And Pets
This is a mildly amusing item. Or maybe it’s not all that amusing really, it just happens to amuse me, because a friend and I were chatting this morning about the relative merits of dogs and cats as pets and the relative merits of animals and humans for misanthropes like us.
The article considers it a scandal that people misdirect their affection onto animals instead of relatives and friends. Well but – be fair. Animals don’t argue. They don’t contradict. They don’t willfully misconstrue what we are saying and then shout at us for saying what we’re not saying. They don’t borrow our clothes. They don’t eat the last piece of cake we carefully stashed in the fridge (because they can’t open the door). They don’t smoke. They don’t say our hair looks funny like that. They don’t nag. (Well, they do, when they’re hungry or want to play or go for a walk. But it’s a different kind of nagging.) They don’t remember something stupid we said fifteen years ago and bring it up at odd moments. They don’t dirty every dish in the house and then go out for the day. They don’t want to watch football when we want to watch a movie or vice versa.
Well that was fun. I will have my little joke. Actually the article does have a point.
In this age of alienation and mobility, too many of the old and the lonely, and even the young and the lonely, find themselves having to rely on cats and dogs for love and companionship, rather than on the web of relatives and friends their ancestors had. When that happens, it becomes temptingly easy for the dependent to blur and even erase the distinctions between themselves and their pets. They begin to see pets not just as animals who share their homes but rather as friends who share their humanity. And that’s not just sad; it’s dangerous.
There is something in that. There are a lot of people out there who think their pets have Rights (we’ve discussed the slipperiness of the word ‘rights’ before). For instance their cats have the Right to roam free. Very well, but then what about the Right of birds and other wildlife not to be killed? Is it so self-evident that domestic cats that we breed for our pleasure and amusement have Rights that trump those of other animals that we don’t breed? If so, why? What of introduced species that displace native species? Whose Rights trump whose there? The answer is not self-evident, it seems to me. And this is not a hypothetical. If you’ve read our About page you know that I used to be a zookeeper. Among the animals I worked with at the zoo were five mountain goats that had been caught in the Olympic Mountains as part of a research programme to see what capture and removal did to them physically (the answer was, nothing good). It was necessary to find out because they were an introduced species who were doing a lot of damage to native plants, which then had harmful knock-on effects on other wildlife. This was a very controversial issue – there were people who wanted them removed and people who wanted them protected; there were pros and cons on either side; whose Rights should be paramount was very far from obvious. As so often, the question is a complicated one, and Rights are a tempting shortcut but maybe not all that helpful.
Yet again I am apparently on the side of the irrationalists. You see, I think it makes a lot of sense to talk about animal rights. I think you are trivialsing an important subject that I, for one, care deeply about. I think we are far too cavalier and frankly brutal in our treatment of animals. I find it morally appalling, the way animals are mistreated by some private owners, parts of the food industry and even some scientists.
By talking as if anyone who mentions “rights” is some sort of loony, you must realise that you become the sort of person who opposes “rights” at every turn. Not good, Ophelia, not good.
Well I agree with you about the treatment of animals, Armando. I just think there are problems with talking about it in terms of rights.
It’s not that I oppose rights at every (or any) turn, it’s that I think the unreflective use of the word can obscure reality, which is that they’re a human institution rather than a fact about the world. That means they can be taken away as well as granted, for example; contested as well as negotiated. I think it’s as well to be aware of that.
This is a nice counterpoint to the bunfight at Crooked Timber where the best minds in Blogovia have conspicuously failed to specify a moral justification for prohibitions on cruelty to animals. Now the Society of Jesus suggests that it is immoral to be nice to animals. Great.
Well, you can disagree on so many levels, can’t you? For a start, if we simply reverse the instrumentalist argument against cruelty to animals which was good enough for Jeremy Bentham (I’m not sure if that’s a recommendation or an ironic reference), suppose that I buy a cat and feed it and teach my three year old child to be nice to it. The object is that by being taught to be kind to the cat, the child will learn to be kind to other people, especially the helpless and the harmless. It’s part of giving the kid a chance to fulfill her potential as a moral being.
And yet she will doubtless become extremely sentimental towards the animal, and will want to give it presents and so on. Is this a bad thing? Not in my moral universe, I’m afraid.
It’s easy to show that spending resources on an animal can benefit a person. If I am a farmer, and I spend money on maintaining the fitness of my prize bull, I am thereby securing myself an income stream with which, just to please the Jesuits, I can buy improving tracts for my family. I don’t see the distinction between this and an isolated person spending money to maintain a pet, from which they reap the benefit of the animal’s presence and gain a degree of happiness.
This is quite different from people feeding their cat on nothing but beluga caviar. That is simply conspicuous consumption and differs not at all from somebody who buys another Jaguar when they’ve already got one. I have no problem with the notion that in this case the money would be better spent maintaining the water supply to a village in Kerala (although I concede that it is logically possible to disagree), but I don’t see what this has to do with deriving enjoyment from the presence of pets.
And I have no time for appeals to past golden ages when everybody looked after everbody else. There have always been lonely old people who became emotionally over-reliant on their pets. Only in the seventeenth century they were hanged for witchcraft.
I think that while I am somewhat more sympathetic to the concept of rights than yourself, I’m inclined to agree that the concept of animal rights is not entirely applicable. Historically, rights are something that have to be demanded (the suffragettes etc); I’m actually quite uncomfortable with the notion that they can be bequeathed, by proxy as it were. Similarly, rights form part of a social contract and are reciprocal between ourselves and between ourselves and the state. Animals cannot honour such a contract and reciprocity cannot be guaranteed. I certainly think there are increased grounds to take the view that we have obligations towards animals, but I’m not sure that applying the idea of rights here doesn’t debase the concept.