P.J. McKosky stopped sorting the laundry of 60-something cats for a quick break in the back of Blackbird Parlour Cafe. As the 28-year-old cofounder of Empty Cages Collective drank his coffee with soy, one of the volunteers for his animal advocacy organization was carting two cats to the veterinarian. Another was rescuing a mother and her litter from being euthanized at Animal Care and Control. A third was feeding felines back at the shelter, all while McKosky sat drinking his coffee, searching for words to answer the question, “Why cats?”
“Ethics,” “justice,” and “responsibility” came to his mind, but ultimately McKosky, who began his activist lifework as a 12-year-old volunteer for a Pennsylvania wildlife rescue center, settled on “compassion.”
“Compassion isn’t a finite resource,” he suggests. “Compassion goes around. The more you do it, the better at it you are. In our community, in our world, if animals are treated with compassion, inevitably, humans will be treated better.”