The Case Against Pet Ownership

In this blog post, I share my reply to a former housemate from university who sent me Twitter comments and Instagram messages, namely:

"Melissa what the hell? This is the most extremist take I’ve ever heard and incredibly messed up. You were too smart to let some youtube psychobabble turn you into someone who makes these kind of comments..."

"Hmm so pigs can convey misery, suffering, and fear to humans but dogs “don’t care about the human ideas of family and love”? Your arguments make no sense"

Megan, I understand this may be this is the first time you’ve really thought through these concepts. You have said hurtful things in your Twitter and Instagram comments to me. I have every reason to simply delete your comments and ignore you, but I'm going to take the high road and offer an explanation.

What’s shown in nature documentaries is how I want animals to live. I think it is our responsibility as human beings to allocate as much of the planet's surface as is possible to be like what is shown in documentaries so that animals can live their lives in a way that is meaningful for them.

Humans are animals, but we are endowed with cognitive abilities that are superior to any other animal on earth. We have complex language, we have culture, and we have built (and destroyed) civilizations. We have the ability to reason and use that reason for good rather than evil.

Unfortunately, much of what we do to animals is evil and has become so normalized that people don’t question it. 

There are obviously basic similarities between the life cycles of humans and other animals: birth, childhood, adulthood, reproduction, death. Animals absolutely feel pain, fear, joy, and sorrow. However, animals have their own social lives and family structures (without interference from human interaction). 

Wolves, for example, are predatory pack animals who love to hunt and fight with other wolves. Wolves compete to find mates and reproduce. Wolves raise their children, and the cycle begins again. Wolves are happy to live this way in the wild.

Think about what humans have done to wolves. The life of a dog is nothing like the life of a wolf in the wild. Humans have selectively bred wolves over generations to be tame enough, small enough, and cute enough to be playthings. We’ve even bred them so that their bodies are so far removed from nature that they experience serious health problems like breathing issues (Pugs), hip dysplasia and intervertebral disc disease (Beagle, Corgi, Shih Tzu, etc.), and sometimes they can’t even reproduce with one another (the French Bulldog, for example, is shaped in a way that it can’t even mount another Bulldog). 

If a dog is able to reproduce, their mate is often chosen by another human being so that the babies are more valuable and can get sold off to humans. The dog doesn’t get to raise a family of pups—the pups get separated pretty soon after birth. Most of the time, not too long after they are puppies, humans remove their reproductive organs to make them more docile and to avoid them ever being able to reproduce. (Cats, too, as I’m sure you know. I think most people in America these days don’t even know what a cat in heat sounds like because they have their reproductive organs removed before they can even be “in heat.”) 

Wolves in the wild roll around in the grass and dirt. They smell. They often have parasites and fleas. This just doesn’t fit with animals living in the homes of human beings where furniture has to be kept clean and free of fleas and dirt. We groom dogs and give them medicine to keep away parasites. They scratch at the floors and blankets on beds because that’s part of the behavior of wolves: they scratch and dig… but in a human home, they aren’t supposed to scratch, and they have nowhere to dig. 

Wolves, like all wild animals, urinate and defecate wherever they please. This also is an issue for animals living in a human home, and they have to be trained NOT to pee or poo wherever and whenever they want to like they would in the wild. It’s a struggle and anyone who has owned animals know that it oftentimes doesn’t work and you end up cleaning pee and poo out of carpets. Anyone who has owned dogs or done any dog sitting knows the disgusting feeling of using a plastic baggy to pick up warm poo from the grass so that our parks and sidewalks don't get covered in dog poo.

I’ve owned cats and I’m personally really disgusted that I had to spend so much time cleaning up cat poo from litter boxes, cleaning up kitty litter from crevices around the house, cleaning fur out of carpets, furniture, and clothes, etc. When my cats got older, especially, I had to clean up a lot of waste around the house. It’s just plain gross to have to clean up after animals, and we force them into this unnatural, uncomfortable lifestyle when all they really want to do is be outside, hunt, mate, and fight with one another.

Dogs are the obviously the most happy when they get to go to a dog park and sniff the butts of other dogs and mount other dogs. They’re pack animals and want to be around other animals of their own species, but most of the time they are sitting at home, alone, waiting for their owner to come home from work so that they can go outside and pee and maybe, if they’re lucky, see another dog. 

This is not even mentioning the messed up reality that they don't get to hunt for their food even though they're naturally predatory animals. They're fed mushed up remains from slaughterhouses (the body parts of pigs, cows, and chickens that humans don't want to eat) on a schedule dictated by humans, their owners. 

It’s all horrible, and I think people will all be better off when they can just GET REAL and admit that we naturally have an aversion to living amongst animals who, naturally, in the wild, are filthy and smelly. We should let animals live out their lives with other animals in their natural habitats: in the forests, in the deserts, and in the oceans. 

And that’s just talking about household pets. Animal agriculture is a whole other level of human derangement, and you can watch a variety of documentaries about veganism: Cowspiracy, Earthlings, Vegucated, etc.