Philosophy of pets 3

Ethics and the dependency argument

When I started thinking about pets some weeks ago, I did a little bit of background research because I didn’t think of “philosophy of pets” as a thing, though given that philosophy leaves no aspect of human experience alone, surely I wasn’t the first to think about it. It turns out that philosophers have indeed said things about pets. I don’t know what all they are because I don’t have time to read whole books on this, though there are a few. I did read a few of the shorter pieces.

A good chunk of what I found has to do with the ethics of pet keeping—or any domesticated animal, for that matter. Obviously there’s quite a bit of concern for abuse and neglect (including factory farming). But even when narrowing the scope to people who take good care of their animals, there are a number of concerns. Many of them have to do with power, vulnerability, and dependency. There’s the issue of what’s going on when we treat animals as property. Calling them ‘pets’ suggests a domination that some people object to, preferring the term ‘companion animals.’¹ I can see that.

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But another argument has been bothering me a bit. Is it okay, the question goes, to breed and keep animals in an utterly dependent—and therefore vulnerable—state, even if we love and care for them appropriately, and give them the appropriate status as non-property ends in themselves? Citing an argument by Gary Francione, Jessica du Toit puts the problem like this:

While [domestication] renders them better suited to living with, or in close proximity to, humans, it also renders them almost entirely dependent on humans for the satisfaction of their fundamental needs and desires. To be so dependent on another is to be in a position of extreme vulnerability. And to find oneself in this position is to run a very high risk of leading a short and miserable life. For this reason, the argument goes, it is morally indefensible to place or allow another creature to be placed in such a position and thus we ought not breed companion animals or even allow them to reproduce with one another.

Although it is true that companion animals are at the mercy of their human keepers, the caring and reliable keepers with whom I am concerned are precisely the kind of keepers who can be relied upon to satisfy their companion animals’ needs and desires (to the greatest extent possible). Thus, if the dependency objection is to make any sense in these cases, it must be because, irrespective of whether the relevant animals’ needs and desires are met, it is morally unconscionable that companion animals are so dependent on their respective keepers.

This argument has bothered me since I read it. It makes the assumptions that (a) dependency is bad, and (b) rendering something dependent, or creating something that is by nature dependent, is bad. But in doing so it ignores what philosophers often ignore, which is that even humans are utterly interdependent with one another. Perhaps wild animals are in a sense freer than domestic ones are, but even they depend on ecosystems working as they should. And they depend on one another as well. The comparison class shouldn’t be to “free and independent” wild animals, but to social animals who cooperate with one another for their survival.

Now, it’s true that dependency goes hand in hand with vulnerability. And we owe the vulnerable special consideration not to take advantage of them. But I don’t think it follows from this that the entire practice of pet keeping is unethical. If we look at the practice through a relational or caring lens rather than an individualist one, it’s easier to see that dependency and vulnerability are a part of life. In that case, the question is how to live, and how to treat one another—including our animal companions—in light of this. In an interview with Nicole Karlis for Salon, philosopher Mark Alizart makes a very interesting point about submissiveness:

Dogs are very peculiar, because as I was saying, they're these in-between world animals, and they're also in-between concepts. We have this fairly stereotyped way of seeing the world that we've inherited from many centuries of masculinity and patriarchy, which are the idea that masculine is good, that masculine is the dominant activity, freedom, wilderness, and we tend to unconsciously relate to the world like that.

There's all these positive values on the one side, and all the rest, by definition, has to be negative. That which means passivity, tamed femininity, and this is so pervasive, it's sunk into our culture so much, it's very difficult to get rid of. Dogs actually play a very weird role in this, because they're on both sides, yet again. They can be very muscular, very aggressive, and some people like to show off very muscular dogs as a sign of manhood. And on the other side, on the other hand, dogs are obviously tamed animals, which means that they're on the other side of the divide. They're home animals. They even seem to enjoy their passivity, or the obvious fact that they have a master, which is so weird for us to understand, because we have this stupid, rigid, way of imagining that submission is bad. Or that they haven't been submissive, or that we have tamed them, and we have kind of stolen their freedom. And that is so wrong. That is so, so stupid. But, it's engraved in our culture. People who've worked on the way we have co-evolved with dogs are able to understand that dogs actually have not been tamed, but that we have built an equal relationship with them.

…

People have an experience of being submissive to something without feeling they have given up, and that is their own kids. I mean your kids are your masters, in a sense. When you have kids, that's it. You experience this submissiveness, but it's not a bad feeling. It's actually a liberation, or something, It's enjoyable, and it's more complicated than people tend to think, this relationship. It's not a one-way relationship.

We have to understand also that dogs are not our children, and that we can change our relationship to them if we understand. If we make the effort of imagining that they're our parents, it’s 's a very weird experience to do, but not calling our dogs, "my baby," but calling them, "grandpa," or "grandma," or whatever, can be very interesting in changing our points of views on what dogs are. It's not that crazy to do because dogs have been around for longer than us, and in a sense we descend of dogs as much as we descend of apes. Without dogs, human beings would not have been able to civilize, as they did.

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So instead of giving up the practice of animal companionship, perhaps what we should do is reframe what’s going on in that relationship. I realize that “submissiveness” has terrible connotations, so I prefer to think about this in more Buddhist terms: letting go of the paradigm of dominance, letting go of the idea that dependency is negative, and instead understanding that entering into a relationship with another creature—human or not—calls for a certain kind of attentiveness that involves surrender, mutuality, and going with the flow. Living with domesticated animals does involve a power imbalance. So does living with children, or any humans who are temporarily or permanently unable to care for themselves fully (which is all of us at one time or another). A power imbalance isn’t inherently bad, but tending to it ethically does require awareness lest we abuse it. With great power comes great responsibility.

So the lesson, I think, is that our relationships with our non-human companions probably require more adjustment and surrender than we’re used to assuming. And that’s what needs to change—not the practice of keeping pets.

1. This makes sense to me. I recently read a novel in which the lead male character called the lead female character “pet” regularly (it was a historical romance). It rankled me, precisely because of the arrogance and dominance it connoted.