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Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets

Book by Jessica Pierce · 4 quotes · Pet, Pets, Breeding

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Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets Quotes

“If you balk at the idea that dogs could be bred like pigs, I’m sorry to disabuse you. Dogs and pigs alike are treated as breeding livestock. The animals are made to have as many young as possible. The babies are taken away at a young age so that they can be sold and a new breeding cycle can begin. The animals never have real sex—that is, sex when and with whom they choose; rather, females are tied up so they can be mounted or, more often, they are artificially inseminated. In commercial breeding operations, and also in many small-scale or backyard breeding outfits, dogs are treated, like the sows and their piglets, as units of production and their sole function is to bear young for profit. All they do is bear one litter after another, until (usually at the age of four or five) they are spent. At which point they are no longer of value and are killed. Taken together with the spay/neuter picture, what we have is rather bizarre: an enormous population of eunuchs and virgins, and a small population of dogs who live their entire meagre existence as breeders, as part of a puppy production line.”

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Book:Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets
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“I’m focusing here on dogs because this is where almost all of the research and exposés lead us. But of course puppies aren’t the only pet animal being bred and brokered and sold for profit; they are just the most high profile. There are kitten mills, too. And rabbit mills. And the many other animals who we keep as pets—the rats, hamsters, and geckos—don’t just materialize out of thin air; they come from a mother somewhere, who has been intentionally bred so that humans can make a profit selling her babies (see chaps. 38, “Cradle to Grave,” and 39, “A Living Industry”).”

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“There is a tendency to oversimplify the issue of spay/neuter and to promote the essential benefits without recognizing that our animals do suffer some harm, even if it is only the harm of deprivation—the harm of having their sexual and reproductive experiences stolen from them. It is possible to take this argument to the extreme and assert that we should never interfere with something as basic as sexuality and reproduction. Good stewards would allow their animals to exist in a “natural” state. The problem here is that our companion animals have no “natural” state; as domesticates, they are artifacts of human manipulation, and human control over the processes of reproduction is at the heart of domestication. As Karla Armbruster notes in her essay “Into the Wild,” we cannot simply hand control for reproduction back to our companion animals; this would be an abrogation of our responsibility to them. But we owe it to them to acknowledge their losses.”

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Book:Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets
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