Subject to Vanity

Synopsis

Why were cats created? I do not mean this as a sceptical question, doubtful of any end in their creation; no answer about adaptation and environment would be adequate, nor any statement of specific use. For with all the higher animals—that is to say, with all the animals one intimately knows—there is some beauty of intelligence, physique, or character which renders them, as one must necessarily believe they are, ends in themselves, not only means to the perfection of our very egotistic species.

The dog, for instance, has at anyrate moral beauty, and the stag physical; but the cat, who so often loses her physical beauty after the first year of her life, and who slinks about with a weight of strange and secret care on her shoulders, what has she? Who ever knew a cat of really fine character, and yet why otherwise do they suffer such bitter experience? Not experience merely of pans and pots and cat-hunts, which only touch the physical cat; but of the real, keen, emotional suffering of the moral cat, fierce pangs of envy, and the burden of alienated affection? I think cats must be meant to be good rather than beautiful.

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