Sometimes I think of

the way a cat owner catches its felicitous feline with a writhing, both playing-dead-and-being-played-with mouse in its jowls, and the owner, knowing very well the cat gets by on its sometimes grain-laced, sometimes grain-free composite kibble, consisting mainly of ground-up turkeys and chickens—the aminos of which, we hope, come from collected carcasses at the end of a long and full life—but seeing as it would not be economically prudent to raise a bunch of chickens and turkeys in waves and wait from them to drop dead in order to retrieve the specific chicken or turkey at the very moment of their withered, shrunken deaths within the throng of other geriatric chickens and turkeys still clinging onto life, and knowing, deep in our hearts, that poultry farming is an enterprise, the participants within which are under the same pressures we as citizens are subjected to on a daily basis, such as paying taxes and the expenses related to our children’s traveling soccer team, the price of which, in particular, grows in a seemingly exponential way, uncorrelated to the reported inflation by the St. Louis Chapter of the Federal Reserve—we allow ourselves to suppress the honest fact poultry farmers must place lively, strong, burly, supple fowls through a wood-chipper-like device, where the incised and disjointed bits of the now-dead organisms are flung through a multitude of sieves, where they are mixed with the incised and disjointed bits of other now-dead organisms until the thrust of new, less disjointed and incised, more newly dead creatures entering the system forces an output of those first into the said system, blowing out the other side of some shepherd-hook-looking funnel in wistful flurries, the volume of which—the consistency of which—makes you feel like you’re looking at a mound of chewing tobacco, as the amber-hued light of the Purina Corp’s subcontracted processing concern catches the mound in the late afternoon sun—so you know your feline does not need the mouse, it is simply driven by something primal, a one-tracked genetic hive mind passed down from its parents and its ancestors before them; and while it seems odd that a cat would have an ancestor—the conceptualization of which, given the size of their cortexes, they are millions of years away from developing a capacity for realizing themselves—they do (have ancestors), and they would be damned if they saw their cat, looking down from kitty heaven, not do their damnedest to play with their freshly caught kill.

But you know in your heart—or, rather, the personification of a central point of your soul’s goodness—that while you may be powerless to change the poultry-farming industry’s sweltering efficiency at sieving carbon-based life, nor can you impart a sense of gratitude in your feline, who is already well provided for and does not need to kill this mouse, who likely has a family at home that will starve and die without the parent returning with berries and seeds tucked in their mouth—as no such supply chain or scaffold of personal obligation exists for the festering, pestering mouse—in this moment, as your feline now has made its sixth or seventh double-incision into its prey’s soft underbelly, you are that mouse’s only advocate.

Yet knowing the blood feud between humans and mice—despite nearly being lost to time—is still, to some extent, on the scale of geologic time, quite fresh, you know that simply tossing the mouse back into the ivy bush whence it came is not only disingenuous to the fifty to sixty million humans who died from the bubonic plague, but also a crime against the laws of nature that suggest this mouse should die because it was slow or dumb enough to get caught by a predator who—were it not for human devotion and the no-small-order modern miracle/horror of kibbled food, the provenance and implications of which it cannot grasp—would have taken its rightful kill; and so, in your split-second decision-making, as you grasp this tiny critter you have pulled from the clutches of Barry (your cat), you endeavor to toss this wounded, half-dead fellow into the garden trash can, which you have recently emptied, save for a bag of recently cleaned litter-box contents, and close the lid—not in a fastened sense, but half-cracked in a way you know the superior strength, relative to its size, a mouse has compared to you gives it a chance… just a chance to overcorrect its error and earn its right to live by climbing out after regathering its strength, provided Barry has not already drained them of the necessary strength-giving blood. That’s how I feel about this country: the way I feel about Barry getting by on his crude meat.