It is the stuff of science fiction, of course, but suppose one day a race of super-beings were to land on earth – peaceable and well-meaning, perhaps, but much cleverer and more powerful than ourselves. Would the implied superiority of these beings give them the right to keep us as pets, confining us in their homes, occasionally taking us out for walks to meet other humans on leads and selectively breeding us for the characteristics they found most useful or cute?
I was fantasising over this notion as I walked through London’s West End towards the Wigmore Street offices and showroom of PetLondon, an online retailer and distributor of pet paraphernalia. I already knew that pet supplies these days went beyond plastic dog bowls, tartan coats and rubber bones, but I was curious to find out how far.
Inside the PetLondon showroom, I was greeted by a bouncy little dog with a pink bow in its hair, and, shortly afterwards, by Melody Lewis, the dog’s owner and PetLondon’s founder. Lewis, it turned out, started the company five years ago after adopting Poppy, her Yorkshire terrier cross, from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and struggling to find the kind of stylish and luxurious products she wanted for her pet. “I’d end up buying from abroad,” she said.
Now, thanks to PetLondon and other new retailers, owners no longer face that problem. Taking me on a quick tour of her company’s products, Lewis showed me clothes for dogs in a startling array of colours and styles: hoodies, T-shirts, frilly dresses, tank tops, basketball tops, polo shirts and beach wear, with a heavy predominance of pink for girls and blue for boys. For special occasions, there was a doggie tuxedo and a wedding dress, each priced at £99.99.
Among the accessories were brightly coloured bandanas, necklaces and a tiara, backpacks, booties, pyjamas, feather-soft beds with pillows and organic blankets, shampoos and colognes in a choice of 10 fragrances, and sachets of freeze-dried vanilla ice-cream.
Was it right, I asked Lewis, to put clothes and cologne on an animal? Smaller dogs often felt the cold and liked wearing clothes when they went out, she replied. Besides, dogs that disliked being dressed up soon made it clear to their owners. As for cologne: “It doesn’t really affect them. If they didn’t wear it, they’d just smell bad and wouldn’t get so much attention.”
A couple of things stood out from this visit. One, obviously, was the extent to which people were now pampering their pets. But much more striking was the way in which owners, particularly dog owners, were treating their pets as humans, buying them the same sort of clothes and accessories as they would if the animals were family members.
This presents a paradox; because if we really do see dogs and other pets almost as little people, with personalities, feelings and needs, should we not be more respectful of their rights? To put it another way, if we ourselves would not care to become the playthings of a higher species, should we really be keeping sentient animals in captivity and treating them as our personal property for no other purpose than our own amusement and pleasure?
Most people would think such a question absurd. You cannot compare animals to humans, they would say. Dogs and cats, knowing no other life, are perfectly happy to be kept as pets – and indeed have been bred for that purpose. Humans, in contrast, think and reason, value their freedom, possess self-awareness and know when they are being treated unjustly.
For the religious, notably Christians, an even bigger difference may be that pets do not have souls. Indeed, it is religious belief that underpins traditional western attitudes towards other creatures. The book of Genesis tells us that, after ordering the earth to bring forth the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, God created man in his own image and gave him dominion over the animals. This placed man in a special position above and apart from other creatures, which were regarded as having been provided for his benefit.
After Charles Darwin showed how human beings and other animals had evolved from common ancestors, however, it became less easy to argue that humans were a breed apart. More recently, the decoding of the human genome has confirmed that we share many of our genes with other animals – indeed, nearly all of them with chimpanzees – while other research has shown that many animals have much more complex mental and emotional lives than we once thought.
In the US, the changing status of animals, particularly pets, has given rise to what many would deride as a politically correct vocabulary to redefine their relationship with humans. In some circles, humans and animals are now referred to as human and non-human animals to reduce the distinction between the two, while the word “pet” is giving way to the less patronising “companion animal”, suggesting almost a relationship of equals. The state of Rhode Island and at least seven cities, including San Francisco, have legally redefined pet owners as pet guardians, making their animals sound less like pieces of property and more like wards entitled to a degree of self-determination and autonomy.
The vocabulary is catching on in Britain, where the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs routinely refers to pets as companion animals. But it is not just the words that are changing. In England and Wales, a new Animal Welfare Act that came into force in the spring raises the consideration of pets’ interests to an unprecedented level. The act requires pet owners not only to give their animals a suitable environment, a suitable diet and protection from injury or disease, but also to meet their emotional needs, including their desire to “exhibit normal behaviour patterns” and be “housed with, or apart from, other animals”. Harsh punishments await anyone failing to do so, including a ban on owning pets, a fine of up to £20,000 and/or a spell in prison.
One of the best known advocates of animals’ interests is Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher whose book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, helped inspire the modern animal rights movement. In his book, Singer argues that the interests of all living beings capable of suffering are worthy of equal consideration; that is, giving lesser consideration to beings just because they happen to have wings or fur is just as bad as discriminating against beings whose skin is a different colour.
Contacting Singer in Melbourne, I asked him to flesh out this idea. Surely there were far better reasons for including all humanity in our moral circle – all men are created equal and so on – than there were for admitting mere animals, which were of a different, and lower, biological order?
That, Singer replied, was exactly the sort of argument men would have used years ago for discriminating against women or people of different racial groups. “Now we’re at a stage where we have extended basic rights or consideration of interests to all members of our species. But that does not show us that the species boundary is in any way a natural boundary or the ultimate boundary. It just shows us that that’s the point we’ve got to so far.”
So, where do you stop? Should trees get the vote?
You stop, Singer said, at the point where you have included all beings that have some sort of conscious awareness of what is happening to them. A tree would be outside that boundary, whereas a dog or a cat would fall within it. But that did not mean the dog or the cat should have the right to vote or the right to free speech, any more than men needed the right to an abortion. The rights they needed were those that were relevant to them, such as the right not to be subjected to unnecessary suffering.
Because large-scale commercial farming caused animals great suffering and deprivation, Singer suggested, then ethically, we should become vegetarians - as he is. Significantly, however, his philosophy did not rule out pet ownership. “If we’re talking about companion animals that are living with people who really do care about them, who make sure they are not just sitting at home bored and alone each day but who have a life consistent with their interests, then I think that can be acceptable.”
If the author of Animal Liberation did not think pets should be set free, then who would? Would People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) – the world’s largest animal rights organisation – take a tougher line? Peta’s co-founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk, is British-born, but now lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where Peta has its headquarters.
“All the arguments that were used to perpetuate human slavery are the ones that are used today to perpetuate animal slavery,” Newkirk told me on the telephone. Then, in an uninterrupted torrent: “All the other animals – and of course anyone who took biology realises we are just one animal among many; they are not deckchairs while we are beings – all the other animals share with us the ability to feel pain, to desire freedom, to avoid a nasty death – to flee the knife, I always say – and they are interested in companionship, affection, they grieve and they get lonely; so if we share all these things with them, and these are not [distinctively] human traits or emotions, then rather than be prejudiced against the entire animal kingdom other than the human, we should expand our compassion and commonsensically include even those it’s inconvenient for us to accept that they feel as we do, and stop treating them as if they are inanimate and inconsequential, as if they are toys.”
It goes almost without saying that Peta opposes the raising and slaughtering of animals for meat: Newkirk said you might just as well condone eating other people. But when I asked her about pet ownership, she surprised me by becoming – at least the way I heard it – equivocal.
The breeding of cats and dogs to achieve a certain aesthetic look, she said, was an “abomination” at a time when shelters and pounds were overflowing with discarded animals. (In the US, millions of unwanted pets are destroyed each year.) But she declined to condemn the practice of pet ownership outright.
Was this because doing so would alienate too many supporters? “No, not at all. I just think you’re asking me to talk about a fantasy.” In the real world, she said, even if the breeding of pets were brought to an end, and the supply from shelters and pounds ran out, there would always be animals in need of good homes: for example, those confiscated from people who had illegally bred or imported them. Such animals should be placed in the hands of appropriately certified owners who had demonstrated an ability to care for them and be concerned for their interests.
In the meantime, Newkirk said she wanted to see “a re-examination of our relationship with the animals we have in our homes so that they’re companions, not amusements, and their needs are addressed”. Often dogs whose owners were at work spent the whole of their days locked up at home, apart from one hurried walk around the block in the evening, and many suffered far greater cruelties. “We’re a long way from anything like the laws that we need, which require a certain amount of exercise, harnesses instead of collars, a certain amount of freedom and proper consideration.”
So not even Peta was prepared to condemn pet ownership. But I did find someone who was: Gary Francione, a law professor specialising in animal rights at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Like Peta, he invoked the slavery analogy to criticise our relationship with animals, but unlike Peta, he used it to explain why the ownership of pets was wrong.
“In the days of the anti-slavery movement, you had some people who said we had to get rid of slavery and others who said: ‘What’s wrong with slavery? These people are different from us. It’s all right to enslave them as long as we treat them well.’ Those were two fundamentally different positions.
“So I understand somebody who asks what’s wrong with keeping cats and dogs as long as we treat them well. But the answer is, you’re assuming a moral framework the fundamental premise of which I disagree with. You’re basically saying slavery is OK as long as it’s well-regulated, humane slavery, and I’m saying, no, the institution’s inherently immoral because you cannot morally justify the status of animals as commodities.”
A coherent theory of animal rights, Francione said, would focus on just one right for animals: the right not to be treated as human property. Each year we brought tens of billions of animals into existence for the sole purpose of using them for our own ends or killing them for meat. True, we had laws forbidding extremes of cruelty, but as long as we owned and controlled animals, we would never give equal consideration to their interests, because our interests lay in maintaining the status quo.
But pets were loved. Where was the harm?
Although many pets were treated well, Francione said, many more were treated badly. But the fundamental moral question remained: whether we should be breeding animals for use as human companions at all. Domestic animals were dependent on us for when and whether they ate, when and whether they had water, where and when they relieved themselves, when they slept, whether they had exercise and so on.
“People say, ‘Well, you could say the same thing about kids,’ but human animals go though a period of childhood and then grow to be autonomous, independent human beings. Domestic animals are neither part of our world nor the animal world. They exist for ever in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything they need.”
Francione did not advocate “liberating” all domestic animals and letting them wander in the streets. They should be cared for as long as they lived, he said; but we should stop producing any more animals for human use, whether as farm animals, laboratory animals, game animals, circus animals or pets. This would not be a loss to biological diversity because there was nothing “natural” about domestic animals – pets and farm animals alike had been artificially created by humans for their own use through selective breeding or, in some cases, genetic manipulation.
Francione had emphasised the chasm that lay between those, like himself, who wanted to abolish animal ownership and the “welfarists” who thought it was all right to use animals as long as they were well treated. On the other side of the chasm, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which has its headquarters in Horsham, West Sussex, is so welfarist that it serves meat from humanely killed animals in its canteen.
“The RSPCA’s basic point of view,” said David McDowell, the charity’s acting chief veterinary adviser, “is that the animals have made a deal with us and we have made a deal with the animals. It’s a sort of commensalism, or symbiosis. Those are biological terms, but what they mean is two species living closely together where each derives mutual benefit from the other and each does better together than they would individually.”
But we bred domestic animals to suit our needs. They didn’t volunteer for the arrangement, did they? “The individual animal might not have, but over the years, I think that certain species have, if you like, chosen to allow themselves to be domesticated. Others haven’t. I mean, you can try all you like to domesticate a fox, but you won’t succeed. Nor will you with a lion or a tiger. Whereas with a dog, I think way back in the development of the species, the dog as a species said ‘OK, if I mate up with humans, yes, I get some disadvantages - I’m locked up at night, I’m made to do this and that, but I get lots of advantages, like food and a warm shelter.’”
Even so, it was still not much of a deal, because humans called all the shots. Pets had no say in how they are treated. “Because we are the stronger, more intelligent species – or at least we think we are – it is our responsibility to deal fairly [with the animals]. So that would be the RSPCA ethos, and it’s not always what’s said very loudly: that it’s not a question of animal rights, it’s a question of human duties or obligations. If we do our best to look after animals properly, then we’re keeping our side of the bargain.”
For the RSPCA, then, the debate was not whether pets should be kept at all, but how they were kept. One of the big questions now being asked, McDowell said, was whether it was fair to keep rabbits in a hutch by the back door. In nature, rabbits were social animals that lived in groups, that made their shelters and bedding underground, and that liked to eat grass. “So what do we do? We keep them on their own, in a hutch that’s above ground, and we feed them dry food. So there is quite an argument that says one of the worst-served animals at the moment is the rabbit.”
We were nearing the end of our discussion when McDowell returned to the subject of animal rights. His late father, he told me, had been a local preacher and used to deliver “quite a good sermon” on rights and duties, which clearly had stuck in his son’s mind. “As a citizen, yes, you are granted certain rights, but as a citizen, you also have duties. It’s just like joining a golf club: as a member, you have the right to play golf, but you also have to obey a lot of rules. And that’s where I go with animal rights. If you say the animals have rights, then there are certain duties you might reasonably expect them to perform” – whereas, in fact, animals do whatever they like, whether it be the fox stealing the farmer’s chickens or the lion killing whatever it could to eat.
Later, I called Peter Singer back and put this argument to him. “Well, if you are going to use rights in that sense, meaning the only beings who have them are those who carry out their duties, I totally agree, animals have no rights,” he said. “Of course, neither do babies, nor humans with serious intellectual disabilities.” The sort of rights that went along with duties, Singer said, were not what he had in mind when he spoke about extending consideration to animals. “I would like animals to have the same moral status as we give to human beings who, because of permanent intellectual disabilities, have a mental level similar to that of dogs or cats. We don’t rear them for food, or perform painful experiments on them, so that raises serious questions as to whether we should do such things to animals.”
He might have added that we do not keep people with permanent intellectual disabilities as pets, buying and selling them, treating them as playthings and breeding them to emphasise certain looks. But is the world ready even to question the morality of pet ownership, never mind condemn it?
First things first, Francione told me. “I don’t think we should have pets, but it’s not just pets I’m concerned about, it’s the general commodification of animals and our exploitation of them. My primary concern is the billions of animals [a year] we’re eating, because as long as it’s all right for us to eat animals, the argument that it’s wrong to treat them as pets simply isn’t going to resonate.”
He has a point. Even as we grant higher status to sentient animals, the idea of curbing pet ownership still sounds like science fiction; speaking of which, as I left PetLondon, I asked Melody Lewis if she thought a race of super-beings would be entitled to keep humans as pets. “Well, we wouldn’t have much choice, would we?” she replied with a laugh. Then: “I think if we were as well-treated as most pets, we’d be all right.”
