*some vegan rando who has never owned a cat before:* don’t put your cats outside! Having an outdoor cat is animal cruelty! Cats are not meant to live outside, why don’t dogs live outside?? If your cat lives outdoors then you are a horrible cat owner!!
*me*: okay…. Anyways… u ever thought about actually caring for an outdoor cat? Try again
You guys seeing this?
Hello @sonik-the-hedgehog, I’m a member of the community on Tumblr known as “vulture culture.” While some members of our little flock are vegan, largely we aren’t, and it makes sense that we aren’t, because you see, ‘Vulture Culture” is dedicated to the preservation, cleaning and crafting with animal remains. Most notably, bones, pelts, claws and teeth.
Do you know what happens to a lot of free roaming feral or outdoor cats? They come to us. They come to us as corpses.
It’s a pretty common theme in the vulture culture community, to the point where some of our informative posts have such features as “How to find out if the dead cat you found has an owner” or “how long you should wait before giving up and processing the corpse to collect the skull” or the legalities of buying, selling, or crafting with the skulls or pelts of salvaged dead cats. A good portion of us vultures have cat skulls on our shelves. And the vast, overwhelming majority of those cat skulls has been picked up by the road.
Not from a cat that’s died peacefully of old age, but from a cat that crossed the road at the wrong time, or a cat that came up on the wrong side of a larger predator, or a cat that died of exposure to the elements, or a cat that succumbed to a lingering disease.
You see, when you allow your cat to live like a wild animal, you’re also opening the door for your cat to DIE like a wild animal, and wild animals don’t have warm safe beds or bandages or pain killers. Wild animals struggle for days or even weeks on a bloody stump of an injured limb. Wild animals hide under porches and die alone where nobody finds them until they begin to smell. Even more wild animals simply disappear, and are absorbed by the landscape until there’s not a single little shred of evidence they ever even existed.
I’ve found such a cat myself! It’s dessicated skin and bleached bones sat, rather tellingly, right outside of an old fox den. Now, it’s impossible to say if the foxes killed the cat, or only scavenged it already dead, or if the cat was merely injured and tired and took shelter in the fox den of its own accord. But it was also impossible to tell whose cat it was, if it had a family or anyone that loved it. Even if it were male or female. It’s identity was erased and anyone who ever had any hope of finding it again will never, ever see it again. It’s sleeping in the fox den to this very day.
Maybe when it’s rotted down a bit more I’ll go look for it again. I’ll pick it up in a little bag and take it home and clean it up with peroxide and hot water. When it’s clean maybe I’ll give it a nickname like “Sam” or “Macavity” and I’ll put it on my shelf. I’ll take care of the kitty for years to come, like its former owner couldn’t. I’ll keep it clean and warm and safe on a shelf, like it wasn’t kept while it lived. And kitty will be an indoor kitty far too late for it to ever matter.
Your outdoor cats come to us eventually, and we’ll gladly take care of them forever.
Sad, yet very true.
