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.
@PM_me_trebuchets @tributarium While domestication of several plant and animal species is clearly a "thing" when looking at human history (many of our most common crops are domesticated, for example), the shift from nominally seeing your pet as a partner (in, say, hunting, which is what dogs were originally domesticated for) to an object to be owned is *much* newer (and problematic IMO).
@PM_me_trebuchets @tributarium It's particulary problematic with pets because we see fit to *literally cut off their ability to reproduce*, among other things. People say pets are like family, but if you locked your child up in the house (for their safety, ofc) and neutered them without their consent, you would be thrown in jail for child endangerment.
@PM_me_trebuchets But what gives you the right to decide if your pet is allowed to reproduce? And I'm not the one claiming pets are part of my family - pet owners are! So it makes sense to examine whether that actually holds up upon closer scrutiny.
If you aren't a troll you're behaving like one. "Shut up, be normal, go outside" aren't arguments.
Nobody is going to be able to convince you unless they come to understand where you stand on the morality of human beings being able to dominate and restrict one another's freedoms or on the richness of the interiority and moral value of non-human animals and tediously go through a deconstruction of the status quo worldview. Because, again, we've already gone through these questions and generally come to similar conclusions.
As a general heuristic in life if I directly benefit from something, and especially if someone else affected by my profiteering can't talk back to me, I see that as a flashing red light saying I need to question things and can't take my motivated intuitions as fair conclusions.
Nothing says critical thinking like stumbling into a thread, insulting everyone, repeatedly announcing intuitions and entitlements without engaging any argument because duh, of course the mainstream view (that non-human animals do not deserve full respect/autonomy/consideration as individuals, that my self-serving intuitive projection of an animal's feelings is accurate) is self-evidently correct without any need to justify it, and then blocking the sub.
@PM_me_trebuchets @tributarium Question: what exactly do you hope to achieve by barging in and insulting anyone who questions your (perhaps motivated) reasoning? You are a textbook example of how not to have an actual conversation. Instead of actually engaging with the points being made (and giving the reasons you disagree with them), you instead stoop to insulting people who are trying to have an actual conversation with you.
Go outside and touch grass, my friend. Anger is bad for you :)
@PM_me_trebuchets You're not actually addressing my points. What gives you the right to determine whether your pet is allowed to reproduce?
Because I am my dogs caretaker, and I have determined that her getting pregnant is not good, because neither she nor I could care for that many dogs, because it is hard on her body, and because I could not afford to take care of her + all her pups. It’s irresponsible of me to allow her to reproduce in this scenario.
@PM_me_trebuchets Also, if I were 'normal', I would have accepted the meat, dairy, and egg industries as 'normal' and not at all exploitative. That is, I would not be vegan. But I actually like to think about these things and question my assumptions, even if it's uncomfortable.
I agree with you that factory farms are abhorrent and need to be addressed. But me having a dog as a pet isn’t me abusing the aforementioned dog.
Dogs are a special case when it comes to arguing about contemporary pet ownership imo because of their uniquely entangled history with humans. (Human beings have had relationships with other animals "since time immemorial"--both prey/predator relations as well as cooperation like the Hadza honeyguide bird--but to my knowledge domestication per se is quite a new phenomenon. "Domestication" itself is a pretty polysemous term that needs further defining ig.) But that said, even though I absolutely tend towards thinking of foraging, pre-agricultural life as a space of strong egalitarianism, including on an interspecies level--perhaps to the point of idealising or romanticising--I don't think anyone can presume to understand those early dynamics. I'd like to think dogs were partners rather than property, but I don't know. I think in any case the truth cannot help but be more complicated than the attitude of "my pet is my baby and I love him and he loves me with his cute eyes and that's the natural order of things!"
Are you vegan or do you agree with the critiques of speciesism in other contexts?
"Stop typing, I believe nothing that you say about your history or what you've seen" doesn't inspire much engagement in any case but there are some premises that I & this community generally take for granted that you...may not.