They possess as their birthright a felicity humans regularly fail to attain.

From Feline Philosophy by John Gray

A philosopher once assured me he had persuaded his cat to become a vegan. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan titbits? Had he introduced his cat to other cats, already practising vegans, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and persuaded it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor was not amused. I realized he actually believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was feeding itself by visiting other homes and hunting. If it brought any carcasses home – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly all too prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.

It is not hard to imagine how the cat on the receiving end of this experiment in moral education must have viewed its human teacher. Perplexity at the philosopher’s behaviour would soon have been followed by indifference. Seldom doing anything unless it serves a definite purpose or produces immediate enjoyment, cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply walk away.

The philosopher who believed he had persuaded his cat to adopt a meat-free diet only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than trying to teach his cat, he would have been wiser if he had tried learning from it. Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live.

Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not. Cats make no such effort. Much of human life is a struggle for happiness. Among cats, on the other hand, happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed. That may be the chief reason many of us love cats. They possess as their birthright a felicity humans regularly fail to attain.

 I saw a video sometime in the past year of a young woman and her dog whom she had trained to be a vegetarian.  As with any of these videos, you have to assume it was staged though the earnestness seemed real.  The arc of the story followed the above conversation in its broad outline.

She was convinced she had taught her dog to prefer vegetarian rather than meat and to prove it she prepared a salad in his dog bowel for him to eat even though there was a bowel of meat on the table.  He did indeed take a whiff at the salad and perhaps even a nibble.  But then he smelled the meat and dove in to that option jowls flapping, meat flying.  His joy was manifest and her disappointment profound.  

Ahh.  Here it is.

Double click to enlarge.