The problem with pets

According to shitlib idiots, they’re human beings too.

The case against pets: is it time to give up our cats and dogs?
A growing number of people argue that owning pets is unethical - and that animals can never really have a good life in a human home

From my cold, dead hands, shitlib. Bearing in mind throughout that this is The Grauniad we’re talking about here—the world’s shitlibbiest of shitlib propaganda organs, tirelessly devoted to the self-imposed mission of dictating to the entire world what we must do and not do in order to be deemed worthy of the coveted Red Badge Of Superior Morality and Righteousness award—let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?

Troy Vettese has a parrot in his family. She gets paid a lot of attention, but she wants more. Parrots are clever and social. Vettese says: “She needs to be entertained all the time, otherwise she really is suffering.” He sees a possible different life for her: “She could be living with her friends and family in a forest, very happy – but she’s not, and that’s unfair to her.”

If that sounds sensible, but you don’t see what it has to do with the fluffy, well-exercised and frequently fed love of your life at home, bear with me. Of course, when it comes to owning pets, there are varying shades of grey. On one end of the spectrum: the poor snake I spotted at a party recently, being worn as a necklace. At the other might be your rescue pup, or my rescue cats, one with a damaged cerebellum and the other with one eye; they wouldn’t have survived long on the streets. But I still find myself wondering whether it is fair keeping them at all.

Yeah, well, wonder on, moonbat. Myself, I’ll just stick with my housecats, all four of which seem to be supremely content to laze about on the bed with me, chow down on the food I dish up for them every day, and relieve themselves in the litter boxes I maintain for their use. YMMV, of course.

We may think that we are giving our companions rounded lives and putting them first when we rise early for walkies or clean up another accident. But Vettese, an environmental historian who specialises in animal studies, says the suffering of his family’s much-loved bird is evidence that pet ownership is not about the animals.

“If people really cared about animals, we would only engage in rescues and helping animal sanctuaries’ wildlife rehabilitation – things that we find fulfilling, but that also help the animal,” he says. Instead, “we only like relationships where they are easy, where the pets are well maintained, where we can hire a dog walker, where it impinges as little as possible on our life and we are extracting as much emotional support as we want from them”. To his mind, it is definitely “a very selfish relationship”.

But, at least in the “traditional west”, keeping animals such as dogs and cats seems to be the norm, says Jessica du Toit, a doctoral student in philosophy at Western University in Ontario who studies animal ethics. She grew up with pets and takes every chance she can to spend time with her parents’ elderly dog, Oliver.

You MONSTER.

In fact, she says, “so many people nowadays consider these animals to be their companions, or a part of their respective families, that we have things such as Uber Pet [which allows you to order a taxi that will take you and your four-legged friend]; restaurants, hotels and workplaces stating that they are pet-friendly; and people earning good incomes as pet walkers, pet sitters and pet psychologists”.

I repeat: MONSTERS.

It isn’t just the scale of pet ownership that has mushroomed in recent years, Pierce says, but also what she describes as the “intensity” of pet ownership: “They are much more intensively captive than they have been in the past.” She takes the example of dogs, which, in general, “have less and less freedom to move around the world and be dogs”.

Wherein we can begin to discern one of the most pathetic yet ubiquitous hobgoblins of the little liberal mind: the immodest donning of a hair-shirt of unearned, pointless guilt which costs them nothing, inconveniences them not a whit, but which they nonetheless feel entitled to parade around in with a ne plus ultra of martyred pride even Saint Joan herself might blush to contemplate.

Then there are the ways they are much more intensely “ours” than once they might have been – another member of the family in a way that is loving, but not very animal. Our pets have become like our children. We buy them bow ties for their birthday and take them for tea-tree oil pawdicures. Professionals paint portraits of them to hang on our walls, or we do it ourselves; I spent a particularly silly afternoon creating lino likenesses of my cats.

Sorry, babe, sounds like a personal problem to me. Maybe you should consider finding yourself a saner, more productive hobby, say? Or nah?

“The problem with unconditional love,” says Ed Winters, the author of This Is Vegan Propaganda (And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You), is that it comes at a price. “How are they going to feel when we go into the shop and they’re whining at the door? They’ve become so reliant on us that even just a few hours of separation can cause distress.” He has only ever had one pet – a hamster called Rupert whose personality was so winning that he was a catalyst for Winters to become vegan.

And here we see another typical and entirely pathetic shitlib trait: an apparently compelling penchant for projecting their own petty neuroses and mental dysfunctions onto the world at large—as if, since they themselves are mentally ill, wretched, and miserable, why, everybody else must be as deranged as they are!

Again: personal problem, one that is assuredly yours, not mine.

The Grauniad's handwringing cri de coeur carries on in like vein from there, but I didn’t bother reading it, and heartily recommend that all well-adusted, non-loony sorts do the same. Call your dog or cat over for a nice scratch behind the ears or tummy-rub instead; it’ll do you both a world of good, way more than any anguished Grauniad attempt to make mountains out of molehills ever could.