The news from Vietnam is a purrfect storm of moral outrage and cultural condescension. Hundreds of stolen cats, destined for the dinner table, have been rescued. British animal welfare groups, ever eager to police the globe, demand a crackdown. But let us pause before we join the chorus of righteous indignation.
History, dear reader, is a cruel teacher. The Romans feasted on dormice, the Victorians on pigeon pie. What we consider barbaric is often merely the custom of another time or place. Vietnam’s cat consumption is not a sign of moral decay, but of economic necessity and culinary tradition. The West’s horror smacks of a colonial mindset: our taboos are universal truths; theirs are savage practices.
This is not to defend cruelty. Theft is theft, and animal suffering is real. But the selective outrage reveals a deeper hypocrisy. We champion the rights of pampered pets while our own factory farms churn out billions of sentient beings in conditions that would make a Roman vomit. We condemn the Vietnamese for eating cats, yet we devour pigs, cows, and chickens without a second thought. Why is a cat more sacred than a pig? Because it’s fluffier? Because we share our beds with it?
The answer lies in the West’s peculiar relationship with pets. Animals are either family or food, and the line is drawn by arbitrary sentiment. A dog in England is a companion; a dog in Korea is a meal. This cognitive dissonance is the true scandal. The globalist impulse to standardise ethics, to impose one set of values on a diverse world, is the intellectual decadence I have long warned against.
We have become a society that moralises while ignoring our own sins. Our cities are built on the bones of animals, our supermarkets stacked with corpses. Yet we point fingers at Vietnam. It is the height of hypocrisy, a spectacle of self-congratulatory virtue signalling. The cat crisis is not a crisis of Vietnamese cruelty; it is a crisis of Western arrogance.
Let us instead ask: why are cats being stolen? Because they have value. Because poverty drives people to desperate acts. The real solution is not a global crackdown on cat-eating, but economic development that makes such theft unnecessary. We should help Vietnam build a prosperous future, not preach from our ivory towers.
But that would require nuance, humility, and a willingness to see the world as it is, not as we imagine it. Alas, nuance is in short supply. The headlines demand outrage; the clicks demand condemnation. So we will tut and cluck, and Vietnam will go on eating cats, and the world will spin on, indifferent to our moral theatre.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, we will pat our cats and feel virtuous. But our virtue is hollow, a mask for our own complicity in a global system of animal exploitation. The next time you see a headline about stolen cats, remember: the only thing stolen is our sense of perspective.
