A large cat, possibly a cougar or a bobcat, is a likely suspect in the deaths of some 60 farm animals in the DeKalb County area.

I shudder each time I hear mention of this story in the local media. I tremble at the thought of the tragic headline ending to this story: Farmer Shoots Bobcat—Sells Pelt for Profit.

I fear some farmer will blast or poison the magnificent cat in the name of protecting the animals he is raising for his own ritualistic slaughter.

But behold, if these farm animals had a voice, they would but confirm that they’d prefer a death by bobcat rather than chance the systematic doom of the slaughter house blade!

It is far better this mystic bobcat put them mercifully out of their anguished lives now, like an Angel of Death, relieving them of the misery of their dreary existence.

Old Major, the wise boar in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, spoke to all farm animals when he said:

“But no animal escapes the cruel life in the end…Everyone of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. To that horror we all must come—cows, pigs, hens, sheep, everyone…the very instance that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.”

On Thanksgiving Day, I will nod to the gods if this cat has been safely trapped and relocated to some remote northern wildlands.

That our nation would reap immediate monetary, environmental, health and moral beliefs from a vegetarian diet is proof enough of the idiocy of this annual slaughter. The ethereal cat eyes all human gluttony!

Jeffrey Smolla

Graduate Student

English and Educational Foundations