The Heart Wants What It Wants (But That Doesn’t Make It Right)
I have argued in previous posts (here and here) that we have good moral reasons to end the practice of keeping pets (for a full defence see here). Pet keeping involves the unjustifiable instrumentalisation of animals, sets back animals’ interests in self-determination, and exposes animals to unnecessary risks of harm. Not to mention the many attendant harms that the practice involves to farmed animals, wild animals and the environment. Given all this, we should seek to transition to a pet-free world.
In this post, I suggest we won’t be able to make progress towards a more just world for animals until we’ve engaged in some honest soul-searching about our desire to keep animals as pets.
What Should We Do?
Crucially, the institution of pet keeping (like many institutions) is sustained by a dynamic of supply and demand. The demand for pets stems from a variety of human desires, including for companionship, emotional support, security, and to signal social status. This demand fuels the supply side, with breeders, pet stores, and rescue organizations all contributing to the availability of animals.
To reduce the number of pets in society, a good place to start would be with the implementation of measures that curtail both supply and demand. For example, on the supply side, we could put tighter regulations on breeding operations, place tighter restrictions on the importation of pet animals, or more radically, prohibit the sale of pet animals altogether. The more difficult it is for people to profit from breeding animals the fewer animals there will be.
On the demand side, we might require that all pet owners have a licence to keep animals, require that owners have medical insurance for their pets, and make pet owner liability insurance mandatory. By making it more difficult for people to acquire animals, these measures might lessen demand, which will likely bring down the number of future animals produced for companionship. After all, if fewer people are looking for animal companions, breeding them will be a less attractive business opportunity.
Pie in the Sky
But let’s be honest, few of these measures are politically feasible and it is hard to see the possibility of a pet-free world as anything other than pure fantasy. Part of the issue is that many people assume that we have a right to keep pets. This belief is deeply ingrained in our societies and often goes unquestioned. Moreover, our sense of entitlement to pets is often reinforced by the law. In most countries, adults are free to purchase domesticated animals with little by way of restriction.
This sense of entitlement suggests a deeper problem with how we think about the practice of pet keeping and the animals we keep as pets. In my view, only when we have reckoned, both individually and collectively, with the desires and assumptions that underpin the whole enterprise, will we be able to do something about it.
Our Acquisitive Desire for Pets
To start us on that path, I’d like to suggest that the desire to keep animals as pets is at heart acquisitive: it is a desire to acquire or possess another. Moreover, the desire has (at least) three aspects that when combined make it especially morally problematic. First, the desire to acquire pets instrumentalizes those animals. People typically decide that they want a pet for reasons that are primarily self-serving: to keep them company, to make them feel safe, to enhance their social media profile, to teach their children about responsibility, to practice caring for someone else before having a human child, to get them out of the house, to help them get over bereavement or a failed relationship, and so on. Of course, when animals are brought into the home to serve someone else’s ends, then their security within that arrangement very much depends upon them living up to expectations. This means that no matter how much we tell ourselves that our desires are also about the good of the animals in our care, when they do not fit into our lives as planned or fulfil the role that we assign to them, or we simply outgrow them, that they might be ends in themselves is quickly forgotten.
Second, the desire to acquire a pet commodifies those animals: animals are assumed to be things that can be acquired. To be clear, acquiring a pet is not the same as acquiring, say, a friend. To be a “pet” is to occupy a distinctive kind of social role; one that a being is usually bred for, sold into, and can rarely escape from without harm. Moreover, these animals often do not choose to be placed with the humans responsible for their care and they enjoy no right of exit. They are the property of their owners. Importantly, the proprietary nature of pet keeping is part of the attraction. Owners typically want animals to belong to them and no one else. And through ownership, people assume exclusive access to another’s body; to touch, stroke, watch, make perform, and control.
Third, and relatedly, to desire a pet is to desire a relationship with a socially subordinate being; one who will always be subordinate to you in terms of power, authority, dependency, and vulnerability. Since there is no possibility of there being anything like equality with an animal who is a pet, the desire to stand in that relation is a desire to stand in an unequal relation with another.
This should give us pause. We rightly worry about relationships between humans that are characterised by deep inequality: consider friendships or sexual relationships between adults and children; or between adults with intellectual disabilities and those without; or between university students and their professors; or between employees and their bosses. We worry about manipulation, domination, and the potential for the abuse of power, but we also worry about the quality of the more powerful person’s desire in this arrangement: why do they want to be in a relationship with a person over whom they have such significantly disproportionate power? If we are concerned about such desires within interhuman relations, then I think we should be worried about our desires for interspecies companionship. Especially since our desire to stand in this particular relationship is often motivated by primarily self-serving reasons, the animals themselves did not choose the relationship, and those animals are socially subordinated as “pets”.
Are You For Real?!
As I write this, I imagine many readers scoffing at the thought that their desire for nonhuman animal companionship is anything but a desire to love, care, and befriend another being. This may be especially true of those who adopted animals from shelters or gave homes to those whose owners could no longer keep them. In such cases, surely people are putting the animals first, not themselves. Without such generosity, these animals would either live sub-optimal lives in a shelter or be killed to free up shelter resources.
I do not want to deny that there are many existing animals who need our love and care. And I should not be misread as suggesting that we ought not to strive to give good homes to shelter animals when we can do so. However, as we have seen, the desire to keep animals as pets is foundational to the maintenance of the institution of pet keeping and its ills. And I’m pretty suspicious about the thought that those who rescue pet animals have purer desires than those who purchase them. Here is why.
It is common for people who are turned down by sheltering organisations to feel especially affronted by such rejection. Online forums are filled with expressions of indignation: “How can shelters claim that they have so many animals in need if they weren’t willing to give one to me?” The reasons why a shelter might turn a person down are complex. Sometimes it’s because there were lots of candidates for a particular animal and at the end of the day the animal could only go home with one person. Sometimes it’s because many of the animals in shelters have complex medical needs that require a lot of time, patience, and money – things that few people have a lot of. Sometimes the shelter staff may judge that the person is not a good fit for the animals in their care.
Now here’s the thing that interests me. Do the people who were turned down by a shelter leave it at that? Often not. Indeed, usually, the main reason why someone is telling me that they would have rescued an animal from a shelter but were turned down is because they are trying to justify why it was that they went on to buy an animal or adopt one from abroad instead of from a local organisation.
This raises the question. Did those who successfully acquired animals from shelters do it primarily for the animals or themselves? Or if they had been prevented from adopting, would they have sought to acquire an animal from elsewhere? When people do not take “no” as an answer to their desire to acquire a pet it becomes far harder to accept that their desire is not self-serving, commodifying, and subordinating in the ways described above.
The trouble with all of this is that we are not always reliable judges of our own behaviour. When deeply ingrained habits or privileges benefit us while negatively impacting others, we strongly resist change. This is especially true when we believe (without justification) that we have an inherent right to these advantages. So, if you have pets or want one, I’m asking you to take a minute to think about why that is and to question whether your motivations are as benign as they may at first seem.
