What is it Tom! You look like you haven’t slept at all today.
It’s worse than that Fraidy Kat. I spent last night and most of today lying with a dying cat. I licked him and purred almost non-stop but in the end he died. In a way it was a relief for him, after the way he had been treated most of his young life.
What do you you mean?
He had escaped from a laboratory, and lived only a few days until he died of starvation.
What’s a labatory?
How can I even begin to describe it? I would never have believed it if he hadn’t told me so much about it. A laboratory is a place where they do horrible things to cats every day without a rest.
When this cat was still a kitten, his entire litter, along with their mother, were captured by cruel men who put them in a big car along with other cats and dogs and took them to the laboratory place. When I found him he had wires sticking out of his head, which had been getting caught on things and making him bleed. He was delirious and totally exhausted from his mistreatment. A young man who took pity on him had helped him and other prisoners to escape, but then they were alone not knowing anything about how to survive out in the world.
What kind of humans would hate us that much?
It’s the same as always, Fraidy. They don’t hate us at all. They just think that they own the world and everything in it, and they never think of us as living, feeling creatures. We are just things that they can do whatever they want to for any reason they can think of. The cat I met didn’t even have a name: they just called him by a number.
Think now, little one, about times when your human put you into a cage and took you to a place where you got poked and made to swallow things. You might not have liked it, but your human was trying to help you when you were sick. Now imagine if you had to live in that cage your entire life, and people took you every day to do terrible things to you. That’s what it’s like in a laboratory.
Oh no! What kinds of things?
It makes no sense, but they torture animals every day and watch how the animals “respond”. All they ever learn is how an animal responds to imprisonment and mistreatment. They are even cruel to monkeys, who are cousins to humans the way we are cousins to bobcats and cougars. Any human who did the kind of things to other humans that they do to us would be considered a monster. The humans in The City would kill that person, or lock him up forever.
This cat with no name had been caged but not tortured when he was still a kitten. Then, when he was nearly grown, they started in on him. They put the wires in his head and then started watching him all day and all night. When he napped they left him alone, but every time he tried to really sleep they would wake him up. He saw other cats who had been treated this way, and those cats went insane. They became too distressed to do anything at all except claw at the wall of the cage and attack the humans and the other cats. Eventually the humans would take them away, and the other laboratory cats said that they would be killed, and then the humans would cut them up and poke around inside their dead bodies.
Why would humans do those things unless they really hate us?
You really don’t understand humans Fraidy Kat, and an innocent creature like you probably never will. These laboratory humans don’t understand their own feelings, so they are curious to find out about the animals’ feelings. They are proud of their curiosity, which they call a search for “knowledge”, and will do anything just to see what will happen. Sometimes they learn things that will help other humans, but mostly they just want to be masters of the whole world.
When you think about it, Fraidy … . Fraidy? Fraidy Kat?
Well, I can’t blame her. She always feels better once she’s back under the bed.
