Unlike children, pets aren’t really family members — they’re property without legal rights and few laws to protect them. And because abuse and neglect primarily occur in the privacy of the home, there’s little accountability for it.
KENNY TORRELLA: The internet is awash in this feel-good content starring some of the 250 million animals — nearly one for every person — who populate American households. It all reinforces the inherent goodness of the ancient human-animal bond, and lets us believe that where there are pets — whom most owners consider to be family members — there is joy, love, play, and hope…
The stirring 2016 book Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets by author and bioethicist Jessica Pierce. Pierce wants to show people like me the shadows beneath the sunny narrative of pet ownership, things like physical abuse, animal hoarding, puppy mills, dog fighting, and bestiality. But beyond such extremes, Pierce’s work aims to direct our gaze to where more subtle, but far more common, forms of everyday neglect and cruelty lie.
To Pierce, even well-meaning pet owners may have a lot to answer for: punitive training, prolonged captivity and extreme confinement, mutilations (declawing, ear and tail docking), outdoor tethering, lack of autonomy, verbal abuse, monotonous and unhealthy diets, lack of grooming, and inadequate veterinary care. (In 2016, about one-fifth of dog owners and half of cat owners didn’t bring their animal in for routine or preventive care, which is highly recommended.)
Add to the bill lack of exercise and socialization, boredom, and even abandonment. (Almost one-fifth of pet owners surveyed late last year said they were considering giving up their pets due to cost amid high inflation, which is generally not an option for other “family members.”)
Unlike children, pets aren’t really family members — they’re property without legal rights and few laws to protect them. And because abuse and neglect primarily occur in the privacy of the home, there’s little accountability for it. Even the most responsible pet owners, which I’d count myself among, are bound to fail to meet the needs of their animals due to other responsibilities and the inherent challenges of keeping a dog or cat in a world made for humans.
We may see ourselves as the best of animal lovers, but we very well could be inflicting suffering on our pets every day. Pet-keeping “is like a sacred cow in a way,” Pierce told me. “Everybody assumes that pets are well off, and in fact, pampered … All they have to do is lay around in a bed and get fed treats every now and then and catch a Frisbee if they feel like it — like, who wouldn’t want that life? “Underneath that is the reality that doing nothing but laying on a bed and having treats fed to you is profoundly frustrating and boring and is not a meaningful life for an animal”. SOURCE…
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