointments, the human need for possessive, absolute love, "till death do us part" finds its satisfaction in the non-speaking animal, instead of in discourse between equal subjects. Owning an animal for love - this is the new modern concept of a "pet", as opposed to a farm or house animal (after all, the cat was previously perceived as belonging to the house and not to the subject - a mouse exterminator, and the dog's purpose was to guard the house from the outside - not sleeping in the owner's bed).

The illusion of naturalness is what protects pets from criticism of modernity, but there is nothing "natural" about them, not because of their domestication or bringing them into the house, but because of their transformation into subjects in modern consciousness. Unlike relationships with animals before the twentieth century, the prevalence of an animal as a real household member - and sometimes as a substitute for a real child - is a new phenomenon. Just as the smartphone was designed using algorithms to create dependency, the animal was designed through the natural algorithm of mutual evolution to reward us for feeding it, through cuteness (which is a resemblance to a human baby - for example, enlarged eyes in relation to the head, hence the word "pet"), physical cuddling and gazes that release oxytocin, soft fur designed to be most pleasant to human touch (an evolutionary remnant of our preference for puppy fur?), and a series of communicative behaviors that cater to the human narcissistic need for endless adoration (such as tail wagging).

If the sacrifice and eating of animals in the past was an identification with the "terrible" divine power, today we can create for ourselves a domestic cult that worships us daily thanks to its feeding, and thus identify with the central power of our time - the owner of material resources, the capitalist who exercises "soft" power and buys loyalty through dogly [Translator's note: "dogly" is a play on words in Hebrew, combining "dog" and "flag"]. If in the past the animal - which is located on the seam line between object and subject - was perceived as a complete object, today it is a complete subject, not despite but precisely because of being a weakened subject - a child who never grows up and rebels against the feeding hand. All this is in accordance with the morality of the "weak" which prefers the needy subject over the autonomous one, and thus our altruistic concern for the animal establishes us as both a "strong" and "moral" subject (that is, in accordance with both American and European ethos). This is the source of the enhanced presence of pets on social networks and their strong lobby that will pursue anyone perceived as cruel to them. Not just furry pleasantness - but moral pleasantness.

Raising a pet should be perceived as a bad habit that satisfies an infantile need, similar to eating sweets instead of food, or consuming drugs as a substitute for real experiences, or prostitution as a substitute for sexuality. In all these areas, the common moral criticism of our time - influenced by the Christian idea of victim and guilt - focuses on the exploitation of the object. Therefore, prostitution is perceived as a terrible problem, while drugs are legitimate, and the human relationship to animals is problematic only in terms of exploitation (which is not possible in relation to a smartphone, hence its power as a "moral" addiction by virtue of being an object). At most, the criticism will also focus on the hidden exploitation of the addicted subject by an imagined other (food or technology companies addicting us to their products).

But the idea of exploitation is itself a rather shaky ethical basis, circular (exploitation is almost always mutual, even between the sexes), and all-penetrating (in every system there is such a component), and therefore meaningless as a criterion for ethical distinction. Who exploits whom, we the pet, the pet us, or perhaps an imagined entity exploits both of us - cat food companies, the veterinarian, capitalism that leaves us lonely, etc.? Perhaps we should blame "evolution" - which created in both us and the animal the same mammalian limbic mechanism, which allows us a relationship that is not possible with reptiles, for example?

What actually distinguishes the relationship between us and the pet from partners and children, for whom we were also designed by evolution to create dependency and exploitation? And why is the smartphone perceived as a problematic habit, but not as a device recommended to give up? In one word - the future. Christian-Western morality is based on an ancient moral calculation that is projected onto the present, within a sacrificial order (original sin, the betrayal of Jesus, slavery of blacks, the Nakba [Translator's note: Arabic term for the Palestinian exodus of 1948], etc.). This order was copied within secularization into an ethical system that sees the weak and exploited victim as the source of moral order. A child needs to be cared for because he is weak, and who is weaker than a poor stray dog?

It is precisely in Jewish sources that an alternative moral order can be found, which if copied into a secular system would create a different kind of ethics. This order is based on examining actions according to their advancement of redemption and messianic repair - only from a moral calculation of an imagined future is the ethics of the present derived. It is precisely ethical perceptions guided by an imaginary future that can free us from the circularity of the idea of the "victim". What is the future that the cat offers us?

Today, technological utopia is the central imagined future image driving the world, and its own ethics are increasingly derived from it. Ultimately, the connection with the animal world is humanity's past while the connection with the smartphone, sexual partner, and child is its future. Significant investment in a cat is a sterile direction, without a long-term horizon, that feeds on outdated romantic sentiments and a fake imitation of the authentic connection between humans and the animal world, which is no longer available to the modern subject as a real possibility. Instead, investing resources in developing a child, technology, or idea is a fruitful direction - it is an investment in the future.

The essence of the maturation process of the human species is a gradual but stubborn abandonment of its animal past - a tremendous process of countless evolutionary and cultural stages - and confrontation with equal and intelligent subjects like itself, towards its great and ultimate future test - confrontation with artificial intelligence. Your cat leaves you behind - in an infantile relationship that will gradually lose its legitimacy over time. Pets are the last remnant of the animal world in our world, and they too are destined to distance themselves from us, as farm animals did before them, and wild animals before them. Let us bid them a polite farewell.

* The author owns a cat.