Should We Keep Pets?

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Praising pets and the idea of pets is a joyful exercise. After all, there are 15,000 years of experience to validate the indispensable bond that unites humans and animals. If you prefer the micro to the macro, there are millions of us in America whose thoughts on the subject go straight to that singular dog or cat who enriches our lives, who brings us closer to the mysteries of other beings, and who remind us -- in the best possible way -- that living right is always a shared experience.

But our exercise today is not quite so simple, or so uplifting. No, in this forum we are to regard pets as a matter of debate. That is, “Should we have pets?”

Hum. This is not a fruitful argument. It’s an idle abstraction, like debating, “Should we have love?” In these kinds of sentences, the word “should” takes on a faux ethical burden. We tug on our chins and the inevitable warning flag rises: Aren’t we thus obliged to forbid that which we should not have?

The danger with this argument is that it gives unintended hope to our enemies – and by that I mean the real foes of animal welfare and protection. They cannot win in a head-on clash of 21st Century ideas about the place of animals in our society. They are unable to defend, say, the monstrous cruelties that occur in puppy mills. All they can do is try to change the subject.

So they draw a fraudulent line in the sand. They claim brotherhood with all those Americans who have pets in their households, which happens to include a majority of the population. They point across the divide to forums like this one and they say, see those animal rights misanthropes are caught up debating whether Americans should even have pets. You know where this is headed, and it’s not in a good direction for animals.