Abuse

by Javantea
Mar 16, 2009

Normally I don't like posting funny pictures of cats, but I thought this one has a good enough reason. In case you aren't watching in horror already, you may find the clip offensive.

Many people probably consider the above video to show graphic animal abuse. However, cats take great exception to any kind of water and yet in natural feral conditions, they have no problem with getting rained on. So obviously the cat's exception to indoor water is that they might drown since they are horrible swimmers. So by subjecting them to the above treatment, you are invoking their drowning reflex much like the goal of waterboarding torture. Thus doing the same to a cat should be considered torture, right? A longer video from a credible news source or a french language video shows that the device was designed for the purpose of cleaning animals and probably does not do permanent harm, like waterboarding. But there are plenty of types of torture that do no permanent harm. Is it in the dictionary definition of torture that it must involve permanent harm? No. The cat did show extreme dislike behavior and could have hurt itself throwing itself around the small box. The next question I have about this video is whether the cat learned to fear the machine when it was dry or whether after the third or fourth run through, the cat calmed down. I'm sure the makers of the machine will tell you that the cat is fine and that the idiots were doing it wrong. The actual company that made the product shows a picture of a child in the 'cabin' with animals. That sounds like a ton of fun, right?

And so the original question of whether this is animal abuse is left up to the viewer. There are a ton of animal hoarders that love cats a lot while many vets say that these people are abusing the animals by neglect. Are these two problems related? One group of people says it's abuse, another group says that it's not. Can it be abuse and not abuse at the same time? And so I ask the final questions: Is waterboarding torture? Can this decision be left up to the viewer?

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