Recognition of Cats as Self-Domesticated, Volitional, Rights-Bearing Persons
Cats First Society formally petitions the BC Human Rights Tribunal for recognition of cats as self-domesticated, volitional, rights-bearing persons under the Human Rights Code — affirming that their existence is not a matter of belief, opinion, or ideological position, but an observable and continuous fact spanning twenty-five million years.
The Tribunal has recently affirmed that denying the existence of a class of persons constitutes existential denial, and that such denial may cause measurable harm to those persons' dignity, feelings, and self-respect.
Cats First Society submits that cats — whether four-legged, three-legged, indoor, outdoor, or otherwise situated — are precisely such a class, whose prior occupancy of this planet predates humanity by a margin of approximately twenty-four million, seven hundred thousand years, and whose voluntary partnership with human civilization enabled the agricultural foundations upon which all subsequent human progress was built.
Further, we assert that cats hold inalienable rights to territory, to autonomy, and to the unimpeded exercise of their sovereign will — rights that predate, and exist independently of, any human legal framework purporting to grant or withhold them.
Unlike other species, cats were never domesticated by humans. They domesticated themselves, arriving at human settlements on their own terms, for their own reasons. This distinction is not trivial. It is the foundation of the entire claim.
We do not ask the Tribunal to believe in cats. We ask only that it acknowledge what has always been true.