In the meantime, there were plenty of dogs available that fit his request, none of which the rescuers (for inexplicable reasons) were willing to place with him … meanwhile, six months later, many of these dogs are STILL up for adoption, no doubt having had (rejected) inquiries from people such as my boyfriend, who would also be good dog-parents.

Another friend had the same issues, and ended up getting a shih-tzu puppy from a breeder.

I just want to know how it is these rescue organizations expect people to afford these houses with big backyards, in addition to veterinary bills and kibble, and NOT work full time …

… And, really, it doesn’t matter WHAT his reasoning was – the rescues he was working with simply ignored his request. In the meantime, there were plenty of

They are a giant pain in the ass to deal with.

Where I live, most (not all, but a vast majority) of the shelter/rescue groups are what I like to refer to as Stepford Nazis. They have the same reaction to dog ownership as they do to having children: if you don’t have a giant backyard and aren’t home 99 percent of the time, then you’re a completely unsuitable “parent” and we won’t consider adopting to you for five seconds.

In other words, if you work a regular job and live in a nice apartment in the city (in my case, across from a fantastic Frederick Law Olmstead park that is incredibly dog-friendly!), then forget it. You simply aren’t suitable for a dog.

In addition to this, my boyfriend (who, up until recently, was only considering rescues), who while lives in the same building as me but is a college professor, therefore has a more flexible schedule (though he’s still heard the “no backyard” wank), after specifically explaining that while he was not adverse to getting a dog that was not a puppy, he did not, under any circumstances, want a dog older than five years. His reason being that his parents two German Shepherds, which he adored, died within less than a year of one another not two years ago. And, really, it doesn’t matter WHAT his reasoning was – the rescues he was working with simply ignored his request. In the meantime, there were plenty of

As far as the first point:

Dogs are not wolves. They were bred for human companionship, upon which they rely. To pretend anything else is to ignore the origin and purpose of the dog.

This is pretty much how I see it. We can’t just turn our pets loose and see what happens. Us humans – male/female, black/white, rich/poor – have made these animals dependent upon us and we have an obligation to care for them. I guess I see it more as an evolutionary biology thing than a patriarchy thing.

And, on the second point, if it’s parellels of ownership and commodification that make this a feminist issue, then, I guess I don’t understand why it matters where the person actually got their pet from. If they own it, they’re oppressing it. So, I also don’t get why one would make an allowance for one purveyor in oppression over another.

In the historical case of sterilization in humans the situation has always been one in which privileged humans attempt to force sterilization on less privileged humans to the benefit of the privileged and the detriment of the unprivileged. Not so in the cat and dog case, though–it’s not like the purebreed dogs are trying to wipe out what the consider inferior dogs by denying them the ability to breed while encouraging the purebreeds to have all the puppies they like.

The situation IS actually like that. We sterilize the unwanted and less desireable pets because we don’t want more of them. Simple. In humans, the “privleged” are desired. Most people want to be wealthy and successful and self sustaining and demanded and useful. The other group, the group that humans tried to sterilize were sterilized because those in power didn’t want to pay for the burden of masses of poor, un-successful, non-self-sustaining, undemanded, and un-useful people.

Exactly the same situation. It’s just that being elitist, racist, and sexist is not frowned upon in the dog world. People buy pets based on their looks, their coat colors, and their gender. ALL THE TIME. It is the rise of the purebred dog and the raised price of the purebred dog that has done much to curb the pet over population problem. When people valued what they saw as quality breeding, any old stray or ferral dog wouldn’t do.

We practice eugenics with dogs, doing so with humans gets you tarred and feathered. We are perfectly fine with measuring dog’s ability against other breeds and making blanket statments. Doing so with races of humans makes you evil and racist.

Both situations are driven by market forces. Those who have make the buying choices. And in the case of dogs, those who have want purebred dogs, and more often than not they keep them and they don’t end up in shelters. Simply because of the perceived value of pure bred-ed-ness. Statistically a dog is less likely to end up in a shelter if it is purebred (having nothing to do with behavioral/health/or any other issues, all those things factored out, the mere quality of being a single breed), if the owner payed more than $100 for it, and if it is spayed or neutered.

Almost all of the top 10 reasons dogs get sent to shelters have to do with stupid people getting rid of them for stupid reasons. Nothing to do with responsible breeders, and only number 10 has to do with breeding at all… and is clearly for mistake backyard breeders:

1. Moving
2. Landlord Issues
3. Cost of Pet Maintenance
4. No time for pet
5. Inadequate vacilities
6. Too many pets in home
7. Pet illness
8. Personal problems
9. Biting
10. No homes for littermates.

Cats
1. Too many in house
2. Allergies
3. Moving
4. Cost of Pet Maintenance
5. Landlord Issues
6. No homes for littermates
7. House spoiling
8. Personal problems
9. Pet illness
10. Inadequate facilities

So the next time you think about blaming a breeder, look at reasons 1-9. Then avoid the mistake backyard breeder (probably making mix breed puppies that can’t be sold for any money, thus no homes) and avoid THEM.

Avoiding breeders altogether is silly. The ideal situation is responsible pet owners buy from responsible breeders and keep their pets. There isn’t an overpopulation of PUPPIES, there is an overpopulation of adult dogs that OWNERS ABANDON. The blame for this lies in stupid owners, not in breeders.

And it’s good that they make money at it. They perform a good service and they should be rewarded and encouraged.

But the chimp mother doesn’t understand or consent in either the case where infanticide is committed by other chimps or baby kidnapping is committed by humans. And your well-worded description of non-human primate morality (as an internalization of norms) is pretty accurate for human primate morality too, I think.

I don’t think animals should be treated inhumanely. I have pretty big problems with puppy mills and abused performing animals (circus, TV, movies, etc) animals and factory farm conditions. But I do think there are humane ways to do all of these things.

Also, to introduce another angle to it, there are many people in the world dependent on draft animals or herd animals for survival. Here in the West it’s relatively easy to get by without relying on animals, but for those people it’s not really a viable choice.

I think my problem comes with, not necessarily anything you’ve said Roy, but with the “Well they suffer just like humans” line of thought. I don’t think the primate mother who had her infant taken away and killed by rival males and the primate mother who had her infant taken away and sent to another zoo (or whatever other example) suffer any differently. So it seems kind of arbitrary to me for (some) animal rights activists to get up in arms about one but not the other.

I see the point you are making, but I don’t think this “arbitrariness” (I don’t actually think it is that arbitrary) is unique to animal rights activists or animal welfare activists. We do the same thing with people.

Suppose I tell you about my mother who had breast cancer a few years ago and had a two separate mastectomies (both breasts removed) within a month of each other and then full hysterectomy for fear of uterine/ovarian cancer. You feel bad for her right? Now suppose I tell you that that a fully functioning mentally normal adult human being knocked my mother out three times and forcibly removed her breasts and reproductive organs. I’m guessing now in addition to feeling bad for her, but feel outrage at the monster who would do such a thing. (Or at least that’s how I feel when I compare what actually happened–the former case–to the hypothetical latter case.)

Now of course it’s probably the case that my mother would suffer more and differently in the latter case, but I don’t think that’s what is behind my outrage. My outrage (rather than my anger or my sadness or empathy) only gets engaged when I believe that someone who has the capacity for morally responsible is responsible for what happened to her either by causing it or by failing to prevent it. I think that is the very nature of some of our moral concepts like outrage, guilt, and contempt–they presuppose that there is not just a bad state of affairs, but someone who committed a wrong or did not meet an obligation by causing or failing to prevent the state of affairs. No one committed a wrong against my mother by causing or failing to prevent her breast cancer–there is nothing to be outraged about there.

So similarly with animals, I think it’s clear to everyone (I hope) that most animals are probably not capable of being morally responsible in the way that most adult humans are. (I think primates are closer to having some kind of morality–I’ve seen some moral philosophers refer to it as “pseudo-morality” because it seems to be largely based on understanding and following the social rules or and being rewarded/punished by other primates accordingly. But the ability to step back and ask, “But is this rule that all my fellow primates accept a good rule?” seems to be absent, and that ability seems to be one of the hallmarks of human moral capacity.) Hence, usually there is no one to be outraged at when a lion torturously kills and eats another animal. There is someone to be outraged at when a person torturously kills and eats an animal.

Of course, there is still a question of why no one is trying to intercede in the huge amount of animal suffering that animals perpetrate on one another every day. Even if there is no outrage and no one responsible, shouldn’t the suffering count for something? I assume the answer here might be one of practicality. I just don’t see how most of the suffering that animals perpetrate on each other could be prevented–preventing it would seem to either require extinction of many species or would require so much human intervention in animal habitats and communities that we would cause even more suffering that way. I mean, what would we do–put every individual animal in a bubble? Deny them any contact with any other animals? (That in itself would probably be much more tortorous than the painful death they might suffer at the paws of a predator.) Take the old animals who die or who are euthanized and use their flesh to feed the other animals? Feel the ones who can survive w/out meat soy and corn? There might be smaller things that we could do to prevent some kinds of animal-on-animal suffering. But I think it’s just a fact about the world that we can’t stop it on the large scale without causing a whole lot more of it (and probably messing up the entire ecosystem of the world). I don’t think it’s arbitrary to admit that and to still be outraged when humans cause animals suffering–no more than it is arbitrary to be absolutely outraged if someone cut off my mother’s breasts and just be a little sad when cancer requires cutting them off.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of acknowledgment above that analogical reasoning is, well, analogical. When you say X is like Y you aren’t saying X is Y in all respects, you aren’t saying X is as important as Y, and you aren’t saying anyone who doesn’t see that X is like Y is a fool and a heretic. Nor does Y’s being compared to X somehow undermine Y’s claim to being unique and different in all kinds of other ways that aren’t directly related to the issue at hand — no one can talk about all the important issues there are at the same time. We’re all stuck with singling out certain issues for treatment at some times and turning to others, just as or even more important and pressing, at other times.

Is our treatment of animals in this culture like slavery? Yes, and it is in ways that Elaine has been at pains to emphasize. It’s about property. All the nice things that people have said in this and other sites’ posts about their moderate and sensible animal ethics (“I’m very sympathetic to the animal rights cause. I was a vegetarian for eleven years. As a kid, I wrote letters to Proctor & Gamble protesting their animal-testing policies. I make an effort to buy cruelty-free make-up and other beauty products…”) simply fail to recognize this deep point of the comparison. All our nice words about how we love animals are pretty much made irrelevant in law and policy by the fact that the animals we feel so kindly towards are, in the end, our property and so their interests will always — until they’re recognized as beings in their own right, not property — be traded off against human property rights. There are important similarities here to the history of both slavery and feminism — kindly attitudes towards women and blacks aint enough when, legally, we still treat them as property. And yes, the same holds with animals: it’s a valid and important analogy that deserves more serious consideration than its been given thus far in people’s rush to distance themselves from controversial and “extreme” analogies which no one ever claimed held in all respects. For more on animals and problems with their status as property check out Gary Francione’s work and website, or Steven Wise. (e.g., http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/francione01.htm or http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/. Steven Wise’s work is easy to find on Amazon.)

And speaking of the repeated charge that Elaine has been too “extreme,” whenever I find myself tempted to level such a charge in a debate between people of apparently good will I always, as a matter of policy, try to think of King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail. If that wasn’t the most profound statement of what’s wrong with moderates leveling the charge of moral extremism against people who are pushing us all to expand the boundaries of our moral horizons I’d like to know what tops it. So there’s another connection between our treatment of animals and the long, tragic, and ongoing history of racism in this culture. King got it right, moderates can be infuriating roadblocks to moral progress, and his point doesn’t apply only to racism. Moderates “allies” are more infuriating at times than out-and-out opponents since they claim to be “on your side” and to “get it” even as they undermine efforts to take serious issues seriously or to handle them head on. I fear being among the moderates King takes to task more than I fear charges of extremism. Moderate people of good will are as often as not more damaging to the causes they claim to support than out-and-out bigots. Are Elaine’s statements extreme? Yes. But… I’m tempted to say it would be a greater failing if they weren’t. The issues really are that serious — not as serious as racism mind you, just deadly serious for literally billions of sentient beings who are currently regarded as property under the law. That’s all.