Pets enrich our lives, and we enrich theirs

Published 6:01 pm Thursday, September 22, 2016

We will concede that vegetarians have a point. While most of us still consume meat, there’s an argument to be made that there is cruelty involved that should be minimized. Even conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer makes the point that someday, we might well move beyond eating meat: “Science will find dietary substitutes that can be produced at infinitely less cost and effort,” he wrote last year.

But owning pets? That, too, is cruel – in the view of law school professor and animal rights activist Gary Francione.

“We live with six rescued dogs,” he acknowledges in the journal Aeon. “With the exception of one, who was born in a rescue for pregnant dogs, they all came from very sad situations, including circumstances of severe abuse. These dogs are non-human refugees with whom we share our home. Although we love them very much, we strongly believe that they should not have existed in the first place. We oppose domestication and pet ownership because these violate the fundamental rights of animals.”

Amazingly, he’s critical of Princeton’s Peter Singer, the “father of the animal rights movement,” for not going far enough.

“Singer does not promote animal rights; he promotes animal welfare,” Francione writes. “He does not reject the use of animals by humans per se. He focuses only on their suffering.”

Francione compares pet ownership to chattel slavery.

“If animals are property, they can have no inherent or intrinsic value,” he writes. “They have only extrinsic or external value. They are things that we value. They have no rights; we have rights, as property owners, to value them. And we might choose to value them at zero.”

Now, pet overpopulation and full animal shelters are a different topic. What Francione is really talking about is the ethics of the human-animal relationship.

What he misses is as plain as the nose on a beagle’s face. Humans love their pets, and pets love their humans.

As the Telegraph reported in February, science now backs that up.

“We have pretty good evidence that dogs actually love their humans,” said to Dr. Paul Zak, who authored the study. “A couple of small-scale studies have shown that when owners interact with their dogs, the human and their dog appear to release oxytocin. It’s one of the chemical measures of love in mammals. Humans produce the hormone in our brains when we care about someone. For example, when we see our spouse or child the levels in our bloodstream typically rise by 40-60 per cent.”

Yet it’s better, in Francione’s view, that those animals – no matter how happy they are, and no matter how happy they make us – not exist.

“We love our dogs, but recognize that, if the world were more just and fair, there would be no pets at all,” he writes.

What a sad world that would be. Of course we should be kind to pets; they enrich our lives. And we theirs.