Rosemary
02-13-2004, 02:24 PM
This is so terrible I hardly know how to respond to it...
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_02.12.04/op/oped.html
Keeping animals in their place
It was the perfect image of an absurd problem: twelve police officers in the close line formation we've become familiar with from searches for lost children on the news and CSI. But they weren't looking for a lost child. They were looking for hot dogs. They were showing themselves to be out there in such force because a dog had died and another 15 had gotten sick, presumably from a hot dog laced with an agricultural insecticide. With the number of officers on the case, I'm sure we'll know soon who decided there were too many dogs in the city and figured they'd do something about it. It was a stupid thing to do. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
We've taken this pet thing way too far. I could run down the numbers, like the fact that in the United States there are about 290 million people and about 377 million pets, and that the number of pet-owning households has grown steadily by more than 10 million in that country in the last 10 years, which translates into US$31 billion in overall pet expenses in 2003, up 5 per cent from the year before. In Ontario, there are 4,000 veterinarians serving about five million cats and dogs. That's one vet for every 1,250 animals, which wouldn't seem all that bad compared to the one doctor for every 550 people, if it weren't for the fact that the vet-to-animal ratio has been increasing over the past decade while the doctor-to-person ratio has been steadily decreasing and that there are now 122 communities in Ontario with a doctor-shortage and about a million Ontarians who don't have a family doctor.
Sure, plenty of money and resources are spent on dogs and cats and fish and hamsters that might be better spent on homeless and hungry people, and it wouldn't hurt to remember that the next time you refuse a quarter to a panhandler on your way to pick up a $50 bag of Iams. But then, the same could be said of how much we spend on chocolate bars, running shoes and hair-care products. The real problem here is the nature and degree of our emotional investment in these creatures.
Pet owners tend to say, if anyone's rude enough to ask, that pets are not child substitutes. I can see how that could be true in theory, but hang out in a dog park, or spend some time with people who first decided to have a dog and then ended up having a child, and you'll probably think otherwise. Though domestic animals do seem to provide comfort and even health benefits to their owners, they have also, as we get farther and farther away from farms and hunting and wilderness and wildlife, been anthropomorphized beyond all recognition.
We figure dogs wag their tails because they're happy to see us, despite the fact that dogs are incapable of happiness and wag their tails in expectation of getting something from us. We like to think cats purr because they're pleased to be with us, though based on the fact that they also purr when terrified in the presence of humans -- say, at the vet -- the more reasonable explanation is that they purr in order to placate us and ensure their own safety, in much the same way that it's been recently proposed that dogs cock their heads to one side not to say, "What's up?" but because, since we think it's cute, over time evolution's selected those with that particular random tick over those whose ticks struck us as less sweet.
The net effect of fooling ourselves in these basic ways has been to project a full complement of thoughts and emotions that are utterly incompatible with the species in question. As a result, we not only treat these animals in ridiculous ways, but ascribe rights to them modelled on our own. So we get pet owners making the case for their dogs' rights to roam unleashed in parks over parents' case for their children's safety, and groups forming to make sure a couple of college kids who killed a cat to make a point about how ludicrously inconsistent our treatment of different classes of animals can be, are found and spend years in prison.
An animal, whether farmed or domestic, is a moral nullity, and the killing of one, under the law as it stands, counts as merely the destruction of property. Which is as it should be. The only thing separating a kitten from a calf is the sentiment we inject into one and the hormones we inject into the other, and it would be absolute lunacy to base our notions of rights and laws on sentiment. If a child loses a teddy bear that's very dear to her, should we declare an amber alert and strike a task force to find it? No. And neither should we spend so much time and effort prosecuting a man who drags his dog behind his truck, or pet breeders who keep their stock in suboptimal conditions. They're animals. They're not in danger of extinction -- in fact, they present a significant challenge to the environment with the amount of resources we spend on them. They can matter to us personally, but they cannot matter to us societally. The way we live depends on killing cows and pigs and rats by the milllions. No one, with the possible exception of the 4 per cent of the population who are strict vegetarians, is suggesting that we live otherwise, or even that we could. So how about we just snap out of it and recognize the fact that there is no difference between a cat and a rat, and behave accordingly. BERT ARCHER
With research from Steve English.
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_02.12.04/op/oped.html
Keeping animals in their place
It was the perfect image of an absurd problem: twelve police officers in the close line formation we've become familiar with from searches for lost children on the news and CSI. But they weren't looking for a lost child. They were looking for hot dogs. They were showing themselves to be out there in such force because a dog had died and another 15 had gotten sick, presumably from a hot dog laced with an agricultural insecticide. With the number of officers on the case, I'm sure we'll know soon who decided there were too many dogs in the city and figured they'd do something about it. It was a stupid thing to do. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
We've taken this pet thing way too far. I could run down the numbers, like the fact that in the United States there are about 290 million people and about 377 million pets, and that the number of pet-owning households has grown steadily by more than 10 million in that country in the last 10 years, which translates into US$31 billion in overall pet expenses in 2003, up 5 per cent from the year before. In Ontario, there are 4,000 veterinarians serving about five million cats and dogs. That's one vet for every 1,250 animals, which wouldn't seem all that bad compared to the one doctor for every 550 people, if it weren't for the fact that the vet-to-animal ratio has been increasing over the past decade while the doctor-to-person ratio has been steadily decreasing and that there are now 122 communities in Ontario with a doctor-shortage and about a million Ontarians who don't have a family doctor.
Sure, plenty of money and resources are spent on dogs and cats and fish and hamsters that might be better spent on homeless and hungry people, and it wouldn't hurt to remember that the next time you refuse a quarter to a panhandler on your way to pick up a $50 bag of Iams. But then, the same could be said of how much we spend on chocolate bars, running shoes and hair-care products. The real problem here is the nature and degree of our emotional investment in these creatures.
Pet owners tend to say, if anyone's rude enough to ask, that pets are not child substitutes. I can see how that could be true in theory, but hang out in a dog park, or spend some time with people who first decided to have a dog and then ended up having a child, and you'll probably think otherwise. Though domestic animals do seem to provide comfort and even health benefits to their owners, they have also, as we get farther and farther away from farms and hunting and wilderness and wildlife, been anthropomorphized beyond all recognition.
We figure dogs wag their tails because they're happy to see us, despite the fact that dogs are incapable of happiness and wag their tails in expectation of getting something from us. We like to think cats purr because they're pleased to be with us, though based on the fact that they also purr when terrified in the presence of humans -- say, at the vet -- the more reasonable explanation is that they purr in order to placate us and ensure their own safety, in much the same way that it's been recently proposed that dogs cock their heads to one side not to say, "What's up?" but because, since we think it's cute, over time evolution's selected those with that particular random tick over those whose ticks struck us as less sweet.
The net effect of fooling ourselves in these basic ways has been to project a full complement of thoughts and emotions that are utterly incompatible with the species in question. As a result, we not only treat these animals in ridiculous ways, but ascribe rights to them modelled on our own. So we get pet owners making the case for their dogs' rights to roam unleashed in parks over parents' case for their children's safety, and groups forming to make sure a couple of college kids who killed a cat to make a point about how ludicrously inconsistent our treatment of different classes of animals can be, are found and spend years in prison.
An animal, whether farmed or domestic, is a moral nullity, and the killing of one, under the law as it stands, counts as merely the destruction of property. Which is as it should be. The only thing separating a kitten from a calf is the sentiment we inject into one and the hormones we inject into the other, and it would be absolute lunacy to base our notions of rights and laws on sentiment. If a child loses a teddy bear that's very dear to her, should we declare an amber alert and strike a task force to find it? No. And neither should we spend so much time and effort prosecuting a man who drags his dog behind his truck, or pet breeders who keep their stock in suboptimal conditions. They're animals. They're not in danger of extinction -- in fact, they present a significant challenge to the environment with the amount of resources we spend on them. They can matter to us personally, but they cannot matter to us societally. The way we live depends on killing cows and pigs and rats by the milllions. No one, with the possible exception of the 4 per cent of the population who are strict vegetarians, is suggesting that we live otherwise, or even that we could. So how about we just snap out of it and recognize the fact that there is no difference between a cat and a rat, and behave accordingly. BERT ARCHER
With research from Steve English.