Is it cruel to keep pets?

[pgwenthold]

Iguanas would be a good example of this. People don't realize when they see the babies at the petstore, that they grow to be over 6 feet long, and need,at minimum, a room sized enclosure. They can be mean buggers as well, and need a constant supply of fresh veggies (although I don't know what some of the newer prepackaged food is like).

Inevitably it will lack the calcium it needs.

My wife is a vet who does a lot of exotic animals, including reptiles. She rarely sees a reptile that is not hypocalcemic.

 

[Jas]

Inevitably it will lack the calcium it needs.

My wife is a vet who does a lot of exotic animals, including reptiles. She rarely sees a reptile that is not hypocalcemic.

Yeah, I didn't even get into the supplements, though I think I mentioned them with snakes (though, if you're snake is eating anything bigger than fuzzies, they generally don't need a calcium supplement).

Lizards tend to be a bit harder, to get the calcium/phosphorous ratio right. And then lighting and diet (avoiding certain leafy green veggies, etc), is important too.

Iguanas are probably easier in that respect, in that they're vegetarians. No need to go about dusting or gut loading crickets and mice.

 

[SixSixSix]

Point one: if animals didn't have emotions, it would be fairly meaningless to talk about being cruel to them. You can't be cruel to your computer, or your car. I'm not aware of any technique that is able to detect the presence of absence of emotions, but owning four cats, I can say that if they in fact do not have emotions, then fake emotions that they appear to have are very convincing. Like any good skeptic, I'm prepared to hear counter arguments (for example I don't see much evidence that goldfish care one way or the other about their owners - or even if they're aware of them), but I'm prepared to accept the statement that most domestic pets have emotions as a tentative hypothesis.

Point two: If we assume that they have emotions, then yes, it's possible to be cruel to them. But it's also possible to be kind. As Kiless pointed out, all four of our cats were abandoned - a great example of cruelty. But fortunately they were found, and "adopted", as a result of which they are healthy and certainly appear to be reasonably happy. True, they are all neutered, so they cannot reproduce - it could be said that that was cruel, but that's debatable; neutering cats increases their life expectancy, as it avoids several health problems. Anyone who thinks that cats don't care about their owners is obviously drawing from cats that are completely disimilar to ours.

In short: I don't think that keeping animals that have been bred to be pets, as pets, is cruel. True, from a species perspective, they would probably be better off if released into the wild to let natural selection do its thing. But we don't even do that to our own species - at least, most of us don't.

Point three: Cows, goats, sheep - all have been bred to eat as surely as dogs and cats have been bred to be pets. Granted, their life isn't anything to sing about, but it's not like it would be better if we all became vegetarians. You might feasibly still keep sheep for the wool, but (assuming you're against using cows for leather) you wouldn't keep a lot of cattle around. The species would actually suffer if humans had no particular reason to keep them around. It sucks to be a herbivore, but there were carnivores eating them way before humans started.

 

[pgwenthold]

Point three: Cows, goats, sheep - all have been bred to eat as surely as dogs and cats have been bred to be pets. Granted, their life isn't anything to sing about, but it's not like it would be better if we all became vegetarians. You might feasibly still keep sheep for the wool, but (assuming you're against using cows for leather) you wouldn't keep a lot of cattle around.

There is an important implicit point here, that, for an individual, existence is better than non-existence.

Is a cow who stands all day in a feed lot better off than a cow that never existed in the first place?

I don't think those states are comparable fundamentally. It's like asking how green smells. The comparison is basically undefined.

This concept is implicit in many theological arguments, as well. The whole "gift of life" thing implies that life is better than non-life. That's not obvious at all. It could be that life is something we are stuck with, so live with it. Would I have been worse off if I had never been born? It's not even a question that makes sense, because had I never been born I wouldn't be worrying about whether things were good or bad in the first place. Why is life a gift and not a curse that we have to bear?

You can argue that if you don't live, you don't have all the happy times. However, what if your life sucks? In that case, is non-life better than sucky life? No, the religious argument has to be that even lousy life is better than non-life, and I see it as an unanswerable assertion.

 

[alfaniner]

Two of mine, checking each other out...

 

[Dogdoctor]

We are animals. We evolved from animals and we have emotions so very likely our ancestors had emotions or their other species equivalent. The problem with using the term emotion is that it is easy to then say they have all the same feelings we have. Without proof it seems obvious to me that other species exhibit similar emotions that are different (years of observing animals). Anyway we can say they probably have their species equivalent to emotions. If not the burden of proof would be on the person making the claim since evolution says they should. The statement that dogs were not raised for food is not necessarily backed by our current knowledge. It seems at least some dogs were raised for food. However there doesn't seem to be any significance to why they were domesticated in my mind. Domesticated animals are adapted to living under the care of humans. There are other reasons not related to cruelty why domesticated animals should not be released into the wild and wild animals should not be kept as pets and this has to do with ecology. Pet species are not a normal part of the ecological system so releasing them can be destructive. Wild animals are and if taken for pets they are removed from the ecological system which can be destructive.