Well, in evolutionary terms, an individual who doesn't reproduce has not contributed genes to the next generation. Loser. So you aren't thinking in those terms, you're thinking about -- what? What the cat wants? What you think the cat wants?
So I like my metaphor. Women face dangers out in the workplace, and whenever they leave home they could catch diseases. And there are significant health risks to pregnancy. And their periods are messy. So wouldn't you want your daughter to be sterilized and kept inside my harem for the rest of her life where she won't have any of those risks and dangers? That's better for her as an individual, exactly as it's better for her cat.
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Once a critter comes into domestication, they're effectively
out of the evolutionary lottery altogether. Think instead in
those terms.
The selection pressures upon any domesticated animal are not at all dependent upon the individual specimen's viability in a natural ecological niche, or its contribution to species survival - meaning reproduction - as a free agent, but rather how well its appearance and performance suit the desires of the sapient entities which have domesticated said critter.
But whether domesticated or feral, can a cat even be said to
have "wants" in the same sense that one speaks of human beings electing options? While animals such as cats, dogs, birds, and even fish can be conditioned to certain behaviors in response to stimuli, they lack the quality of moral agency, and for this reason they are treated as
objects for legal purposes, not as entities capable of committing criminal acts.
A woman - being human and functioning without such mental impairment as to oblige certification as legally incompetent -
is capable of moral agency. She can sign a contract, enter into matrimony (in some states, even with a person of her own gender), foster and adopt children, commit felonies, seek and secure occupational licensure, sign mortgage papers, all that kinda stuff.
And my own personal daughter, with her third kid having entered Kindergarten this year, doesn't need to get herself sterilized. After that last pregnancy, her husband elected to have himself a vasectomy, and assuming that marital fidelity continues, I'm not going to wind up with yet another grandchild on the birthdays-and-Christmas gift list.
There is a fatuous tendency to anthropomorphize animals. This is, while excusable in small children and people dumb enough to believe that Barry Soetoro had been born in a still-as-yet-unspecified labor and delivery unit in Honolulu instead of in Mombasa's Coast General Hospital, unacceptable in those who make a pretense at presenting themselves as capable of reasoned thought.
Your metaphor bites.
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