The Captain’s Log entry: Weeks of November 27 and December 4, the year of our Lord 2023 🧠
DEEP thoughts on cats, Kantian ethics and karma!
Well guess the heck what. We are LATE. Or…right on time? Is time a thing? This is a season of really deep thoughts. We’ll get into it a bit later on but before we do, we’re continuing to celebrate on our tiny schooner all these wonderful shout outs as 2023, the year of our launch, comes to a wrap.
We appreciate our new friend of the pod Frank Racioppi of Ear Worthy for again spotlighting us by including us in his year-end shout out for considering us among amazing peers and podfriends, as excerpted above. We can’t think of higher praise. Thank you.
We are so honored and excited to have once again been featured by excellent audiogram platform Headliner in their e-newsletter - so glad Headliner and catfather Christy was into our pod!
Another thank you to Joey Held whose awesome Fun Fact Friyay Substack featured our season 2 debut on witches and whisky - and a bunch more facts that are not quite fun but super fascinating and make you grateful to be in the here and now…well, kind of.
Huge gratitude to Podcasting by the Moon for including us in their industry podcast recommendation round-up! We appreciate your support of femme and non-binary podcasters!
Seems like with every episode, more folks are getting into our lil’ 6 Degrees of Cats podcast. In this era of “Big Podcasting” where the medium is being exploited as a flashy marketing vehicle for personalities (which is fine, good work if you can get it!) it can feel like this heartfelt passion project of ours is but a tiny dot in the pixelated giant image of a huge dollar sign. But it isn’t. We do this because we love connection, we love sharing knowledge and - most of all - WE LOVE CATS.
We appreciate all the kind notes and reviews you’ve been sending - thanks to superfan Ekaterina, shouting you out here! - we read all of them and it helps keep things smooth sailing. As 2023 rapidly revs up (let’s not kid ourselves, things are NOT ever going to wind down as the wheels of capitalism churn and burn this earth to a a crisp) we are heartened and motivated and moved by the power of joy and love and hope that is expressed through art, connection and compassion. KEEP IT UP Y’ALL!
*cough*
Oops, got a little carried away there! As you were. Onward.
AT OUR LAST PORT OF DISEMBARKATION
In which the editorial director of this newsletter, Captain Kitty reports on our past destinations.
If you haven’t yet listened to episode 3, “The Purr-fect Life: Cats, Kantian Ethics and Buddhism” we hope you do! It was chockablock full of DEEP THOUGHTS. Such as…
…what are the ethics of being a cat [guardian / stewards / owner / butler / etc.]
Hear me out - it was definitely a stretch at first to source this knowledge. As we established at the top of this podcast series, for some bizarre reason that I still cannot figure out and probably never will - cats are just struck from most historical records.
What. The. Heck. WHY? How? I…will never not bang that drum.
Ahem.
Since those wise Greek philosophers were missing the meaning of life right in front of their eyes, jumping around, keeping them alive through defense of carbs (wonderful carbs) - we found no real answers there.
So we had to jump ahead a bit north to read up on Immanuel Kant, and thanks to our resident expert ABIGAIL LEVIN, PH.D., of Niagara University who specializes in animal ethics, we finally got someone to supply some ethical takes on giving your cat a good life. Kant’s a big name in ethics - he surfaced a lot in my research (which is limited to English sources so of course, there’s that very strong “Western” bias right there) and it feels like a lot of animal ethics research are responses to his stance on our duties to animals. He’s not the first, but he seems to be among the most referenced.
I have a professional background of being yelled at professionally in fields that rely heavily on neuroscience and cognition, and from my understanding of the emerging research, a lot of questions asked by those earlier Greek philosophers are somewhat addressed by that work.
So I do think that as we gain more and more knowledge, some branches of philosophy will continue to merge or differentiate into specialized “hard science” fields using PET scanners and contrast imaging technology and all that help us understand the architecture of human knowledge processing systems.
But - regardless of what we do excavate and interpret from these increasingly large data sets - we will remain limited if the work is solely trained on the human perspective.
Take for example, the below - which demarcate intelligence:
language
feelings / emotions (which my non-Ph.D.’d self will loosely define as assigning value to a sensation prompted by sensory stimuli in the environment)
altruism / compassion
community
All of the above have been researched, and now observed and documented, in non-human species.
What was once deemed strictly, intrinsically and uniquely human…isn’t.
How does this relate to our podcast episode?
Well. Kant’s point was that humans have an ethical duty to not be awful to animals BECAUSE we have these intrinsically human capacities, that grant us a power and capacity that those we share this earth with lack*. * I think - please chime in if I’m totally missing the mark here, philosophy scholars!! Oh, and be on my podcast!
So it’s clear that some aspects of Kantian ethics about our duties to animals will not necessarily hold fast in terms of pure logic now that one of the foundations of his stance seems to be pretty shaky.
BUT I think the underlying message - that we do have a duty to them - is evergreen. And research continues in animal science - very smart ethicists such as U. Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum (who was name-checked by Dr. Levin) are moving the conversations and laws forward to think more (deeply) about animals and our relationships with, and responsibilities to them.
Moving a bit away from logic and systems, though…well…my entry level philosophy professor said that science answers “how”, and philosophy answers “why”.
WHY should we care about the welfare of our kitties and other animals, if Kant’s premise isn’t quite holding water?
For this, my team and I were able to get much, MUCH more clarity by heading East.
It just so happens that Dr. Levin is a practicing Buddhist - and along with Dr. Levin, we got a fantastic perspective from the wonderful JANET GYATSO, PH.D. of Harvard Divinity School.
A few little heartstrings were pulled (were you surprised at the Buddhist view of cats?). Thankfully, Dr. Gyatso had us take a giant step back to gain the broader perspective of how humans and animals relate. Not just in terms of the superficial “were you once an [animal] in your past life” stuff, but the real deep stuff. The stuff about the cycle of suffering, and noticing it all around us, and the accompanying responsibilities for your respective position in that hierarchy or cycle or what have you.
You know those moments when you just can’t get your head around something? Like, you know it’s right, smart and kind people you respect totally agree with it - but you can’t yet succinctly anchor that concept in a way that feels right with your cosmology - your values/ethics/culture/etc.? And then: epiphany. Something - something- does the trick. A quote. A poem. A moment. An anecdote. Then it FITS. Like a missing puzzle piece that turned out to be right in front of you when you looked at it once last time, rotated it, and it snapped in place.
Yep. That was how this conversation with Dr. Gyatso landed for me.
Hearing the world translated through a very pragmatic, very patently obvious (to borrow Dr. Gyato’s apt words) worldview that - rather than favoring the cold, alien, hypothetical / “devil’s advocate” tyranny of rote, pure, binary, solely human-centered logic - centralizes the feelings and sensations that we rely on to qualitatively and quantitatively (in some way$) assign as suffering (or pleasure, or joy) …And recognizing, naming explicitly that this is NOT a uniquely human phenomena -
That makes SO MUCH SENSE.
I know, I know. I told ya we’d go deep!
“Amanda, get to the cats.”
Well - the episode did not bring me to a space where I could judge overall on the experience of all cats everywhere regarding their experience as pets. And we didn’t problem solve anything, really.
Because it turned out to be a bigger question about life.
And life itself isn’t a problem to solve, so much as it is an experience to process.
I don’t know about you, but all the stuff I learned along the way helped me better understand my responsibility to cats, humans, dogs, fish, nematodes, geoducks, um, you get the point.
And to continue to build resiliency so that I might strengthen my ability to face, rather than turn away, from the suffering around us - and help reduce this suffering if I can.
To that point - yep. A LOT of the discussion we didn’t yet include focused on the devastating impact that humans have had on the environment in relationship to, or with, animals. The industrial agricultural complex (just look up PETA). The environmental impact of urbanization and human settlement expansion on ecosystems. And we’ll hear more about that in future episodes. There are BIG questions for cat owners going on relating to those points. I have BIG opinions on them. So do a lot of other people. So I’m taking my time on those…
DEEEEEEP QUESTIONSSSSSS!
But also some fluff. Don’t you worry. We have fun trivia, and you know I’ll keep it weird.
Coming up next - a VERY cool holiday episode that’s been years in the making on Christmas and kitties. Bundle up!! And because Captain Kitty and crew needs a little break, we will release ONE episode in December, then resume our biweekly (fortnightly / twice a month) podcast feed drop cadence in 2024.
Alrighty.
CAT NEWS LATELY
Fresh catches trawled from the internet.
Cats and ships, I’m tellin’ ya. (Note: STOP SMUGGLING ANIMALS FFS! So unethical.]
Why? Well…
Puerto Rico’s famous stray cats will be removed from grounds surrounding historic fortress [Associated Press, US / international]
SJP! Now Mariska! All the Gen X TV heroines of elder Millennials are cat ladies!
Mariska Hargitay Gets New Cat and Names Pet After Taylor Swift: 'Karma Is a Cat' [People Magazine, US]
Holidays are HARD. And I want everyone to know, grief for your lost furfamily is REAL and you can tell anyone who tries to minimize your process to take their business elsewhere.
I Thought Our Kid Would Be Sad About Our Dead Cat… Yikes. [Slate, US paywalled]
Newsweek has the beat! We should just have a section for this in perpetuity.
File under: Ya don’t say.
Cat adoption ad goes viral for its refreshing honesty: 'She will own you, your house, your belongings' [Fox News, US]
Best false alarm ever. (For Snuggles, the sighting would be giant raccoon or badger.)
Cougar Sighting in Oregon that Prompted City-Wide Warning Turns Out to Be a House Cat [People Magazine, US]
Cat hair can solve crimes! (As can human and dog hair.)
5 feline facts to help see your cat in a new light [CBC, Canada]
CALLS TO PASSENGERS
…that’s you!
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We hope you are entering this season with your kitties close, your communities cared for and your heart, head and humors intact. We all have been managing a lot.
Thank you again for being a huge part of what made 2023 so net positive, even amidst some personal challenges that have arisen (#suffering #resilience #catnaps) for the team.
ANYWHO. Do tune in next Tuesday 12/12 for a special message and feature of a friend of the podcast - our next regular drop will be 12/19 jusssst in time for the holidaze!!
We love you! Mind how you go! 🐾
For the second half of this newsletter, please click that “pledge” button! You’ll receive NEWS FROM THE CREW featuring Binky & Snuggles, CAPTAIN’ CAT ASTROLOGY, special recommendations from a guest (is it YOU?) and other treats.
PS: Audio should be a bit higher now 😻