Happy Valley

When boys on a high school team in Texas battered a cat with their baseball bats, put it in a bag, and ran over it with their pickup truck, killing it, because it had taken to hanging around and soiling the pitcher’s mound, the animal people were outraged and demanded that the players be kicked off the team. Such intense disapproval “bewildered” the youths and caused a backlash. We all did things to cats when we were young. This is just ridiculous. Some people think a cat is more important than a boy. Although such arguments are not up to the debating dazzle, say, of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a humanist argument in any form defends normal thinking against the misanthropic nuts—the animal people or, worst of all, the animal-rights people who seek to question it.

Joy Williams for Harper’s, 1997.