Can We Be Kind?

My cat died the day I sold my book. His death was scheduled when the impending need for such mercy became apparent about a week before. I took calls from editors in between periods of crying while watching him from across the room. (I tried to keep enough distance that my sobs wouldn’t disturb his sleep.) It’s not true that I didn’t care about what happened with my book during this time, but given the circumstances, I didn’t care very much. A heart has only so much room, and mine was too full of investment in his future to maintain an equal stake in my own. 

Buster was a textbook bully. If another cat was getting attention, he would rush over and muscle in front of them. When another cat settled into a spot he thought of as his own, he would leap into whatever narrow space surrounded their settled body and loom, or collapse and crowd, or strike, until they left. Out of boredom more than sadism (I hope) he developed a habit of waiting at the litter box while one of the others used it so he could attack them when they tried to leave. The nefariousness of this is impossible to overstate but I tried to emphasize its dastardliness by telling people, “imagine every time you used the bathroom, there was someone ready with a baseball bat when you came out.” We joked that as a human, he would be a Republican, a sheriff, or some other heavy-handed political official. He so believed in order and brute force, and so clearly thought he was in charge.

Despite how he related to other cats, he loved people and liked dogs. He thrilled to every visitor: maintenance men, friends—it didn’t matter. He was beautiful and he lived to be admired. He posed. And he was wild about vegan food. He liked fake meat more than real. Less than two weeks before he died, I laughed at him for getting his head repeatedly stuck in a mostly empty container of pea protein powder as he dove in to lick the sides. He was a cat, he was curious, so such behavior wasn’t strange but now, believing he died of stomach cancer and knowing that he died gaunt, unable to eat or retain food, it’s hard not to interpret this action as an attempt to get nutrition into a body that refused it with increasing efficiency.

I would say his decline was rapid but my perspective is probably divorced from his own experience of it. He’d lost enough weight in late August that we took him in for blood work, which indicated he was healthy. The next step would have been an x-ray to catch tumors, and I declined. Going to the vet was traumatic for him and by extension for everyone else. He broke skin no matter how many warnings we gave technicians, and he urinated profusely on the table in protest. Aside from the weight loss, he seemed fine. Even if they found cancer, I wouldn’t have put him through what would be required to stave it off. 

Then one morning in late September, I woke up and saw he looked too thin. I started researching a vet who would make house calls. We bought him a different type of dry food, we started feeding him wet. We could still pretend the problem had an acceptable solution. Then on another morning, I called to him to come see a bird in the yard, and he stumbled and shook as he half-jumped on the windowsill, his poise destroyed. That was the moment I knew there was only one good thing a vet could do for him. It was the first but not the last time I hid my face from him while I cried, as if I could keep from him some truth about himself. I cry about it now, because I miss him and the vision of him so diminished continues to cause great pain. It’s a potent memory of being confronted with the inevitable, which is a flavor of one’s own uselessness. 

I don’t think I’m confrontational with my enduring grief as much as I am protective of it, because in a culture that wants life to be valueless, grief is insubordinate. Mourning without shame affirms that the life of an animal mattered, and matters still. “You couldn’t pretend you had lost nothing,” writes Lorrie Moore in “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens.” “A good cat had died — you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, pointless wants.” Americans are “pet crazy,” so there’s encouragement to buy particular brands of treats and that sort of thing. But mostly our society insists that caring about anything other than our immediate selves (the desperate mothers at the border, the children dead in their classrooms, the cop-slaughtered innocent men, the animals bred for a life of unending atrocity) is pathetic, unserious, and embarrassing. A politician might “have values” but only foolish, inconsequential, feminine people care.

This stigma exists to paper over the fact that generosity and attachment and fellow-feeling are incendiary inclinations. They are not impotent at all; they are dangerous in several directions. “Kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others,” write Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in On Kindness, a small book concerned with why we deny ourselves the superlative pleasure of treating each other well. “Bearing other people’s vulnerability—which means sharing in it…without needing to get rid of it—entails being able to bear one’s own.” Everything changes when a person accepts the beguiling challenge of being kind—at least, the “everything” a human has access to does. It is a way of (re)making the self, replacing the gauzy fiction of the inviolable “I” with the thirsty tree roots of an “I” that is eternally dependent and therefore responsive. Sensitive. The dream of self-sufficiency falls to the reality of radical instability, of an existential fragility that can only be mollified by cooperation. This is the first vector of risk, and it begets another. After breaching the fabric of self, the instinctual insight that compels a kind action might begin to breach the legitimacy of the state and its institutions. A vision of taking care might pierce the paranoia, confusion, and pathological aggression that are so profitable for a nation to stoke and entrench. 

That’s my extension of their point, anyway. Because hostility to decency isn’t merely laced through our culture as a subliminal message. It is, for instance, codified in anti-homeless laws, which don’t stop at criminalizing people without homes but target people who offer free food to people without homes. Phillips and Taylor’s argument is that rather than having to be taught to be kind, as contemporary convention holds, we must be taught to be kindness-ascetics, made to believe that kindness is deviant. Laws like that support their claim. Humans require inculcation to become averse to their own empathy; we must be belittled and strong-armed out of it. Phillips and Taylor attribute this education to a collective psychological overreaction, a sort of allergy to recognizing one’s own precariousness. (They call it “phobic avoidance, the contemporary terror of kindness.”) Behind every tyrant, small and large, is probably a pants-wetting fear of how small and wretched and mortal they are, but the products of that phobic avoidance are not confined to one cramped soul nor limited to habitual social errors like refusing to tip. They are the collaborative structures that constitute a state: the prisons, the borders, the military, the corporations. They are physical. They have locations.  

Factory farms are newer than prisons, much newer than borders, but they easily merit a place on the list of humanity’s most stunning exercises in the eradication of empathy, the abdication of decency. Everything about a factory farm—the obscene amounts of pollution, the bottomless misery of the beings confined there, the damage to workers, the grotesque profits—exists as an obstacle to every conceivable progressive goal. To say they are necessary is an insulting lie that conflates demand with requirement, elides the amount of water squandered (after all, it means little to feed someone who can’t access water) and ignores their appalling, lasting effects on local and global environments. As with prisons and borders, there is no good faith argument against their eradication, only massive evidence of their unsustainability and inherent brutality. As is true for the cases against prisons and borders, too, it is incredibly hard to find an audience willing to face that. 

The great challenge of animal rights activists is to get people to think of animals as individuals. Even people who love their pets, who observe their pets enjoying the world with personalities as distinct as any human’s, hate being asked to do this. “Acknowledging that humans aren’t the only creatures who experience physical difference and illness brings animals too close for comfort,” writes Sunaura Taylor in Beasts of Burden. “If humans can share this sort of vulnerability with non-human animals, what else might we share?” Well, and what if we could share our vulnerability with other humans? (“What we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other,“ write Phillips and Taylor. “Bearing other people’s vulnerability—which means sharing in it…without needing to get rid of it—entails being able to bear one’s own.”) What else might we share if we could start from that unity, what institutions would be revealed as monstrous, intolerable? The challenge for prison and border abolitionists is not so different from animal rights advocates’. For their projects to be successful, they’ll need to shatter the sorry logic that smears prisoners and migrants into faceless categories of other and less than, that regards them as living beings who can be abused without moral consequence. 

The way we think about other humans informs the way we think about non-human animals and vice versa; I am unconvinced there ever has been or ever could be a clean line between the two. As Sunaura Taylor writes, animals “are devalued and abused for many of the same basic reasons disabled people are. They are understood as incapable, as lacking in the various abilities and capacities that have long been held to make human lives uniquely valuable and meaningful.” The line between animal and human, like the artificial boundaries intended to demarcate race and gender, is hardly immutable. (As Taylor's book, among others, outlines, that line has a long history of panicked revisions made in response to discoveries regarding the capabilities of various non-human animals.) Moreover, what impact could it have to point out that pigs are as intelligent as human children when we know what is being done to children right now? All the slivery arguments that rely on reference points that rest on imaginary divides is doomed to deteriorate. We’re always coming up with excuses for why we’re allowed to forgo kindness and they are never convincing. In there end there’s only one argument for compassion, and no way to fence off its flood of implication. 

I don’t think many leftists feel complicit in borders or prisons the way they feel complicit in the degradation and torture of animals. I think a rejection of borders or prisons can stay in the realm of the rhetorical in a way that recognizing the rights of animals can’t. I also think there’s a sense that there needs to be a limit, that there’s (paradoxically) a sort of irresponsibility and carelessness in being concerned with too many lives at once. “The need of the world seems infinite, so to open your mind to it is overwhelming,” writes Larissa MacFarquhar in one of my favorite books, Strangers Drowning. “It can seem hopeless to try to do anything about it, or that to make any kind of serious attempt would involve a frightening amount of sacrifice… You see [the effort’s] formidable nobility, and at the same time you sense uncomfortably that you would not survive it for long.” A phobic avoidance of kindness suggests that to provide another with even a morsel of kindness might crack us open, might ruin our lives as we know it. “We have come to believe that feeling too much for others,” say Phillips and Taylor, “endangers our lives.” (emphasis added.) 

That feeling is not entirely wrong. Strangers Drowning is all about people who, in a fashion, ruined their lives with their empathy. It’s about beating oneself to death on the rock of human uselessness, about looking at the deficit of people who care and resolving oneself to care enough to cover their share, too—as if Sisyphus were to invite everyone else condemned to push a boulder to place theirs in front of his own. The subjects of MacFarquhar’s focus are people whose devotion to others has led them to forsake much of what is regarded as essential to happiness: their families, their health, the opportunity for solvency or even non-poverty. It’s unclear how much they’re helping, if they’re having any positive impact at all. She quotes one woman, Julia, who gives away most of her money, and who evaluates her desire to have children against how much the child’s upbringing would cost the needy who’d otherwise receive it from her as a donation: “If everyone who could, pulled a little more weight, I wouldn’t need to pull so much.”     

This is a thought I’ve indulged in often, not because I believe I’m perfect or even that I’m giving all that I possibly could, but because a common rebuke of vegans is not only that their veganism is futile and meaningless but that they're abandoning human animals (i.e. for the ones who really count.) Admitting you care about something so widely considered frivolous—the suffering and exploitation of animals—releases blood into the water. It emboldens others to ridicule you while trying to extract more from you. Now they know you have a soft spot and they'll do their best to gouge it.  

Plenty of ardent animal rights activists have built lives around helping humans, too. They are journalists and EMTs and so on. One passion hardly precludes the other. What vegans do or don’t do, however, is beside the point, especially because this accusation comes so quickly from people who've chosen to sacrifice nothing at all. There is no need to prove what is self-evident: that the wounds of the world are infinite and I am finite. This is not real argumentation, it is a clumsy self-defense, and not self-defense against an assault from the outside but the lashing out of a self trying to protect itself from its self. It’s an attempt to silence one’s own conscience, to stanch caring before it starts. The people who attack vegans see a chink in which they would like to wedge a crowbar. They want to crack you open before the implicit rebuke of your presence can crack them. 

Here is how MacFarquhar describes Julia, who ultimately does have a child and who goes back to work quickly after her birth because “she had to start earning again so she could keep donating”:   

Two months ago, a man I’d never met before came to my apartment to kill my cat. He inspected the other two first, gave them shots and listened to their hearts. They were set free to run into another room before he turned his attention to Buster. He explained to us how the process worked: one injection that would fully sedate him, a final injection to stop his heart. He told us we could be present for as little or as much as we wanted. 

I had no intention of leaving at any point. Many years ago I’d seen a PostSecret I could not forget: i work at a vet clinic [and] when euthanizing a pet we give you the option of staying in the room with them or leaving……always stay……they look for you once you’re gone. 

Buster was curled up on the ottoman where he’d been sleeping for most of his recent days. We were told to pet him, to distract him with physical sensation so he’d be less likely to notice when the needle went in. It didn’t work; he noticed. He hissed, he bit Sam’s finger so strongly that it became infected and is still scarred. He leapt up and ran from us, crouched near a bookshelf. He looked mad.

“I’m sorry,” the vet said. “I scared him. I didn’t mean to scare him.” He held up the needle, which was bent. Buster was very dehydrated, and it took a lot of force to get beneath the skin. We reassured him it was ok and not his fault, that the reaction was about anger and not fear. “I can’t believe he’s still upright,” he said, as the cat stood and walked further away. I could believe it. There are no words for how much I admired his spirit. 

He stopped on the floor of the kitchen, with a woozy look in his eyes that I'm sure I've had just before my many surgeries. He ended up lying like a dog, on his stomach, sitting on his haunches with his chin on the floor. His eyes were open. The vet laid him on his side. “I’m going to give him the final injection now.” And from less than a foot away, kneeling, I watched the ending tremors and twitches, I saw his body become finished. 

“We love you so much,” I told him. “We’ll always love you so much.” I touched him. It was my last chance to do it. We were crying, even the vet, who sat at the kitchen table and tried to disguise it. “I feel really bad that I scared him,” he repeated, wiping the bridge of his nose. And we repeated, instantly, that he wasn’t scared, he was pissed off. “He had a real mean streak,” I’d tell the vet when he left while apologizing yet again. “We loved that part of him, too.”

The vet said we should leave the room then, because we wouldn’t want to see his body put into a bag. I complied for the vet's sake, but I wanted to stay. He was precious to me, and the newly him-not-him of his body was precious to me too. Or even more, somehow, than precious: simply still him.There is an Anne Carson fragment that’s been circulating lately: “I’ll take care of you,” says Pylades. “It’s rotten work,” says Orestes. And Pylades replies, “Not to me. Not if it’s you.” This is the loyalty of true love, the absolute loyalty that shares a seam with responsibility, and the stitching of the two creates courage. Whether I recall an image of him when he was dead or when he was alive feels no different to me. He is gone but I look for him. Any vision of him is beloved. 

I don’t mind thinking about death and I don’t think other people do either—not as a concept in the abstract, or as a visitor to someone other than themselves. I don’t think it moves an omnivore to tell them that their meat was once a living being, that it’s the flesh of a corpse and so on. (It feels a little like trying to dissuade a woman from aborting by telling her she’s pregnant with “a baby.” Surely it’s counterproductive to insult your target audience’s intelligence this way.) But I do believe most people, people born desirous and capable of kindness as a matter of course, don’t want to think about suffering. Looking at your bacon and thinking abstractly about a former pig is not the same experience as looking at your bacon and picturing a pig in agony because its snout has been smashed with a wrench, because someone cut out its eye for the sheer sensation of doing harm, because its leg is being sawed off while it is fully conscious, or because it’s lived its entire life in unfathomable hell, in conditions not even convicted war criminals are subject to.  

Death is the best thing that happens to the vast majority of animals bred for food because it is their only escape from agony. As a child on the way to school, I felt shock and concern when I saw flatbed trucks piled high with cages of hens on the highway. I'd been taught animals were to be treated with gentleness and benevolence; I had been told to be kind. Yet here were so many creatures left exposed to the elements, crammed in cages, stacked on top of each other. Now, when I am visiting home and I see one of those trucks drive by, I think that perhaps this is the best moment those chickens have ever had and will ever have in their short lives. It is their only chance to breathe open air, to (maybe) see the sky, to (maybe) feel the sun.  

You think I was being heavy-handed about the pigs, perhaps. I wish I were. But I've kept (and will continue to keep) from detailing the worst sadism documented in animal-use industries. Here are some stories from slaughterhouse workers that, remarkably, fulfill my promise:

Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a story about a border control agent who’d abducted, raped, and attempted to kill some of the women under his control. “Critics say the very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work — dealing with vulnerable, powerless people, often alone on the nation’s little-traveled frontiers — makes it easy for troubled agents to go unnoticed,” read one line. This is not what I have heard “critics say.” What I have heard critics say is that the very nature of the border, the very nature of policing, the very nature of any authoritarian exercise is the cultivation of and demand for cruelty and violence. Sadism in factory farms is not incidental. It is not an anomaly; the system creates it. Sadism is what is being produced, commoditized, financially incentivized. As one worker says, “You develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care.” 

A variety of factors made it easy for me to become vegan, and to stay vegan for nineteen years, but I am still not one of those vegetarians who is unfailingly repulsed by meat. I felt wistful about the absence of its taste for years. I sometimes think it smells very good. Not eating animal products has always been, to me, not an expression of preference or the welling up of great emotion, but a boycott: rational, direct, calm. Maybe the boycott can end, or change, when the circumstances that necessitated it change, but it cannot end until a change occurs.

Phillips and Taylor say that kindness is a way of “being in solidarity with human need, and with the very paradoxical sense of powerlessness and power that human need induces.” Strike out the “human,” since the needs of a non-human animal and a human animal barely diverge, and that's right, and useful. I want to be in solidarity with that which suffers, no matter how destined I am to fail in the attempt and even if the gesture means nothing to anyone but myself. It's not rotten work, it is an honor to turn the heart again and again, as many times is needed, to face the ones who look for you.  

I first shared this essay in late November of 2017 but it’s gone offline since TinyLetter folded, so I’m putting it here for now. I left the links as they are, from that period, because I think it’s an interesting time capsule. I’ll have a new piece of writing for you next week!