The news arrives with all the gravity of a Victorian melodrama: hundreds of cats rescued from the Vietnamese food trade. UK animal welfare groups, ever the moral scolds of our age, are calling for global action. But let us pause, dear reader, before we join the chorus of sanctimony. Are we not the civilisation that once burned cats alive in wicker baskets as a form of entertainment? The pendulum of history swings, and now we sit in judgement over a culture that eats cat meat while our own ancestors feasted on hedgehogs and swans.
This is not to excuse cruelty. It is to observe that our outrage is selective, our memory short. The Vietnamese cat trade is brutal: cats are skinned alive, their meat sold as ‘little tiger’. We recoil. But we consume battery chickens, pigs slaughtered in gas chambers, and cows stunned with bolts to the brain. The difference is one of proximity and sentiment. Cats are companions, not commodities. Yet in parts of Asia, dogs and cats have been protein sources for centuries. Our shock is a luxury of the overfed.
Consider the moral calculus of our intervention. We demand Vietnam ban the trade. But whose values shall prevail? Ours? The same values that brought us factory farming and the mass extinction of species? We are like the British Empire, waltzing into foreign lands with Bibles and bayonets, declaring that our way is the only way. The Vietnamese might well ask: who are you to lecture us when your own food system is a nightmare of industrialised suffering?
History teaches that civilisations often collapse from internal rot before they are conquered from without. Our obsession with animal welfare is a sign of decadence, a society so comfortable it invents new moral crises to distract from its own decline. While we agonise over Vietnamese cats, our own national identity frays, our educational standards plummet, and our intellectual life becomes a barren waste of student protests and trigger warnings.
Let us be clear: I do not condone the torture of any creature. But let us focus our energies on problems we can actually solve closer to home. Banning the cat trade in Vietnam is a noble gesture, but it will not save a single soul from the emptiness of modern life. We need a revival of moral seriousness, not more selective outrage. Otherwise, we are just the Victorians all over again: smug, self-righteous, and ultimately irrelevant.
So, yes, rescue the cats. But spare us the global calls to action. The only animal that truly needs saving is the human animal, lost in a forest of its own contradictions.
