Finally putting this part of my world to text after holding off for so long trying to think it through. I’m very much looking for feedback on this whole idea and progression in my world. Please let me know what you think!

I should also mention that this is in no way in reference to or inspired by any human events or atrocities. That was not my intention, I did not go out and try to find for human tragedies that I could use for my own writing, and this is entirely a figment of my imagination, inspired mostly by other fiction and not real events.

Context for this world is that it is inhabited by intelligent animals, think Zootopia but more sci-fi, and with quite a bit more political and societal turmoil during the time period this post focuses on. Also, these are normal, animal shaped animals, not anthros. They do have human scale lifespans though, if only because a 15-20 year lifespan for a cat is not conducive to detailed character development.

I really need to start with some background information beforehand, otherwise the story feels incomplete.

A pervasive and central part of this world is the problem of predator and prey. But being intelligent animals with their own hopes and stories, it becomes very morally problematic very quickly to hunt and eat your prey, at least for some predators. This brings us to the Feline empire. Some cats came to really enjoy the screams and pleads of their prey and really put effort into making them suffer while eating them, in that way your cat at home plays with its prey and bats it around, letting it go and catching it again till it gives out. Other cats, the vast majority in fact, did not like hunting and eating other animals, but either had no accessible alternatives or the alternatives were prohibitively expensive, it’s extremely hard to convert an obligate carnivore to eating plants, at least physiologically. Still others were completely opposed to eating prey and saw eating prey as eating their comrades and made every possible effort to avoid it.

But as you may imagine, the meat-free alternatives for obligate carnivores were quite limited. Omnivores like most canids had enjoyed something called a Dietary Enzyme Supplement for quite a while now, which is a pill that is taken either with every meal or at regular intervals, that arms the digestive system with artificial digestive enzymes, that can more efficiently break down plant matter, including cellulose, and use those breakdown products to synthesize nutrients in vivo. Nutritional supplements and synthetic meat substitutes had existed for even longer, but they were mainly compatible with omnivores, not carnivores. So Felines that wanted to stop eating prey and stay healthy were forced to mix and match various expensive enzyme supplements for omnivores (they were hard to get in Feline territory) with expensive “special” nutritional supplements, pay close attention to what plant based foods they’re eating to get enough base nutrients like protein, and monitor very closely for the earliest symptoms of malnutrition. And if they were nursing kittens, they would be producing much less milk and less concentrated milk, leading to malnutrition in their kittens. Not to mention even weaned kittens are voracious little things and would be very expensive to feed without prey.

Collectively among the general public, issues with eating prey were weighing on their conscience, and there was a dream of a dietary enzyme supplement for obligate carnivores. A cheap and convenient thing for Felines to essentially go vegan. But their government was Trophist (pro-predation) and gave no funding to these silly ideas of cats not eating meat, and other carnivore groups didn’t seem to care.

That was, until there was. Biochemist Nikita Almondtail and quantum chemist Yvonne Dandelionpaw (note that these are Reddit links while I’m editing those character profiles for posting on Lemmy) had developed ATDP, the first ever nutritionally complete dietary enzyme supplement for obligate carnivores. A pill that only had to be taken once a week, and which will not only allow Felines to digest and more importantly derive all their nutrients from plant based food, but to digest cellulose, and a range a food wide enough to include the softer raw plants. And critically, initial tests on Felines showed that it was safe for use when pregnant, and when nursing, could satisfy kittens’ nutritional demands if done right, and could allow mother cats to produce just as much and just as high quality milk as pure meat eating cats. But, plant based food was more stable and reliable, higher output, and in a time when food insecurity and hunger was rampant among Felines just as it had been the nature of being a hunter, they could have a safe and reliable source of food that they controlled, no cat should go hungry again, all while making peace and even making friends with prey animals! Two cats developed ATDP no less, and it was tailored specifically for Felines! It used brand new technologies that the Felines had recently pioneered, including a newly discovered super-element called Intium. It was a triumph of Feline technology and science, and was poised to rid Felines of the need to kill and eat prey forever. That was, until the king of the Feline empire personally banned its production or further development, first stating that it unpatriotic and “against nature”, though changed his narrative to saying that it wasn’t safe for Feline to use after strong public pushback.

This triggered a series of events that would lead to the outbreak of the Feline revolution, quickly escalating into the Feline civil war. Unitist (essentially, vegan socialist) movements among Felines had been growing steadily for a long time, and this is not the first time Unitists engaged in civil disobediece and even attempted insurgency, but the banning of ATDP pushed the Feline population over the edge and support for a Unitist revolution skyrocketed. The public had had it with their Empire and was determined to dismantle it in favour of a Unitist republic, just like the Unified Territories next doors. The empire responded with violence and terror against these Unitist cells, determined to silence them. This was when Yvonne Dandelionpaw and Nikita Amondtail came back together, using the knowledge they learned from developing ATDP, namely protein science and Intium, to develop a weapon to turn the tides in favour of the Unitist revolutionaries.

They came up with something they called Catsbane, a neurotoxin developed by the Feline Unity Army and was used to assassinate numerous key figures of the Feline Empire they were trying to overthrow. Basically, they would find a way to tamper with the supply chain of mouse and bird meat, lacing the meals of the royal elite with the poison in highly targeted assassinations. There were even cases of captured prey animals slated to be eaten by high profile individuals who willingly took the poison in order to pass it on to the cats, with the long delay to symptom onset allowed them to not experience the effects until, you know. Being a pro-drug, the chemical would be absorbed through the intestines and slowly processed by the liver into its physiologically active, toxic form. It would then travel into the brain where it interferes with the surface proteins of neurons such as ion pumps and neurotransmitter receptors.

It was engineered to kill as silently and non-dramatically as possible. Victims would not feel symptoms for anywhere between days to over a week, at which point they will experience insomnia, disorientation and disassociation, memory loss, escalating into unresponsiveness and coma, before death comes about two to three weeks later. The “Catsbane stare” was coined to describe the blank expression late stage sufferers would develop as their brain shut down. The chemical is very difficult to detect before symptoms set in, and there is no antidote. Catsbane was also nicknamed “peaceful rabies”, due to the fact that it has a period of no symptoms post exposure, is hard to detect until it’s too late, and it targets the brain.

A total of 120 assassinations were carried out with Catsbane, all in the Feline Empire’s military or royalty, and it was a major contributor to the success of the revolution, with most agreeing that cats would be still eating prey if it wasn’t invented. Obviously, this was extremely controversial. Many supporters of the revolution argued that this poison was much more merciful than the cats who ate prey gave their victims (getting eaten would also be up there in horrible ways to die, but that’s not a medical condition), while many others questioned the integrity of a movement by cats who claim to want to live in harmony with their former prey animals engaged in killing other cats.

After the revolution, the new Feline Democratic Republic, the Unitist republic, banned the poison as a Schedule 1 chemical weapon. The state-run Feline Science Institute is usually very open about providing anyone with their research and papers for free, but the synthesis of Catsbane is a notable exception. Some believe not even they have the synthesis procedure anymore and that all documents related to how to manufacture it was destroyed (they definitely still have it, though, in secret). Interestingly, the general Feline public had nearly complete support of these assassinations, but many prey animals (generally prey animals who lived in the nearby Unified Territories which was already Unitist for a long time) criticized it as even Unitist Felines were still killing animals, and highly polarized opinions among prey animals living within Feline territory (called the prey diaspora, long story). Many ended up trusting the Felines enough to stay and the Feline government post revolution is committed to making sure they are safe and can lead good lives alongside Felines.

For Felines themselves (all animals in Feline territory actually), the Feline government is constitutionally required to ensure both plant based food and dietary enzyme supplements will always be freely and readily available to all animals in Feline territory, as that was a massive part of the revolution. The signing and near unilateral support of the Interspecies Peace Agreement banned predation, for all Felines anywhere in the world, from the cheetah to the domestic cat, in theory forever.

There are rumours that the Unified Territories, which included the native territories and governments of their regular prey animals like rodents and birds, as wells as small to medium omnivores like dogs and foxes, aided the Feline Unitist side. But no they definitely did.

  • DerKriegs
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    1 year ago

    Very cool write up, thanks for sharing!

    Some serious gray area here with the Unitist terrorism, and how brutal that the same people that made peaceful coexistence possible were also the self made arbiters of their own government’s fate.

    The idea of Catsbane is quite devious, but feels like a really natural progression of their protein research and the need for such measures. I imagine (as it’s in the zeitgeist) Dandelionpaw having some sort of “I am become Death” moment a la Oppenheimer.

    Question about the revolt: other than these high profile assassinations, what did this civil war look like? What did the felids & co deal with on the streets? What, other than the deaths of many leaders, caused the government to finally capitulate/fall?

    • HiddenLayer5OP
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      1 year ago

      Thank you so much for reading!

      Some serious gray area here with the Unitist terrorism, and how brutal that the same people that made peaceful coexistence possible were also the self made arbiters of their own government’s fate.

      The way they justified it is that the cats they were targeting were hellbent on ensuring (read: actively enforcing and preventing access to alternatives like ATDP) that all Felines continued to hunt and eat prey. And they were the cats that hunted in the way you expect cats to hunt, playing around with their prey, slowly eating them alive, really making their prey suffer for their amusement. I’m sure you’ve seen those videos of cats catching mice or birds and what they do to them. They also argued that a slow fade, that was thought to at least be painless (but then again no one still living can verify that), was much more mercy than what they granted their prey.

      They also justified it by saying that by going directly for the top of the imperial hierarchy, as in the cats actually responsible and the ones they actually want to take down, they reduced the amount of lives wasted in the war, because the other option would be to fight all the bottom level soldiers, most of whom were conscripted and forced to fight, kept in line by the empire’s terror cells despite very much supporting the Unitists. They would have to have killed all those cats before even getting close to the imperial leadership, because the Empire certainly didn’t care how many cats died as long as they stamped out any Unitist thoughts. The Unitists certainly did not enjoy killing, cats, prey, or otherwise, that’s the whole point of their movement, but they were backed into a corner and saw no other option.

      They were extremely careful to only take down inddividuals and not cause any sort of “collateral damage” with their poison. If they had done something like release it into the Moonpeak (Feline capital city) water supply, that would have been unambiguously immoral and evil because it would have killed indiscriminately and on a massive scale.

      In the end whether their justifications are valid depends on your values and (if you’re in-universe) your own experiences with cats, predation, Unitism, Trophism, etc. Many prey animals actually criticized this because they didn’t want cats to die either, but the vast majority still recognized that it was war and a fight for survival, so death was inevitable either way, especially since they themselves were fighting (alongside the Unitist Felines) for their own right not to be eaten.

      From a literary/symbolism standpoint this also plays into my motifs for this world, particularly that of intelligence and the mind. That’s why I chose to depict it as a neurotoxin, but that is not the reason in-universe, they were just making do with their knowledge and desperation.

      The idea of Catsbane is quite devious, but feels like a really natural progression of their protein research and the need for such measures. I imagine (as it’s in the zeitgeist) Dandelionpaw having some sort of “I am become Death” moment a la Oppenheimer.

      To say she has no regrets would be a lie. But, she and the rest of her team justifies it with the reasons listed above.

      “I don’t claim that what we did was the best possible thing we could have done, nor do I claim perfect morality. But looking at it now, purely after the fact, I think takes away from the context of what kind of situation we found ourselves in. I’d been around predation my whole life, I was lucky enough that my parents were Unitists so we never hunted or ate prey, but simply witnessing the things some cats did to prey as a kitten still haunts me. And the things we experienced in the revolution was so much worse, the screams of predator and prey alike, the massacres by the imperial terror cells, all drowned out by bombs and gunshots, so close that it rattled your whiskers. Every moment mattered, every move could be the decisive turning point. We didn’t have time to take a good, introspective look at the morality of every single minutiae of our revolution, we just wanted it to end and we had to do what we most thought would bring the least suffering and lost lives. Do I have my regrets? Of course I do. Do I wish everything could have worked out without the death and violence? Of course I do. I wish plenty of things. But when the enemy is as cruel and ruthless as they were, and we as desperate to end the horrors of predation and the horrors in general as we were, I still think we made it through with our values and conscience intact.” - Yvonne Dandelionpaw

      She does not hide what she did, nor does she glorify it. Now she’s mostly just wanting to move on and focus on her scientific career, the thing she actually enjoys doing, and to do her best to make sure no cat or other animal has to go through what they or their former prey went through ever again.

      (One day I need to do a roleplay AMA with Yvonne Dandelionpaw, if that’s allowed. She’s actually a really sweet kitty once you get to know her.)

      Question about the revolt: other than these high profile assassinations, what did this civil war look like? What did the felids & co deal with on the streets?

      I haven’t really developed this that much because it’s not really what my plot focuses on (the plot mostly follows my science nerd characters because this is still a sci-fi fantasy story with cute fluffy animals, and not a war story). But I imagine it as just a “typical” (not sure if that word is even applicable to a war) civil war in an industrialized nation. Air raids, soldiers marching in the streets, loyalties and paradigms being torn apart and reformed, the whole nine yards.

      What, other than the deaths of many leaders, caused the government to finally capitulate/fall?

      When the royal palace was stormed and the royals and aristocrats put on trial. Those at the very top were convicted of predation and willfully causing undue suffering, and were executed by firing squad, and that was of course pretty controversial as well, but the argument was to prevent them from trying to inflict that level of suffering again or try to take back power. Most were given life sentences though, but predation is still the one and only crime under Feline law that formally carries the death penalty, though only for extreme cases and for ringleaders essentially.

      There is still a small, fringe group of Trophist Felines who hunt and eat prey to this day, effectively in exhile from Feline territory (or any Unitist territory) because they’re wanted on crimes still punishable by death. They’re mostly the former aristocracy, high military command, and terror cell leaders of the Feline empire. They take refuge in Trophist territories, attempting to get the Trophist Apex predators to help them take back Feline territory. Actually, they don’t just want to help the Apex predators (who think they’re suckers and are planning to betray them and start eating cats as soon as they succeed), they actually just want their help to take back control of the Felines, who arguably have the highest level of technological development, and use that technology to become the ultimate Apex predator on the planet, just like the species that made the domestic cat, the humans, once did. No honour among prey-hunters it seems. This is a huge part of my ultimate plot if I ever end up writing that far!

      • DerKriegs
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        1 year ago

        You’ve put some real work in here, mad props!

        The ultimate plot you mentioned near the end is really compelling, would be a great read/view (from previous posts, I understand you’d like an animation made from the material: I’d binge the hell out of it!). The Trophies cells are an interesting concept, are they still maintaining a certain level of lifestyle? Or are they becoming feral?

        Also, concerning the civil war/revolution, this video (YouTube link) is an excellent watch for getting down to this brass tacks. Everything Hello Future Me does is pretty excellent, some great long-term Worldbuilding video essays.

        • HiddenLayer5OP
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          1 year ago

          Thank you so much! They’re definitely not becoming feral, actually, they’re treated pretty good by the Apex predators as part of their looming plan to double cross each other. I won’t say how their alliance actually breaks down, for the time being (still need to develop the ending tbh).