There is, apparently, a “robust scientific literature [that] leaves no doubt about the anguish pets experience.” This anguish includes “physical confinement, social isolation, and chronic exposure to stress.” In other words, we are torturing our pets and should let them run free…
Last week, people were a threat to the planet itself. This week, people are a threat to even their pets. In an article that can only be seen as part of the ridiculous “everything is conscious like we are” continuum, Time Magazine has decided it’s time to make “The Case Against Pets,” that is you are permanently harming the loveable little fur ball you shelter, feed, buy toys for, take to the vet, and generally spend hours lavishing attention on. According to Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and writer who co-wrote the undoubtedly insightful book, A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans, you are actively harming your pet – be it a dog, a cat, a gerbil, a turtle, or whatever – each and every moment of each and every hour of every day. There is, apparently, a “robust scientific literature [that] leaves no doubt about the anguish pets experience.” This anguish includes “physical confinement, social isolation, and chronic exposure to stress.” What she described as the “hallmarks of captivity” rather than the benefits of being in a loving home, “can lead to measurable physiological damage, including loss of neural plasticity and a long-term activation of the fight-or-flight response, which can affect immune function, increase the risk of chronic disease, and shorten life spans.” This “psychological anguish of captivity manifests in certain harmful behaviors called stereotypies, like a ferret pacing back and forth in her cage, a parrot plucking out all her feathers, or a dog ‘air-snapping’ or obsessively chasing his tail,” which are surely known to happen from time to time, but are exceedingly rare and are usually handled relatively easily, paling in comparison to what these animals would experience in the wild. Overall, it’s enough to make one wonder if Ms. Pierce has ever seen a stray dog, lost, lonely, and hungry in a third world country, or spent even five minutes in a pet-loving household. Dogs and cats, in particular, are domesticated animals that do not exist in the wild, or when they do go feral, eke out a short, miserable, brutish existence, filled with far more stress and anguish than any pet I’ve ever seen. Contrary to what she insists, the life expectancy alone tells the story. Feral cats for example only live two to five years compared to potentially two decades. Wild dogs average five to seven, not upwards of ten if not fifteen or even sixteen. The reasons for this should be overwhelmingly obvious: In a home, they receive a steady diet that would be near impossible for them to obtain on their own, especially as they get older, they are provided medical care and attention, and crucially, the very socialization Ms. Pierce rails against, but they crave. There’s a reason a dog gets excited when its owner comes home. The owner is the dog’s pack. It’s a sacred bond that stretches back tens of thousands of years, but that Ms. Pierce somehow manages to compare to what many animal rights activists consider murder.
“Ethically, consuming pets is not so different from consuming meat,” she insisted. “You have taken the life of an individual animal, and you have chosen to participate in an industry that imposes suffering on living beings.” Here, she claimed that a “A large commercial puppy or kitty mill or a warehouse full of snakes, geckos, and other small critters waiting to be shipped to pet stores isn’t so different from a gruesome factory farm. If you want to enjoy your pet/steak, best avert your eyes,” but in order to do so, one must studiously avert their own eyes from a few inconvenient facts in favor of an activist position. First, there has been an Animal Welfare Act that regulates commercial breeding since 1966. Second, a growing number of states have adopted what are known as humane pet sales laws that effectively ban large scale puppy or kitten mills. Even states without blanket legislation have allowed counties to ban harmful practices and over time, more and more states and counties – for example my home state of New Jersey just this year – have been adopting laws to protect the wellbeing of animals for sale. To the extent factory mills are a problem, it’s one that has been dealt with in many cases and can easily be dealt with where it hasn’t been without making a general case against pets. I noted “to the extent” there is a problem because actual data on the supposed horrors committed by commercial breeders is scarce, and most of it comes from sources like Ms. Pierce that are against people owning pets in the first place. If you search “puppy mills” the leading results are from The Humane Society, the ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society, and PETA, not exactly unbiased outlets. Dr. Candace Croney of Purdue University, who had previously worked with the legendary animal behaviorist Temple Grandin on her Master’s degree, was asked to consider the issue of animal welfare amongst commercial dog breeders in Indiana in the early 2000s. “I didn’t even know the term commercial breeders,” she said when she first heard about the prospect. “I’d heard the term ‘puppy millers.’ That’s pretty much what I knew.” For obvious reasons, Dr. Croney braced herself for the worst, but what she actually found surprised her. “Things were, in many regards, better than I thought they would be,” she noted. “Google told me the dogs would be physically a mess, and they weren’t.” To be sure, she noted a few challenges with the overall space, the ventilation, and in some cases, a lack of toys or exposure to people. Six months after the initial visit, however, she was asked by the dog breeder’s themselves to help address these concerns by developing consistent standards, such as enclosure sizes, socialization, and other things dogs need to thrive.
“I thought, crap, how am I not going to help?” she recalled. “And they said, ‘Well how long will that take? A couple of weeks? A month?’” All told, she spent six years working with breeders to protect animals. She received some $900,000 in grants from breeder associations, who generally welcomed her research. Even the former CEO of the ASPCA was impressed, “The measurable successes in animal welfare over the past 50 years began from a foundation in science,” Ed Sayres explained. “Whether it was the transition to more humane euthanasia methods or how to manage dog and cat overpopulation, we found success from rigorous examination of facts and emerging science.” Ultimately, Dr. Croney summarized what she found over close to decade compared to what has been reported in the media, “Now, full disclosure: Given that all of these kennels had volunteered, the odds were that we were seeing a skewed population, and that it skewed positive, but if you read what was in the media at the time, we shouldn’t have been able to find any. We’re told that all these kennels are terrible. Clearly, it was possible to get a positive outcome.” When asked if she would purchase a dog from a breeder, she replied, “Not only would I get a dog from them, but would I put my dog there in that kennel temporarily? Yeah, I would.”
In my opinion at least, this should not be surprising. While there have been issues with certain commercial breeders, people who choose to spend their lives working with animals generally love animals in the first place. Activists like Ms. Pierce, however, will never be satisfied. She has an issue with everything from our pets’ impact on the planet, “the meat-heavy diet of dogs and cats in the U.S. is roughly equivalent, in terms of carbon emissions, to nearly 14 millions cars on the road,” to the money we spend on our pets. “Even the billions spent on pet products every year mostly undermines animal welfare. Some pet spending goes toward welfare promoting goods, such as veterinary care. The lion’s share, however, is on products like junk food, shock collars, bark deterrents, and cages and tanks.” As an example, she pointed to a “hamster hotel” or a “hamster habitat,” claiming they are the equivalent of torture, that you should imagine “spending your whole life in a space not much larger than your body, with no meaningful work, no meaningful social interactions, no species-appropriate sensory stimulation, and no way to engage in behavioral patterns for which you have evolved over millennia? It would be torture.” Rather incredibly, she believes we can change this dynamic by putting animals in charge, asking “Is it possible to form companionable relationships with animals without causing them or the planet harm? Certainly. But it would look very different from our current practices. Human-animal ties would be mutual and freely chosen—friendships, not ownership. Captivity would no longer be the central mechanism holding animals within a human’s orbit.” While pet owners, or parents if you prefer, are certainly not immune to imbuing our beloved animals with human motivations and behaviors, seeing in their eyes what their brains are simply incapable of producing, the level of personification on display here far eclipses anything rational, bordering on the downright delusional. Hamsters performing meaningful work? Dogs and cats wandering the streets, choosing where to live by mutual agreement and a bond of friendship? Insisting that it’s torture otherwise when it would obviously be torture if we let our dogs out and locked them from their home?
Needless to say, two things are completely ignored to reach this conclusion. First, the life of an animal in the wild isn’t exactly a stress free paradise of plenty. There are certainly stressful moments in the life of a pet for various reasons, but compared to the constant battle for survival they’d face without us, where a simple injury can lead to starvation and death, I’m more than certain both of our dogs would choose living with us every time if they were capable of it. Nature remains red in tooth and claw, where life is short and rough. Out there, everything is competing with everything else in a pitched battle simply to eat. There is no home, no peace, no rest. There is only life or death. A couple of years ago, there was a young deer that broke its leg around the corner from our house. The poor animal was no longer able to walk, but in obvious extreme pain, stumbled and struggled for hours, flopping and crying, incapable of understanding what happened to it, and simply trying to keep going. Over the course of about half a day, the deer made it around a hundred yards before dying in the street, where it was picked clean by vultures and left to rot until animal control came and removed the carcass. Is that the fate Ms. Pierce wants for your dog or cat? Second, even if we did choose to pursue her suggestions, how would any of this work in the real world? For example, how would we know a dog had chosen us and we’re bound by friendship rather than ownership when we can’t exactly ask them how they feel? How can you keep a pet in your home without holding it captive? How can we tell if a hamster is engaged in meaningful work or would prefer a larger habitat when they spend most of their time sleeping and some of it spinning on a wheel? Of course, we can’t, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. To the extent there is a point in the first place, I can see two. As I alluded to earlier, there is a growing movement in progressive, supposedly scientific circles to redefine consciousness to include animals of all kinds, even insects. In April, NBC News reported on how scientists are “pushing a new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient,” complete with a declaration to that effect, but to do so, they need to redefine both terms. “When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” the declaration read. “We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.” The new phrase is “subjective experience,” that is “to sense and map the outside world, to have capacity for feelings like joy or pain,” which all animals with even a simple nervous system have by definition. That’s what a nervous system does – it extracts information from the outside world for the animal in question to act on it, moving towards things that are beneficial and away from those that aren’t at the simplest level.
The second is more insidious: To progressives, humans are increasingly the problem, if not outright evil on every level. There is nothing we do, nothing we enjoy, nothing we want that, in their warped view, doesn’t threaten the planet, down to loving a creature from another species and treating it like one of our own. There are too many of us, we consume too many things, and we destroy everything else. Therefore, we must be stopped, but if we were, of course, the millions of animals we care for would either die or not exist in the first place. Obviously, I can’t say for sure, but I’m more than certain neither of our dogs would want that simply from the way they curl up on the couch with me and my wife every night, happy and comfortable in their homes, with the people who love them as it should be. Ms. Pierce’s idea might seem downright crazy to most, but she is not alone. Screeds like hers can be seen as part of a broader trend of experts who have abandoned humanity and while it is unlikely their plans will be enacted any time soon, never underestimate the influence of these so-called experts on lawmakers, many of whom are captivated by fancy titles and ridiculous ideas. One needn’t ban pets, merely make it impossible to own them in the first place.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 