I’m in a pretty vegan-friendly country with a long tradition of plant-based eating. Most people eat meat, but they are basically sympathetic to every meat-free argument: ethical, environmental, health. They sometimes do an awkward little shuffle & apologise for eating meat in front of me or say they’re part-time vegetarians and so on. I think this is all quite nice.
What bothers me is when these same people talk about their pets. Eating meat, especially in contemporary urban settings where the origin is factory farms, indisputably objectively does more harm than keeping a pet, but people basically acknowledge meat-eating is a matter of habit/skill/knowledge. Whomst among us lives totally plastic-free, fuel-free, in the woods, etc? But people fucking rhasphodise about their pets. People will buy an animal from a breeder and keep it locked in the house or a cage completely bereft of any stimulation, they’ll make it do stupid tricks to earn its food, they’ll hound it or punis it for behaviours the owner finds inconvenient, use it for emotional comfort while having no real curiousity about the non-human animal’s internal life or perception or needs beyond food and water and maybe some exercise, and then they’ll talk about how it’s their best friend. Guess what–I wouldn’t “own” my friends! At least eating meat, in principle (though obviously not in practice in the modern world) is part of the natural circle of life and can be part of a respectful predator-prey relationship & sustainable ecology. At least people don’t generally defend their meat-eating. But suddenly they’re saints and best friends in their own eyes for taking a captive. To me, even though the objective harm is lesser, this is actually much more sadistic on an individual level.
Obviously there’s a spectrum, bla bla. Dogs are an especially complicated case as a primeval co-domestication relationship with humans. One can absolutely make the case that because of the danger of our anthropocentric/anthropogenic built environments, it’s the humane thing to do to keep a cat in the house instead of destroying wildlife or geting run over by a car or drinking antifreeze somewhere. The attuned, curious, considerate shelter-adopter is not the same as the owner who gives her dogs narcotics so they stop whining and disturbing the neighbours while she’s gone 8 hours a day. But while interspecies companionship is not wrong, ownership imo aways is. I think people should at least be very self-critical and ambivalent about it. On the contrary, most people see it as unproblematic and a hobby.
To me, destroying non-human habitats and taking them into our own homes and completely flattening their internal lives & turning them into “good boys” and restricting their freedom (while calling them “friends”–friendship is a fucking voluntary dyadic association with no collars involved!) is a much blunter manifestation & affirmation of speciesist ideology imo. Every time I encounter it I find it very hard to deal with. I just stayed with someone who kept dogs leashed up 24/7 except for two daily walks who talked about how much he loved them and how ethical he was with them (there is no animal protection agency here, all of that is legal). A friend of mine just whined to me about how sad he is that he can’t stroke his rodent because it died because another rodent pet of his bit it–well, don’t fucking keep animals captive together in unnatural circumstances where they can hardly avoid conflict that was absolutely forseeably fatal?
Again, to me, it is just sadism. This is such a deeply-held position for me and it’s so unpopular and impossible to talk about. I can’t actually connect with anyone who is a proud or uncritical pet owner. I just smile and nod and think about how much muchness is in every consciousness and how close we are to most animals we keep captive evolutionarily and how much suffering that is both extremely easy to imagine and sympathise with if you bothered to consider it (no mammal or bird likes to be caged up/understimulated/told what to do/eating ultra processed garbage, fucking duh, Vox has a pretty good article critiquing pet ownership that lays it out convincingly & plainly) & difficult to understand bc every being has its own unique perceptions & desires & needs & skills many of which are opaque to humans…is created by pet ownership! And it makes me very very sad. I’ve distanced myself from relationships bc of it. Death to speciesism, death to anthropocentrism, death to the myth of human superiority.
I can kinda get you’re what you’re saying, but I don’t really get your point. Some people are bad pet owners. Some people are meat eaters. You said yourself there’s a spectrum, but then you said “blah blah” for some reason. You excused some meat eaters because at least they “do an awkward shuffle” when they do it around you.
I have a cat, and I often feel really bad about keeping it indoors. I rescued the cat and I’m keeping it warm, keeping it from destroying the ecosystem around us, and it has a very safe, and seemingly happy life in my home, but I still wonder if it would have been better off if I never took it in. In that way, I can see what you might be saying. But do I think every pet owner is worse than every meat eater? No, not even close. Would you excuse a dog owner who works 10 hours a day as long as they did an awkward shuffle and apologized to you personally about it? Or is all pet ownership inexcusable to you?
Yes, I get very frustrated with people who take poor care of their animals, but also when they neglect their environment, their friends/family, their personal space, or themselves. I’m not about to start advocating for abolishing pet ownership, specifically. Maybe you are.
Your tone comes off as though you think all pet owners are equally evil (even though there’s a spectrum “blah blah”), but we can excuse other harmful practices out of necessity. Is it because no one “needs” to have a pet? I still think rescuing an animal and trying your best to give it a decent life is better than euthanasia, but maybe you disagree. Maybe your point is all animals should run free, and i can’t say I disagree with that, but I also think it’s ok to try and protect the creatures around us sometimes.
I’m sure you don’t appreciate people who say things like “I eat more meat just to offset your veganism” or other such nonsense, and I don’t appreciate people who keep fish in tiny bowls, or people who breed dogs for profit. But because of the “spectrums” you mentioned, in general I can abide pet ownership more easily than wanton consumption
Edit: reading again, maybe you are struggling with the use of the term “ownership”, so I apologize for wording it that way. I don’t mean to be “speciesist” and insinuate human superiority. I used the term out of habit. I do think people keeping their pets safe and out of trouble can be for the best, just like protecting a child who doesn’t know better. But I would recoil in disgust if someone said they “owned” their child, whereas “owning” a pet is the normal terminology. In that aspect, I can agree with you that people shouldn’t treat pets like possessions, but as fellow occupants of their home or even family members
Thanks for your response. It’s not just the term “ownership” I am frustrated with, because there’s a reason we use the term: it’s accurate. I think in an ethical world we would be building a society and environment that allowed us to be good neighbours to cats (and all other forms of life) rather than forcefully assimilating them into our homes and taking away all of their freedom. I think veganism is a horizon most people have considered (even if just only barely) because of the brutality of factory farms but people hardly have the imagination to acknowledge the cruelty of what goes on in their own homes and alternatives (for obvious reasons: it’s relatively easy to not eat animal products, very difficult for any one individual to make a non-human-friendly impact on the environment around them). I think the way you think about your cat is fair. What prompted my rant was the kind of attitude that someone who responded to this post earlier had–“are you kidding, OBVIOUSLY my dog loves me, OBVIOUSLY I am entitled to make decisions about its reproductive rights, because even though he’s my best buddy he’s my inferior!” I find the “I’ll eat an extra steak for you” attitude vile but I almost never encounter it IRL whereas almost everyone I know will project the most convenient possible narrative and emotions onto their pets and praise themselves for keeping them. I mean, as I say in OP, it is what it is, it’s arguably better for a cat to be indoors in this messed-up world. But only arguably and ambivalently so. It’s most people’s cavalier attitudes about it that I find to be inexcusable and diagnostic of deep cruelty.