ELAINE DING
DING: Meditations on animal welfare
In my childhood, my cousin Zoe once fostered a kitten, inky black, whose name I have long forgotten. I was some age before morality, clearly, as I remembered learning that cats had nine lives so I decided to see whether that was true. Testing this hypothesis felt unextraordinary, like testing if plants could prefer green tea to soda, or if they could understand human speech. So when my parents were gone and my cousin was out and my grandparents weren’t looking, I would fling the few-months-old kitten across the room.
October 23, 2024
