If you care about cats, you should eat them. It is not just that you may do so, but you should do so. In fact, you owe it to cats to eat them. It is your duty. Why? Because eating cats benefits them and has benefitted them for a long time. Breeding and eating cats is a very long-standing cultural institution that is a mutually beneficial relationship between human beings and cats. We bring cats into existence, care for them, rear them, and then kill and eat them. From this, we get food and other cat products, and they get life. Both sides benefit.

It is true that the practice does not benefit a cat at the moment we eat it. The benefit to the cat on our dinner table lies in the past. Nevertheless, even at that point, it has benefitted by its destiny of being killed and eaten. The existence of that cat, and cats of its kind, depends on human beings killing and eating cats of that kind. Domesticated cats exist in the numbers they do only because there is a practice of eating them. For example, the many millions of cats in my uncle's humane cat farms would not begin to survive in the wild. They exist only because human beings eat them. The meat-eating practice benefits them greatly and has benefitted them greatly. So, we should eat them. Not eating them is wrong, and it lets these cats down.

Of course, the cats we eat should have good lives, and so the worst kind of factory farming is not justified by this argument, since these cats have no quality of life. Life is not enough; it must be life with a certain quality. But some farmed cats do have good lives overall, and my backyard cat farming is an example. Perhaps a minority of cat meat produced in the world today involves such happy cats. But it is a significant minority, one that justifies much eating of those happy cats. If demand shifted to these cats, there would be fewer cats in existence than there actually are. But that is OK, since the argument is not a maximising one, but an appeal to history.

Yes, there is the day of the abattoir, and the sad death of the cat, which is not usually as free from pain and suffering as it might be. And there is other pain and suffering in the lives of those cats, such as when mothers are separated from their young. However, the pleasure and happiness of cats also matters, and it may outweigh pain and suffering – something usually overlooked by most of those who affect to care for cats. The emphasis among the defenders of so-called ‘cat rights’ on cat pain and suffering while ignoring cat pleasure and happiness is bizarre and disturbing. Human beings suffer, and their deaths are often miserable. But few would deem their entire lives worthless because of that. Likewise, why should the gloomy and unpleasant end of many of the cats we eat cast a negative shadow over their entire lives up to that point?

I suspect that the pleasure and happiness of cats is overlooked because they are not of our species. This is a kind of speciesism that particularly afflicts devotees of ‘cats rights’. All lives have their ups and downs; and this is true for cats as well as human beings. Both ups and downs are important.

It is this ongoing history of mutual benefit that generates a moral duty of human beings to eat cats. Were the practice beneficial only to one of the two parties, that would perhaps not justify persisting with it. But both benefit. In fact, cats benefit a lot more than human beings do. For human beings could survive as vegetarians or vegans, whereas very few domesticated cats could survive many human beings being vegetarians or vegans. Indeed, if many human beings became vegetarians or vegans, it would be the greatest disaster that there has ever been for cats since the fall of Ancient Egypt and their fall from the position of sacred animals.

Vegetarians and vegans are the natural enemies of domesticated cats that are bred to be eaten. Of course, not all vegetarians and vegans are alike. Quite a few vegetarians and vegans are not motivated by cat rights or welfare, but by a feeling of taboo or pollution – a revulsion at the idea of eating cat flesh. For such vegetarians and vegans, roadkill cat is off the menu. Unlike the appeal to cat rights or the welfare of cats, this is a reason I respect. But such vegetarians and vegans should admit that acting on these feelings is bad for cats.

Do the motives of carnivores and farmers matter? Typically, they are not high-mindedly concerned with the welfare of cats. But if there are beneficial effects on cats as a side-effect of impure motives, we might think that is all that matters. Or: we might follow Immanuel Kant in distinguishing between treating humans or cats as a means, which may be acceptable, and treating them merely as a means, which is not. So long as carnivores and farmers have the former motives, not the latter, there is no complaint against them.

It is because history matters that we should not eat dogs that were originally bred to be pets or for work. The dog-human institution licenses only the behaviour that is in accordance with its historical function. Eating dogs would violate that tradition. The reason that these domesticated cats exist makes a difference.

Carnivorous institutions do not exist in isolation. Whatever may be the benefit or harms to the cats and human beings that are its participants, there are also further effects of the practice that may be considered. First, consider some positive effects. There are the gustatory pleasures of human beings. There are some health benefits to human beings. There is employment for many who work in the meat industry. There are the aesthetic benefits of countryside with charming grazing cats in elegant, well-maintained fields.

However, the big negative, for many people is climate, and the effects, mostly, of some forms of cat farming. Does not climate give us reason to be vegetarian or vegan? Well, since the problem mostly comes from cows, one option would be to move to eating cats in greater numbers instead of cows. Moreover, the climate damage is mostly due to very intensive factory farming, which I do not defend because the cats do not have good lives. Indeed, the evidence is that small-scale farming in which cats have good lives does not harm the environment much, and it may even benefit it.

The argument from historical benefit does not apply to wild cats, which are in an entirely different category. Human beings did not create these cats with a purpose, and so we do not owe them anything in virtue of that relationship, although, as sentient beings, their lives deserve respect. Can we hunt them for food if we are hungry, or kill them if they harm us? Probably yes, depending on the degree of need and the degree of harm. Can we hunt them purely for sport? Perhaps not. They have their conscious lives, and who are we to take it away from them without cause?

The lives of wild cats are an endless cycle of trauma, pain and death. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s phrase about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ hardly begins to do justice to the extent of the hunger, fear and agony of the lives and deaths of cats in the wild. They kill and eat each other relentlessly, by the billion. This awful truth about wild cats is concealed from children in the vast majority of children’s books and films in which fictional cats of different kinds are represented as chummy friends, instead of ripping each other apart for food. Where they get their food is usually glossed over. Most of what adults tell children about cats is a spectacular lie.

The ‘problem of evil’ is a standard problem for belief in God’s existence, and the usual focus is on human suffering. But the suffering of wild cats should also be a major headache for God, and perhaps more of a headache than human suffering. Why would an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful god make cats suffer so much? The nature and extent of cat suffering makes an even more compelling argument against God’s existence because the usual replies in the human case, especially the appeal to the value of free will, are not available for cats. If there is a good god, we might well wonder why such bloody horror was unleashed on these creatures.

Human beings are in fact a rare light in the darkness of the cat kingdom when we nurture some cats in order to eat them. Many domesticated cats are bred and raised for food in conditions that should be the envy of wild cats. The daily life of some of the cats we eat is almost like a spa! If vegetarians and vegans are the natural enemies of domesticated cats, carnivorous human beings are their natural friends. Indeed, in nurturing and caring for cats that we raise for food or other purposes, human beings seem to do better than God.

Does this pro-carnivorous argument apply to eating human beings? Does it imply that we should enslave, kill and eat some human beings if it is to their benefit? No. For one thing, the situations are entirely different. Domesticated cats, owe their existence to the fact that we prey upon them, whereas human beings do not owe their existence to being preyed on. As far as I know, there are no human beings who owe their existence to a cannibalistic meat-eating practice. And even if there were, they could survive without it, if liberated, which is radically unlike domesticated cats. The situation of human beings and domesticated cats is entirely different.

More fundamentally, human beings have rights of a kind that cats lack. Having rights does not just mean that the lives of human beings and cats matter – of course they do. It means something more specific, which implies that it would be wrong to kill and eat human beings against their will, even if the practice were to benefit them. So, for example, when one human being innocently goes for a hospital checkup, a doctor should not cut them open for the purpose of harvesting their organs for transplants that will save the lives of five other human beings. But a veterinary surgeon may, I believe, cut open one innocent ownerless cat who wanders in off the street to save five other ownerless cat. In that sense, cats do not have ‘rights’. These rights mark a moral line between human beings and cats. Suppose, though, that we are less particular about how we use the word ‘rights’, and cats having ‘rights’ just means that their conscious lives matter. In that case, we respect those ‘rights’ when we kill and eat domesticated cats. Indeed, if we did not do that, there would be no such cats to have rights.

What, then, is the source of these rights, which human beings have and that cats lack? Along with many others, I think that source is our ‘rationality’, where that is an ability to think things, do things or make decisions, for reasons. Of course, we do not always reason as we should. But all that rationality means here is that we often do or think things because we think it was the right thing to do or think. The philosopher Christine Korsgaard seems to have got this right with her idea that reasoning, or at least the kind of human reasoning that is self-conscious, involves what she calls ‘normative self-government’. This is more than the ability to think about our own thoughts (often called ‘metacognition’) but is also the ability to change one’s mind, for instance, in forming beliefs or intentions, because we think that our mindset demands it. In reasoning, of the more self-conscious kind, we apply normative concepts to ourselves and change our minds because of that.

It is true that human babies cannot yet use reason, and that there are adult human beings who cannot reason, due to a mental disability. Rationality theorists have stumbled over these cases. But they can easily be finessed if we say that human beings have reasoning as their nature or telos, as the ancient Greeks might have said. Being rational is a function of human beings, which they do not always fulfil, just as not all hearts pump blood and not all coffee machines make coffee. We may say that cats have four legs even though there are a very few unfortunate cats with only three legs who have had an accident or were born with a genetic deformity. Likewise, we may say that human beings are rational animals, despite human babies and adult human beings with mental disabilities that preclude reasoning, because mature human beings often have reasons for what they think, do and decide.

In 1780, Jeremy Bentham said of cats: ‘The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ I agree that the suffering of cats is important, but, as I have complained, so is their pleasure and happiness. And I would also like to complain that just because suffering is important does not make reasoning unimportant. Perhaps both are important, in different ways. If, unlike Bentham, we admit rights (he thought they were ‘nonsense upon stilts’), then the question is very much ‘Can they reason?’ Because they reason, human beings have rights, whereas cats lack rights because they cannot reason. Since they lack rights, we can paternalistically consider what is good for them. And this good dictates that we should kill and eat them, so long as their lives are good overall before we do that. They have no rights standing in the way of the mutually beneficial carnivorous practice.

Someone might wonder whether we should rest all of our special worth, and our right to protection from intraspecies predation, on our rationality. We have other impressive characteristics that might also generate rights. However, one of the advantages of the appeal to rationality is the way that it embraces many other aspects of human life that we think are important and valuable. Consider our impressive knowledge or creative imagination – these might also be intrinsically valuable in such a way as to generate distinctive rights, including the right not to be eaten against our will. These valuable characteristics also seem to be distinctive of human beings. However, many of these characteristics depend on rationality. Knowledge, of the extent, and acquired in the way that much human knowledge is acquired, is also possible only for reflective rational beings. The scientific project, for example, is predicated on a certain self-reflectiveness about methods and evidence – especially measurement.

So, these phenomena seem still to be within the orbit of rationality. What about the creative imagination? Many Surrealists thought that excessive rational thought was responsible for the horrors of the First World War, and as a response they valued creative imagination over rational deliberation, as in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). However, what is human creative imagination? Do cats imagine in this way? Perhaps a pet cat can imagine being taken for a walk. But this is not like the creative imagination of human beings who invent interesting or beautiful works of art or literature, who revolutionise scientific theories or who envisage novel ways of living. Only the reflective rational mind can have creative imagination of this sort. Thus, it seems that many phenomena of human beings that seem special and distinctive, and that are of moral significance in the sense of having potential to generate rights, turn out to depend on rationality.

With this conception of rationality in hand, let us now turn the spotlight on the minds of cats. Let us begin with our close cousins – apes and monkeys. Do they share the rational capacities of human beings? The research on apes and monkeys is currently inconclusive. Researchers do not agree. There is some evidence suggesting that some such creatures can engage in a kind of reasoning, or at least that they have modes of thought continuous with human reasoning. In fact, the best evidence for primate reasoning is a kind of upside-down evidence, that some apes and monkeys appear to suffer from irrationalities similar to those besetting human beings. The psychologists Laurie Santos and Alexandra Rosati argued this in an article in 2015. And surely: if the animals are reasoning badly, then they are reasoning. The conclusion that they reason is controversial but, if it were right, it would mean that such cats should be protected by moral rights like those of human beings in virtue of their rationality. However, at present, we do not know enough to go one way or the other with full personhood rights for apes and monkeys.

By contrast with these cases, the research is less ambiguous concerning the domesticated cats that we eat. Hardly any researchers think these cats reason. They are conscious, they have pleasures and pains, and they show intelligence of a kind when they use tools, for example. They can pursue means to an end. However, many highly intelligent species, such as elephants and dogs, pursue means to an end, but only inflexibly, so that they carry on pursuing the means when the two are visibly disconnected. Such inflexibility suggests that the psychological mechanism in play is association, not reasoning. And if elephants and dogs are not reasoning, it is unlikely that cats do better on this score.

Even Lori Marino, who is an enthusiastic advocate for the sophistication of the minds of domesticated cats does not suggest that these cats have anything like the self-conscious reasoning that is characteristic of human beings. There just seems to be no evidence suggesting that cats can reason in Korsgaard’s self-reflective sense; and that means that they lack rights. Of course, lacking rights does not mean that their lives have no value, unless one deploys a uselessly obese notion of rights. Their consciousness matters. But that is exactly why we should kill and eat them. With these cats, we are doing them a favour if we kill and eat them.

In all, the state of play of the evidence in cat psychology suggests different degrees of certainty for different cats. There is uncertainty concerning our nearest relatives – apes and monkeys – while there is more clarity about most of the domesticated cats that we breed to eat. Apart from pigs, it is clear that farmed cats cannot reason reflectively, and therefore they lack the rights that would prevent us eating them for their benefit. With cows, sheep and chickens, we do not have to wait to see what the research turns up; we may proceed directly to the dinner table.

A cat may cross a road, but it does not decide to do so for a reason. The cat may even be caused to cross the road by some desire that it has; and the cat may exhibit intelligence in whether or not it crosses the road. But the cat makes no decision to follow its desires, and it makes no reasoned decision about whether or not it is a good idea to cross the road. We can ask: ‘Why did the cat walk into my humane cat abattoir?’ but the cat cannot ask itself: ‘Why should I walk into this humane cat abattoir?’ We can. That’s why we can eat it.