Proposition: Cats Are More Libertarian Than Dogs

Cats, like libertarians, think for themselves.

- By Jason Russell

AFFIRMATIVE: Meow.

Cats don't take orders from anyone.

It's not that cats don't understand human speech or can't be trained. Cats just do what they want. "Cats don't do what you expect them to do," Charlotte de Mouzon, a cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre, told The New York Times last year. "But if cats don't come when we call them, it may be because they're busy doing something else."

Thus, it should be no surprise the queen of self-interest, Ayn Rand, was a cat owner. She wrote in a letter to Cat Fancy magazine: "I love cats in general and own two....I can demonstrate objectively that cats are a great value" (emphasis in original). She was seemingly referring to pictures she enjoyed in the charter issue of Cat Fancy, just one installment in the centuries of cat art that humans have enjoyed. Today, that enjoyment often takes the form of memes of grumpy cats or videos of cats in silly acts.

Entertainment aside, cats provide economic value. Cats work on farms, ships, and elsewhere to scare off and eat rodents and small creatures and when their employers desire it and the cats consent, they accept scritches.