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.
This is the true animal rights mindset. Reject petism / mascotism. Animals are not living toys or playthings, they are individuals. They are ends in and of themselves and not merely means to our ends. The pet industry is horrific along with pet ownership itself and all the rights violations, sufferings and deprivations it causes, many of which are overlooked or dismissed by “pet owners” or petists.
Have you listened to or read anything by Eisel Mazard by any chance? His newest livestream touched on the topic (don’t be thrown off by the title, he does talk about petism) https://www.youtube.com/live/SSiVZ0UIwbM .
Lucie Munson also has a good podcast on “pet ownership” and veganism. https://youtu.be/GD-6XJfkF2I
One thing I would say though, I think animals should be referred to as “they” or he/she, rather than “it”. This helps to individualise them and see them as someones and not somethings, individuals vs objects. “The dog was restrained and we chained them/he/her (rather than it).” I believe language can have a powerful effect in how we view other animals leading to how they’re treated societally. For the same reason I reject the use of animals as insults, such as calling a human a pig derogatorily.
Thanks for sharing all of this. I agree with you. TBD whether returning to social media will be a net good or a net evil in my life, but it’s such a relief to be able to see people agree for once with what is such an obvious, high-stakes moral position.
Edit: although I’m 100% on board with the book quotations I actually am not inclined to agree with a lot of the stuff in the first video. For one, I think sterilising human beings really is more of a practical than a moral limitation and I think he doesn’t give enough space to the instances of where it actually happened. And for another–I started to type about how I disagree with him on civilisation being necessarily a positive unambigous transcendence or whatever, and then about how calling bacteria & sharks mindless is arrogant, but then he goes full anthropocentric in the end and says that humans in civilisation are the only ones who can live meaningful lives and all animals following their instincts (& people living outside of civilisation today & the vast majority of human history apparently) are just perpetuating meaningless suffering? This is an extremely narrow-minded, arrogant, parochial, self-aggrandising perspective. I’m surprised he advocates for wild living for animals when he has no curiousity at all about how the world actually works outside of the human city and countryside. Really reaffirms my dislike of talking heads, especially those with the comments turned off lol.
Lol, yeah Eisel is a bit of a mixed bag. Quite a controversial figure in the vegan community who many disagree with on a lot of things. But I think the actions he advocates for are probably positive for the most part (not destroying nature, not exploiting animals etc, even extending that further than a lot of vegans will by saying we shouldn’t own pets etc), even if his views, ideas and expressions can be problematic. I agree that part especially at the end about saying non-human animals are “mindless” didn’t sit well with me, and the implication that their lives aren’t very meaningful. It also continually surprises me that he actually cares about not harming/using animals given how lowly he sometimes speaks of them in comparison to humans and how focused he is on the supposed greatness/potential of humanity and civilisation. For him, veganism/animal rights is a “civilising mission” for humanity to stop doing barbaric things for the good of our own evolution, as much as or perhaps even more than it is for the good of the animals themselves. I think you’re right that it’s a more than slightly egoistic and anthropocentric perspective for sure. But again, at least he seems to place some value on non-human animals sufficiently to the degree that he maintains it’s not acceptable to abuse them, and holds fairly high standards for that comparably to his standards for human rights. I primarily mention him in the topic of this post as one of the only people I’m aware of actively speaking out about the concept of petism / pet ownership and why vegans/animal liberationists shouldn’t support it, rather than for his other musings. He rarely focuses on one point at a time and usually drags in multiple other topics into the discussion, lol, so it’s hard to find him talking exclusively on that issue for reference. Like you said his book quotes are pretty eloquent.
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.
I agree with you on nearly every point. I know what it is to be rejected for pointing out what would be obvious if the people I were trying to explain this to weren’t actively benefiting from the arrangement. I can feel myself being radicalized in real-time.
Reminder that the downvote button isn’t for things you disageee-with. Its for low effort posts or spam.
Clearly OP put a lot of effort into writing this. Please dont downvote just because you disagree with them.
I always had cats around me as a child and teenager, and always advocated against having a cat in an apartment, because I find it cruel.
But then an orange starving baby cat stumbled in my life and he’s more than happy to be with me - even after several apartment changes
I’m kinda with you that I find it strange, that people explicitly buy specific breeds just to lock them in their flats, but I’m also experiencing currently how grateful my cat is, to be with us.
So, I guess just like for people, animals want to have a friendly environment. And as long as it’s viable, this social factor seems to matter more than the perfect replication of natural environment
Edit: obviously also depends on the animal and how social it is
