No

by Amanda Stephenson

Created on: January 13, 2009

Long, lean, elegant, sleek and beautiful to behold The list of an Ashera's positive traits rolls on and on. For the privileged few, owning a wild cat is generally not an unthinkable luxury. Lions, tigers, panthers and pumas can often be found on the grounds of the homes of society's more fortunate. The question is not in whether or not one can afford the animal, but whether it is right to do so. A tiger does not want to be fed; It wants to hunt. A lion is not genetically predisposed to sit beside you in your home and take in the evening news- He has other things he would rather watch over.

The Ashera, however, is not a wild cat. They are a domestic species, bred to have all the splendor of a big cat in a housebroken, 30-lb. package that will conveniently refrain from mauling visiting in-laws. It seems the perfect compromise, and people are flocking to drop $22,000 on one of their own. Twenty-two thousand dollars. That's a lot of money. Moreover, that's a lot of money to pay for a cat.

I own cats, myself. I love them dearly, as most pet owners do. I am enthralled, day to day, just by the sight of them; Long, smooth lines, supple muscle and soft fur, alert, intelligent eyes and characters that change like the weather. I frequently wonder if there has ever been any other animal out there so beautiful and fantastic as the compact little ball of wonder that is the domestic cat. They amaze and entrance me, they delight and enthuse me, and neither one of them has a single ounce of pedigree to their name.

Anybody who has ever owned a cat knows that the connotation of "ownership" is misleading. Any domestic cat asserts their authority in no short order. They survey their homes with pretentious airs, hunting and killing feet and houseplants with impunity. Throw rugs and recliners are vanquished in short order, laser pointers are stalked and assaulted, in some cases bookshelves and racks of DVDs fall victim to their impulses. The very notion of a collection of crystal figurines or any other breakable assortment is so far-fetched as to be unrealistic and unthinkable. Any cat, regardless of their size or breeding, has some "wild" in them.

As Da Vinci said, "Every cat is a work of art." As with art, though, the appeal of the feline is different for everybody. While anybody with a paintbrush can hammer out a few well-positioned nudes on a canvas, that doesn't make it "art" in everyone's eye. The beauty that one can find in a Van Gogh or a Monet is not to be found in paying an exorbitant amount for one, but rather for loving and understanding it for what it is, and appreciating the beauty without feeling a need to "possess" it.

Of my two cats, one was found in a grocery store parking lot, starving to death and riddled with parasites, half-blind from an infection in one eye and obviously too young to be away from his mother. He had an injured back leg, due, we theorized, to somebody throwing a rock or a shoe at the stray to shoo him off. Nature had not been good to this cat and man had been even less so, but when we picked him up, he started to purr. My other cat was a shelter baby that we selected, alongside his sister, to the great delight of their "foster parents"; Apparently nobody else wanted the two deformed kittens, blighted with a mutation called Radial Hypoplasia- an ailment that never interfered in their ability to love, or to enjoy their lives. These cats have been a constant source of joy in my life, and I have certainly never wished that they had some kind of papers to their names.

The theory is not, of course, that an Ashera is incapable of the affection that a stray cat might come to offer, rather that the degree of gratitude surely cannot exist in a cat that people fought with each other to buy. This cat has never gone hungry, or shivered in the cold of the night by itself. It has never curled next to a trash can, waiting to die because it was too far gone to save itself. This cat doesn't know what cruel people do to its cousins across the world, because they are cheap and plentiful. It doesn't know about being hit by a car, kicked by a child, about being left to die in a shoebox in a dumpster somewhere because its birth was unplanned and inconvenient. It doesn't know about shelter euthanasia policies, and it will never have to because for $22,000, people aren't going to just drop it off outside of the Humane Society when it clashes with the furniture or the baby, or isn't allowed at their new apartment. For $22,000, these people think they're buying a stature, a fountain, a Van Gogh.

They're buying a cat.

And for twenty-two thousand dollars, they're paying to not see what a walk through a parking lot could have yielded. They want something special, something unique and astounding, something wild and beautiful and new.

Twenty-two thousand dollars is a lot of money to pay for something that every single cat on earth has to offer, and would be grateful to. Twenty-two thousand dollars is a lot of money to a charity, or a shelter, that could ensure that other cats never have to know what the Ashera will never have to, just because it was bred to be big. Twenty-two thousand dollars could buy a lot of food, or blankets, or spayings and neuterings. Twenty-two thousand dollars could save a lot of lives.

An Ashera is only a cat.

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